Fiction for Lovers: Freshly Cut Tales of Flesh, Fear, Larvae, and Love

Britta Santowski is a freelance writer in Victoria.

This collection of nine short stories is disappointing. The
disappointment begins with the cover and title, which suggest something
erotic, titillating, and dangerous. But the stories are actually horror
stories or, more specifically, stories that attempt to evoke horror.

The opening story, “Snow Rooms,” introduces a terrifying ghost,
Jack Duff Sidney; we know he is terrifying only because the two main
characters see him and run. In “Snow Rooms II,” the narrator again
attempts to convey the horror of this ghost, but all I could glean about
Jack-the-man (the stage before ghosthood) is that he was a couch-surfing
slumming adult with violent tendencies and an unfortunate childhood.
“Worms” is an excessively descriptive and meandering piece that
mentions the “long slender body” of a worm somewhere in the middle.
“Sir” takes several pages to build up a story told to the narrator
by a friend, only to tell a mediocre tale of a man in a subway who sees
a sexy ghost, gets naked, and doesn’t get caught. “Bug Day,” which
delivers on the promised “larvae” from the subtitle, is a rather
unbelievable tale of a cockroach infestation. “Arms” is a more
creative attempt at the perspective shifts of a dying man after his wife
cuts off his arms.

The book contains some gems. “The Screaming Tunnel,” for instance,
is especially poignant when Burgess describes the genesis of the urban
legend: “A light appeared suddenly and as the child raised its arms to
be swept up to safety a wall of metal exploded the tiny body. The train
never stopped, never saw the tiny form it swallowed and in that instant,
the child slipped low into the ground, escaping the death its body
experienced, and it hung in a tunnel that ran under the tracks, hung
there screaming, a tiny faceless monster made of darkness.” The rest
of the story explains the mechanics of the legend and concludes with an
overly obvious ending.

Burgess can write stunningly well. Given this talent, it’s surprising
when he doesn’t deliver actual terror. These rather quaint stories are
not really horrific at all.