The Wide, Carnivorous Sky

I recommend starting Langan's collection on page fifty-five. "Kids", the opening story, is Langan's amuse bouche: freshly zombified preteens eat their teacher in four pages. When a character bold-faced as STAGE MANAGER opens "How the Day Runs Down," we are clearly in the world of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, only Grover's Corners, and the rest of the world, has been taken over by zombies. Langan can excel with this sort of literary allusion and game-playing, but the long scenes that follow have none of the impressionistic grace of Wilder's tale of small town life. Langan writes long stories, but this is the only one I have ever bailed on.

But on page fifty-five, things pick up, and Langan's talent for horrific invention never flags again. He touches on most major horror tropes and plays them out with wit, strong characters, and a genuine relish for the scary bits. Some highlights:

In "Technicolor" an eager undergraduates in an American Lit class receive their professor's close reading of Edgar Alan Poe's "Masque of the Red Death." It's a lecture, with multi-media, that they will never forget and probably not survive.

The title story involves four veterans of the Iraq war who regroup to destroy the vampiric creature they encountered at Fullujah. Yes, it sounds like a movie on the Chiller Channel, but this is Langan showing that when called upon he can turn out a old-fashioned supernatural adventure story. (Scratch "supernatural," but it's too complicated to go into.)

Langan opens "Revel" with a chase through the woods because that's the way these new-fangled werewolf movies start. Characters are introduced as just that, characters you would find in a werewolf movie. It's all good, bloody fun until it gets weird.

I have never sought out books that extend the Lovecraftian mythos, but the one thing I have always wondered is just what is really supposed to happen once Chthulu and his unspeakably horrible buddies return. I know it's bad news for humans, but what are the details? "The Shallows" takes place during this prolonged transformation from our world to theirs. We follow a man named Ransom, the last human in his neighborhood, as he goes about his daily routine. His only friend is crab he calls Gus.

I said I was going to mention the highlights, but I see I've written about almost every story in the book. Like I said, these tend to be long stories. Langan ranks high among the new horror writers I've read. His storytelling is excellent, his prose is literate, and his acknowledgement of the horror tradition is sophisticated and inventive. More like him, please.