Horror Literature Quarterly, a free pdf magazine, features two stories in its Winter 2008 edition.
“Recipes” by Lavie Tidhar is the sad story of a man coping with imprisonment in Auschwitz. While there isn’t a plot, as in a series of happenings, climax and resolution, the story, like the character needs only to survive to give readers a dark taste of the very real horror that happened only a breath of time from today. A lovely ode to spark memories, “Recipes” in a welcome reminder of the horror of the past and a present where perceptions are over dramatized and needlessly exaggerate.
The first hint of something wrong in “Nesting” by Christopher Golden is the subtle mention of tension between Mike and his pregnant wife Cori. In a story that appears to be a happy little suburbia tale of soccer moms and middle class love of art Golden weaves in an undertone of wrongness as he expands what the reader knows of Mike, Cori and their little town. An art gallery party leads to the discovery of a series of paintings which reveal the existence of a burnt out house and a series of oddly placed stones on Mike and Cori’s property. Elements of trepidation and oddness are smoothed into the tale in a way that almost makes readers overlook them. A creepy open ended tale “Nesting” takes readers from the ordinary into the disturbing and back, tainting the story world with a wonderfully subtle tinge of sinister.
