The Garden State Horror Writers Presents Dark Territories
Edited by Gary Frank and Mary SanGiovanni
www.gshw.net
GSHW Press, 2008
$14.95
ISBN 978-0-9792346-2-0

     Before I even start, you should know that I was an English Literature major in college... which means I read a lot of kinda boring stuff for a long time.  Fuctup makes fun of my mini library of books I have left over from college and thinks I'm some artsy fartsy literature geek because I have Shakespeare's entire collection sitting next to Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas on my bookshelf.  I'm still a little burnt-out from college, so, unfortunately I have developed a really, really, REALLY short attention span when it comes to reading.  Seriously.  I can't even read the newspaper without getting antsy.  I was super excited when I was asked to review Dark Territories, a collection 15 short stories written by members of the Garden State Horror Writers, because I wanted to start reviewing again but I just couldn't bring myself to finish a novel.  For so long, reading was a chore, a course requirement, work, something I did because I had to, not because I wanted to.  With that being said, I started reading Dark Territories on the bus on my way to work one morning, and almost missed my stop because I became so involved in the first couple of stories.

     The editors' introductions boast that "these stories are something different.  They wander into darker realms of the human spirit, exploring what it means to be human."  I didn't really get that from a lot of the stories.  I mean, most of the stories were good, some were not-so-good, a couple left me wondering "Why the hell did I just waste 15 minutes of my life on that piece of shit?" but that's the nature of the beast when you're reading an anthology of short stories.  I was really into the first story of the collection, "Dream Girl" by John R. Platt, but the story fell flat on its face at the end.  Dan Foley's "Forty-Nine Cents", on the other hand, kept my interest the entire time and had a fucked up twist at the end.  A-mazing.  I love stories about lost childhood innocence and betraying your best friend! (Maybe that's why Battle Royale is one of my favorite movies...)

     I'm really fascinated by how an audience interacts with a film (read my article "Final Girls"), so Peter Gutierrez's "Scopophilia" caught my attention immediately.  It was the best written story in the anthology, by far. From reading just this one story of his, I want to read everything else he's ever written - and isn't that the point of putting a story in an anthology, to get people to want to read more of your stuff?  I'm about to check Amazon now.

Artwork:  They say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but I totally did in this case.  The artwork is kind of cheeseball (sorry, Steven Gilberts).  One of my co-workers just saw it laying on my desk and asked me, "WHAT are you reading?!"  It shows an undead, one-eyed hitchhiker with headlights eerily approaching in the background, but I can appreciate the artist's connection to the highway system of NJ with ominous streetsigns such as "THE TURNPIKE OF TERROR" (ooh, scary...).  If you can get past the corny artwork and actually start reading the stories, you'll be entertained for a few hours.

Overall: One thing that I noticed about many of the stories in this anthology is that they don't really follow the standard "conflict-climax-resolution" arc that, uh, just about every written and oral story in existence follows.  Maybe they do follow it, but it was just harder to identify.  Maybe my post-college onset A.D.D. was kicking in and I stopped paying attention.   Anyway, some stories seem to have an unclear conflict.  Others have an ending, but not really a resolution  to the conflict at hand, which I guess is what makes them different from short stories in other genres.  In horror stories, nothing really gets resolved - or it does, but in a messed up way.  You probably won't love every single story in this anthology, but if you have time to kill in a waiting room, on your commute to work/school, or if your DVD player is broken and you can't watch your sweet new "Scrubs" box set, you can pick this up and have a mediocre substitute. (That's right, I watch "Scrubs" and Zach Braff is in my top on MySpace. Don't hate.)