32 White Horses on a Vermillion Hill: Volume One

32 White Horses on a Vermillion Hill #1

by Duane Pesice (Editor), Farah Rose Smith, Matthew A. St. Cyr

Planet X Publications is proud to present this charity anthology, benefitting our friend, horror writer Christopher Ropes. It features stories & poems generously donated from members of the weird fiction & horror communities. Christopher has a condition called dentinogenesis imperfecta, which causes discolored, brittle teeth, and has been a lifelong source of pain & distress for him. All the profits from this book will go directly to Christopher to help cover the costs of some long-needed dental work so that he can smile easy for the first time.

Genres: Weird Fiction, Anthologies

222 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 21, 2018

About the author

Duane is the author of a small army of stories under a slew of pseudonyms. Under his own byline he has published pieces in a number of of hitherto-unrelated places. He writes weird fiction and baseball articles and has a book available.
Duane also records under the band name "moderan", and is indebted to the late David R. Bunch for the use of that name and concept.
He lives in southern Arizona with his guitars, books, and cats.

Reviews

[Joel Hacker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Horrifying fiction with a benevolent purpose, this was the first of two volumes put out by the community to try to raise money to help one of their own (Chris Ropes) get some desperately needed dental care done, hence the name.
There are certainly some names included that followers of the small press horror world will find familiar, like Nadia Bulkin with the introduction and Matthew Bartlett who is as distressing as always with "The Fever River." A few pieces nod ostensibly towards teeth, but overall this collection of stories and poems is more about simply entertaining and raising money than adhering to a theme.
I feel like this collection is a little less consistent in overall quality than other Planet X anthologies Pesice put out, and I won't speculate on possible reasons for that, but there are still some really standout entries. "Chindi" showed promise, but given the themes may have been better handled by someone with more Native background themself. James Fallweather's "I Can't See The Bottom" starts to stretch the length and form, and borders on the bizarro/absurd, but in a way I'm very much here for, starting out with a large hadron collider/garbage disposal accident. Though on the whole, I feel like the ones I liked best are those that felt as though they could easily be the seeds of longer works. Douglas Draa's 'Fishing Boots' is an early and rather funny entry, and I certainly wouldn't mind reading more about Mr. Boots and his voodoo misadventures and is also the only story besides Jill Hand's "Spare Parts" that made me laugh. "The Tooth" by Russell Smeaton also seems nestled a larger world, where green tusked creatures walk (and breed) among us. Christopher Slatskey gives us a pair of PoC detectives in a supernatural hard-boiled detective horror that I would very much like to see more of in "Project AZAZEL". Though Brandon Barrows "Verdure" and Sarah Walker's "Ink" are set in very different environs, with the former being more of a vietnam meets meets scifi (think Haldeman's Forever War) and the latter being a more traditional occult tomb modern tale yarn, both had me intrigued enough to wish more space could have been given over to these stories in particular.
Closing out my list and close to closing out the volume are John Linwood Grant's "Hungery" and S. L. Edwards "I Keep It In a Little Box". Both would have a place in one of Datlow's collection of modern spins on more classic fairy tales. 'Hungery' gives us a child befriending an Ogre, to terrifying results, and the "I Keep It..." shows us both the wonderful and terrible things that can come from rejecting the kindness of dragons.