Enter Ellen Datlow's Inferno

Published late in 2007, Ellen Datlow's dark fantasy anthology Inferno was a highlight of the year that got overlooked by some readers. With the holidays behind us for good, though, it's been picking up steam. As part of spreading the word, I recently reviewed it for Sci Fi Weekly, where I wrote in part, "In reading Inferno, I was reminded at times of the old Whispers series I used to love, as well as such iconic stand-alone horror anthologies such as Prime Evil and Dark Forces. Time will tell whether Inferno is as good as those books, but for me it provided several fun hours of atmospheric, intelligent, scary, entertaining reading. Here's hoping Ellen Datlow can be persuaded to edit an Inferno 2 in the near future."

Featuring great work from Jeffrey Ford, Lucius Shepard, P.D. Cacek, Laird Barron, Nathan Ballingrud, Joyce Carol Oates, and others, Inferno should appeal to anyone who loves to curl up on a quiet night with a good scary read.

Datlow also includes an introduction about the horror and the rationale behind the anthology, which she's allowed us to excerpt below as an Amazon exclusive.

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I love the horror short story and novella. To me, they're the most powerful and important forms in the field. For at least two hundred years, the short form has proven to be enormously fertile ground for dark literature that plumbs the depths of fear and the evil that may reside in the human soul.

Undeniably,  the novels of  Stephen King and such other dark novels as The Monk by Matthew Lewis, Dracula by Bram Stoker, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, as well as those by H.P. Lovecraft,  have been enormously popular. Nonetheless throughout the history of British and American horror, the short story has been the most celebrated form of the genre. Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, M. R. James, Robert Bloch, Robert Aickman, Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson, Ramsey Campbell, and Dennis Etchison, to name but a small number of great practitioners of the genre, are some of the authors who come to mind when we think of  those who have created some of our favorite horror and terror tales.

I think that fiction of the supernatural works better in the shorter forms for the simple reason that the short form lends itself with great ease and flexibility to an enormous variety of narrative styles and strategies. Novels, while they can be quite chillingly effective, are an entirely different matter. Very few longer works truly carry the power to force the reader to sustain the suspension of disbelief necessary for the kind of stunning, chilling, or flat-out terrifying effect of a great short work.

In Inferno, though, I present for the first time all stories that I've chosen and edited. And all of them had to succeed on my terms: to provide the reader with a frisson of shock, or a moment of dread so powerful it might cause the reader outright physical discomfort; or a sensation of fear so palpable that the reader feels compelled to turn on the bright lights and play music or seek the company of others to dispel the fear; or to linger in the reader's consciousness for a long, long time after the final word is read. Such stories are my passion. For fear is a part of life, and horrific or frightening stories have always been the surest way humanity has found to deal with the very tangible terrors of the real world. It’s been that way since people first sat around a fire, surrounded by the darkness and dangers of the wild beyond their circle of light. Listening to stories of the terrifying beasts and other natural threats, our ancestors used stories to help conquer their fears, by putting them into tales that they themselves wrought, stories in which they dealt with fears by naming them, thus rendering them known, less powerful for being told, the stories handed down from generation to generation, a tool that has never lost its power and usefulness.
      
When the story is over and we emerge back in the real world, we’ve survived a test of courage, or of endurance, or whatever other tests the skilled author has posed to challenge us—or our imaginary avatar, as created within the narrative. And back in the real world, we are once again whole—and often, as readers have experienced in the most effective tales, we are more whole than before. A gifted storyteller's craft can uplift, transform, and challenge us in ways that are either unlikely or downright impossible in the real world.

Vicarious adventures in terror are a lot easier to survive than some of the terrors we face in life. Violence, violation, loss, revulsion, mental, emotional  or physical suffering . . . all are trials that in life may bow us and break our spirit. In fiction, though,  we survive them and are strengthened by our survival. - Ellen Datlow (copyright 2007)