O Thou Uncanny and Cruel Providence! - Reviewing Barry Lee Dejasu's "Black City Skyline and Darker Horizons"

Thinking about where to start with Black City Skyline and Darker Horizons, my thoughts keep on going in circles which always end in the same one word: Providence.

"I can't tell you what's going on in this city, Detective. Maybe it's a combination of gentrification, global warming, and crime, with a hefty dose of lockdown anxiety. Maybe it's something else."

Courting ground to Edgar Allan Poe as well as home to H.P. Lovecraft, Cormac Mc Carthy and yes, Barry Lee Dejasu, Providence has a substantial claim to fame when it comes to North American literature. In the tradition of other evil small towns like King's Salem, Levin's Stepford, or the more recent examples of Baxter's Gulpepper, Jones' Proofrock, Junji Ito's Kurouzu-cho, Dejasu's Providence too plays a crucial, almost characterlike part in his debut short story collection. So much so that this horrible place, of which characters often complain but never do or even can leave, is the common thread holding these 15 short stories together.

There are supernatural phenomena to be found here, possibly malevolent aliens among us. Insects, fungi, spiders, unknown creatures in all their animal and humanoid variations. Pandemics, quarantines, disorders with unspecified symptoms. Objects through which the shadow of evil in other universes can shine through upon us and objects which allow passage between worlds, between times. You're never safe in this Providence. Your lover, your friend or your business partner may turn out to be something you'd never thought them to be. Or maybe not.

It is a weird kind of Providence and it is my kind of Providence that Barry describes!

My highlights:

Penumbra

Shortly before their move into a skyscraper in Providence, the marketing company Zoot Suit LLC decides to hold one last Halloween party in their old office building and the office's resident horror geek Brandt brings a piece of decoration which isn't like any other. Seriously off things start happening which will find their shocking climax, of course, on Halloween evening. 

What's Below Beneath - Why I Don't Go Into Basements Anymore

Peripheral Visions is a fresh and quirky youtube show about paranormal phenomena happening in Rhode Island, a platform where people can unburden themselves of all the weird stuff happening to them in this seemingly unholy place. The show also marks the beginnings of a new kind of Providence, where the fear of the unknown is replaced by the fear of the basement and it's outright terrifying. I wouldn't want to go anywhere near basements either if that happened to me. Coincidentally, this story reminded me of T.E.D. Klein, who wrote the introduction to this very collection and his short story "Children of the Kingdom" in which Earth was being attacked by creepy beings that came out of unexpected places and which was published in his legendary collection Dark Gods.

"Hello? Is Someone There?"

Found footage. A long distance relationship during quarantine and weird things happen in the backgrounds of he displays while two lovers try to communicate. This is always effective and always scary in my opinion. Never gets old.

The Archive's Wife

A rather emotional story about a man chosen by some entity to become "an archive", a memory bank for all earthly information and his wife who doesn't want to accept the new state he's in. An interesting idea.

M.O.T.W.

A very paranoid piece of writing about the evil targeting children. Really chilling.

Tripping the Ghost

The chills continue almost seemlessly in what I personally think is the strongest, most uncanny short story of this collection and if you now guessed mushrooms, you guessed right. I'm enjoying the fact that fungi horror is immensely popular right now, and that popularity has been non-stop growing for the past five to six years. Like the disgusting mushrooms here are growing. That theme has been paired here with a different kind of morbidity connected to their growth and harvesting and it's just insanely ugh... Great story.

Grab this collection, these stories are so weird!!!

On a last note, I have two personal complaints: number one is that spiders were often used as a horror element, but I absolutely love them. They are cute and they don't scare me. So any situation where spiders and an oddly omnipresent man with a spider protruding out of his chest freak people out, that didn't really work for me. I think it would be very awesome to have spiderlegs coming out of my chest, like an arachnoid godess Kali!

The other one is that, I don't know if maybe my kindle edition was damaged, but two stories, "Why I Don't Go Into Basements Anymore" and "Hello? Is Someone There?" don't show up under Contents. Maybe some technical glitch?