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Chilling Tales #1
Chilling Tales: Evil I Did Dwell; Lewd Did I Live
18 Spine-tingling Tales Best Served Chilled... This tome includes selections by iconic Canadian dark fantasy and horror writers Nancy Kilpatrick, Claude Lalumière, Brett Alexander Savory, Robert J. Wiersema, Richard Gavin, Barbara Roden, Leah Bobet, Michael R. Colangelo, Simon Strantzas, Jason S. Ridler, Suzanne Church, David Nickle, Christopher K. Miller, Brent Hayward, Sandra Kasturi, Ian Rogers, Gemma Files and Tia V. Travis with an introduction by Michael Kelly. Edited by the maestro of macabre, Michael Kelly, Chilling Tales: Evil Did I Dwell; Lewd I Did Live will distress, delight and disturb you with stories that slowly creep under your skin and linger in your mind long after the pages have been read.
- GenresHorrorAnthologies
224 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2011
2 people are currently reading
96 people want to read
About the author
Michael Kelly
74 books67 followersMichael Kelly is the Series Editor for the Year's Best Weird Fiction, and author of Undertow and Other Laments, and Scratching the Surface; as well as co-author of the novel Ouroboros.
His short fiction has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including All Hallows, Best New Horror, Black Static, Dark Arts, the Hint Fiction Anthology, PostScripts, Space & Time, Supernatural Tales, Tesseracts 13, and Weird Fiction Review.
Michael is a World Fantasy Award, Shirley Jackson Award and British Fantasy Award Nominee.
His short fiction has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including All Hallows, Best New Horror, Black Static, Dark Arts, the Hint Fiction Anthology, PostScripts, Space & Time, Supernatural Tales, Tesseracts 13, and Weird Fiction Review.
Michael is a World Fantasy Award, Shirley Jackson Award and British Fantasy Award Nominee.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
October 11, 2011
I'm not sure I'd call most of these stories horror. More like dark fiction. Some were a little too oblique for my tastes (I had more than a few 'Huh?' moments), but the writing caliber was good across the board.
Overall rating: 3.5/5.0 stars
Reviewed for Bitten by Books. http://bittenbybooks.com.
Overall rating: 3.5/5.0 stars
Reviewed for Bitten by Books. http://bittenbybooks.com.
March 23, 2012
This review appeared in the NYRSF in Jauary 2012.
Chilling Tales: Evil Did I Dwell; Lewd I Did Live
Edited by Michael Kelly
Trade Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-894063-52-4
$14.95
224 pages
Review by Ursula Pflug
684 words
Many Canadian readers of horror and the supernatural turn to the U.S.'s mega-selling authors such as Stephen King, his son Joe Hill, or Peter Straub. Those writers are all superb craftsmen, but we have some fiercely good talent right here at home including those authors represented in Chilling Tales .
In Sandra Kasturi’s "Foxford," protagonist Eleanor is a likeable scholar, an introspective sort who opens her home to relatives from across the Big Pond who impinge not just upon her hospitality but her psyche, going out of their way to be derisive in many little ways that add up to making her feel small. Frankie and Bill are the kind of folks you shouldn’t give the time of day and probably wouldn’t, if you weren’t related to them. Eleanor turns into a Welsh fox, the big grey magical kind, and, together with her brethren, pursues the guilty parties.
Does the fox represent the no nonsense toughness Eleanor needs to develop to keep herself safe from the mean girls of this world and their spouses? She’s got boundary issues, clearly. But psychoanalyzing this story or any other in Chilling Tales is by no means necessary. We like Eleanor and the artfully drawn Oxford, with its cobblestones and pubs and train stations, without even once thinking about what the foxes mean. Still, much of the darkness in award winning editor Michael Kelly’s picks for his new anthology comes from this nebulous, murky area in human relationships. Why do we cross boundaries and do petty or mean or outright awful things to other folks, or conversely, allow them to be done to us? At its best horror fiction examines these most important of questions and makes some effort to shed light even while it entertains.
Barbara Roden’s chillingly Kafkaesque “404” is about office workers pushed into smaller and smaller psychological cubicles by corporate pressures. An ever-escalating series of background checks succeeds in creating fear in employees Wilson and Armstrong. Conspiracy theory lurks in the background of this tale that frightens precisely because it contains neither blood nor ghosts, rather positing the modern workplace as a source of primal unease.
Leah Bobet’s “Stay” asks, as most of these stories do in one way or another, what makes us human or not. In the north, isolation is a constant pressure and folks look after each other as a matter of course; there aren’t enough of them to do otherwise, and the weather’s a constant, fierce challenger. The truck driver who has gone wendigo is brought back into the fold, begged to stay human by Cora, reluctant healer/waitress in the hamlet of Sunrise.
Gemma Files’s “The Shrines” is a mother/son tale, probing the complexities of that relationship through deft descriptions of son Darrow’s sinister found-art shrines built on Toronto’s Leslie Street Spit. His mother asks what, or whom, they are actually calling. Which spirits, perhaps more real than imagined, do we call upon when we invent new religions? What happens when our prayers are unexpectedly answered and not quite in the way we’d hoped?
Suzanne Church’s “The Needle’s Eye” is a near-future science fictional plague tale. A competent medical procedural, its grossout quotient is directly linked to Church’s descriptions of the ooze and ick of a new plague; its humanity stems from the powerful love between its Médecins Sans Frontières protagonists.
David Nickle’s “Looker” is a moody thing about a fluidly bordered group of young people partying in a beach house, including the peculiar Lucy, who sees the world through different eyes than most, to say the least.
Last year, Edge published Evolve , an anthology by Canada’s vampire queen Nancy Kilpatrick, that became super-successful. It’s a rare thing when a short story collection attains best seller status, and my bet is Edge is hoping for another with Chilling Tales . It’s not implausible as each story in this anthology is of high quality, and it exposes the reader to a variety of authors, giving us the opportunity to hunt down our favorites’ other works.
Ursula Pflug's new book, Harvesting the Moon, is forthcoming from Britain’s PS Publishing.
Chilling Tales: Evil Did I Dwell; Lewd I Did Live
Edited by Michael Kelly
Trade Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-894063-52-4
$14.95
224 pages
Review by Ursula Pflug
684 words
Many Canadian readers of horror and the supernatural turn to the U.S.'s mega-selling authors such as Stephen King, his son Joe Hill, or Peter Straub. Those writers are all superb craftsmen, but we have some fiercely good talent right here at home including those authors represented in Chilling Tales .
In Sandra Kasturi’s "Foxford," protagonist Eleanor is a likeable scholar, an introspective sort who opens her home to relatives from across the Big Pond who impinge not just upon her hospitality but her psyche, going out of their way to be derisive in many little ways that add up to making her feel small. Frankie and Bill are the kind of folks you shouldn’t give the time of day and probably wouldn’t, if you weren’t related to them. Eleanor turns into a Welsh fox, the big grey magical kind, and, together with her brethren, pursues the guilty parties.
Does the fox represent the no nonsense toughness Eleanor needs to develop to keep herself safe from the mean girls of this world and their spouses? She’s got boundary issues, clearly. But psychoanalyzing this story or any other in Chilling Tales is by no means necessary. We like Eleanor and the artfully drawn Oxford, with its cobblestones and pubs and train stations, without even once thinking about what the foxes mean. Still, much of the darkness in award winning editor Michael Kelly’s picks for his new anthology comes from this nebulous, murky area in human relationships. Why do we cross boundaries and do petty or mean or outright awful things to other folks, or conversely, allow them to be done to us? At its best horror fiction examines these most important of questions and makes some effort to shed light even while it entertains.
Barbara Roden’s chillingly Kafkaesque “404” is about office workers pushed into smaller and smaller psychological cubicles by corporate pressures. An ever-escalating series of background checks succeeds in creating fear in employees Wilson and Armstrong. Conspiracy theory lurks in the background of this tale that frightens precisely because it contains neither blood nor ghosts, rather positing the modern workplace as a source of primal unease.
Leah Bobet’s “Stay” asks, as most of these stories do in one way or another, what makes us human or not. In the north, isolation is a constant pressure and folks look after each other as a matter of course; there aren’t enough of them to do otherwise, and the weather’s a constant, fierce challenger. The truck driver who has gone wendigo is brought back into the fold, begged to stay human by Cora, reluctant healer/waitress in the hamlet of Sunrise.
Gemma Files’s “The Shrines” is a mother/son tale, probing the complexities of that relationship through deft descriptions of son Darrow’s sinister found-art shrines built on Toronto’s Leslie Street Spit. His mother asks what, or whom, they are actually calling. Which spirits, perhaps more real than imagined, do we call upon when we invent new religions? What happens when our prayers are unexpectedly answered and not quite in the way we’d hoped?
Suzanne Church’s “The Needle’s Eye” is a near-future science fictional plague tale. A competent medical procedural, its grossout quotient is directly linked to Church’s descriptions of the ooze and ick of a new plague; its humanity stems from the powerful love between its Médecins Sans Frontières protagonists.
David Nickle’s “Looker” is a moody thing about a fluidly bordered group of young people partying in a beach house, including the peculiar Lucy, who sees the world through different eyes than most, to say the least.
Last year, Edge published Evolve , an anthology by Canada’s vampire queen Nancy Kilpatrick, that became super-successful. It’s a rare thing when a short story collection attains best seller status, and my bet is Edge is hoping for another with Chilling Tales . It’s not implausible as each story in this anthology is of high quality, and it exposes the reader to a variety of authors, giving us the opportunity to hunt down our favorites’ other works.
Ursula Pflug's new book, Harvesting the Moon, is forthcoming from Britain’s PS Publishing.
July 17, 2019
This is a better than average horror short story collection with some strong authors.
October 31, 2011
If it were an option, I would give this anthology two and a half stars. Overall, it had a greater number of reasonably well-written stories than many small press horror anthologies I've read--but ultimately, I'm not sure Chilling Tales is entirely a horror anthology. It's not bad fir what it is--though neither is it amazing--but very few of these stories were anything close to what I'd call chilling, at least for me. And a number of them were also fairly derivative. I knew from the first page or two what kind of story it was and how it would turn out, which always disappoints me in an anthology that features a number if writers whose names I recognize. The most frustrating were the stories that left too much unexplained, so I ended up with a feeling of "Well what was the point of that?" rather than satisfaction at having understood the apparent mystery that was introduced. The worst offender in that regard was "The Carpet Maker", which felt just plain sloppy. "Safe" and "Looker" came in second place--they were overall better written, but still left too much unexplained to provide satisfying conclusions.
There are a few gems as well. My hands-down favorite story was Gemma Files's "The Shrines", which was both beautifully written and chillingly believable. "Stay" by Leah Bobet was a very close second; it was well plotted and her characterizations were compelling. Claude Lalumiere's "Dead" had a fascinating concept, but fell short in terms of the child/teenage narrator's character voice, which didn't sound authentic; and Tia V. Travis' "The Weight f Stones" wasn't a horror story in any particular way, but was very enjoyable to read. I also like "My Body" by Ian Rogers and "Cowboy's Row" by Christopher K. Miller. Both were variations on stories that have been told many times before, and so were a bit predictable plot-wise, but the intriguing, believably flawed protagonists made up for that. Ian Rogers' story in particular pleased me, since I discovered that the main character is a detective who's appeared in one or two novels. I'll very likely pick those up at some point, since he's a character I'd be glad to see more of.
There are a few gems as well. My hands-down favorite story was Gemma Files's "The Shrines", which was both beautifully written and chillingly believable. "Stay" by Leah Bobet was a very close second; it was well plotted and her characterizations were compelling. Claude Lalumiere's "Dead" had a fascinating concept, but fell short in terms of the child/teenage narrator's character voice, which didn't sound authentic; and Tia V. Travis' "The Weight f Stones" wasn't a horror story in any particular way, but was very enjoyable to read. I also like "My Body" by Ian Rogers and "Cowboy's Row" by Christopher K. Miller. Both were variations on stories that have been told many times before, and so were a bit predictable plot-wise, but the intriguing, believably flawed protagonists made up for that. Ian Rogers' story in particular pleased me, since I discovered that the main character is a detective who's appeared in one or two novels. I'll very likely pick those up at some point, since he's a character I'd be glad to see more of.
August 14, 2016
Pretty much all the big names in Canadian weird fiction are present in this anthology, so it's a little surprising to find the results slightly lackluster. Nearly all of the stories are thoughtful and well-written (far more so than is the norm with horror anthologies), but none of them are stunningly imaginative or creative. The book forms an interesting contrast with the last anthology I read, an entry in Kevin Donihe's "Bare Bones" series. There's no question that the present tome offers consistently higher levels of literary craftsmanship, and there's no question that the stories in Donihe's book are far more outlandishly imaginative and innovative. It's nice to spend time with the civilized writers in CHILLING TALES, but it's also slightly dull.
That said, there are a few standout contributions. Claude Lalumiere has, in my experience, yet to furnish a routine yarn, and he does not disappoint us now. Leah Bobet gives us a fine Wendigo story, very strong on people and setting. I also liked the piece by Gemma Files––I wonder if she knows that there really are strange structures of the sort she describes, but at Gibraltar Point, not the Leslie Street Spit.
The inappropriately lurid cover belongs in front of some YA horror hackwork, not a collection of this level of intelligence and sophistication. Also, the title is plonkingly unimaginative (maybe they should have gone with the palindromic subtitle).
That said, there are a few standout contributions. Claude Lalumiere has, in my experience, yet to furnish a routine yarn, and he does not disappoint us now. Leah Bobet gives us a fine Wendigo story, very strong on people and setting. I also liked the piece by Gemma Files––I wonder if she knows that there really are strange structures of the sort she describes, but at Gibraltar Point, not the Leslie Street Spit.
The inappropriately lurid cover belongs in front of some YA horror hackwork, not a collection of this level of intelligence and sophistication. Also, the title is plonkingly unimaginative (maybe they should have gone with the palindromic subtitle).
April 23, 2016
Horror anthologies almost always over promise their ability to terrify their reading audience.
It'll give you nightmares!
Seven days and seven nights of chills!
So scary you might as well read it in the bathroom so you can shit your pants and vomit into the litter box at the same time!
Most of us have been reading the genre for a while and I suspect we're not expecting a hair-raising and soul blanching experience of fear. Been there, done that. Gotta up the disturbing and/or gory ante. Get nuts with the dismemberments and demons.
Some of us horror veterans want to be entertained and enthralled. Creeped out and see an aspect of horror in a new light (or shadow). Something sophisticated and challenging and twisted. Without the Evil Dead budget for fake blood.
This anthology of all Canadian writers is My Jam. The stories are haunting and thoughtful and complex. Characters are well developed and consistent. First paragraphs are poetic and conclusions are not spoon fed easy ways out. Setting and nature and cities are their own distinct characters in these tales. It's a marvellous collection.
The first half of the book blew me away. Between the middle and the end some stories were more facts than fables, but I don't mind very much.
I recommend this book to everybody.
It'll give you nightmares!
Seven days and seven nights of chills!
So scary you might as well read it in the bathroom so you can shit your pants and vomit into the litter box at the same time!
Most of us have been reading the genre for a while and I suspect we're not expecting a hair-raising and soul blanching experience of fear. Been there, done that. Gotta up the disturbing and/or gory ante. Get nuts with the dismemberments and demons.
Some of us horror veterans want to be entertained and enthralled. Creeped out and see an aspect of horror in a new light (or shadow). Something sophisticated and challenging and twisted. Without the Evil Dead budget for fake blood.
This anthology of all Canadian writers is My Jam. The stories are haunting and thoughtful and complex. Characters are well developed and consistent. First paragraphs are poetic and conclusions are not spoon fed easy ways out. Setting and nature and cities are their own distinct characters in these tales. It's a marvellous collection.
The first half of the book blew me away. Between the middle and the end some stories were more facts than fables, but I don't mind very much.
I recommend this book to everybody.
May 11, 2011
A collection of the top Canadian talent in horror has something for everyone. From Nancy Kilpatrick's straight ahead horror story "Sympathy For the Devil," to Michael R. Colangelo's disturbing "Blacklight," Leah Bobbet's lushly written "Stay" and the memorable "The Weight of Stones" by by Tia V. Travis.
March 22, 2014
Review coming soon.
April 4, 2013
My story, "The Needles Eye" is in this anthology, so my opinion is likely biased, but Michael Kelly did a great job editing this one.
Must finish reading ALL of the stories.
Must finish reading ALL of the stories.
September 12, 2018
There were a few stories that were exactly what I wanted for short story horror. There were a few stories where I wished I had another chapter or two to read about it because as I was really getting into it - the story ended. However, there were a few stories where I was left doing a "meh" style sound effect while turning the page.
Overall it was a generally good book with a wide variety of "horror fiction". Worth giving a shot for short story lovers and people interested in diving into mild horror a few pages at a time. Good book to read when you have a few minutes to spare.. like at an airport or doctor's office and waiting sort of thing.
Overall it was a generally good book with a wide variety of "horror fiction". Worth giving a shot for short story lovers and people interested in diving into mild horror a few pages at a time. Good book to read when you have a few minutes to spare.. like at an airport or doctor's office and waiting sort of thing.
July 27, 2017
Oops - I thought I reviewed this ages ago. I suppose not. Onwards!
I have read and loved many of Edge's anthologies (the Evolve collections are fantastic). But this one was surprisingly bad. Some stories were ok, but overall, it wasn't a good read. One of the stories in here even has the dishonor of being one of the worst stories I have ever read - and I have a massive collection of anthologies. The premise of the collection was great, I love chilling stories, but the book just didn't deliver.
It's pretty disappointing, especially since I have never read a bad book from Edge.
I have read and loved many of Edge's anthologies (the Evolve collections are fantastic). But this one was surprisingly bad. Some stories were ok, but overall, it wasn't a good read. One of the stories in here even has the dishonor of being one of the worst stories I have ever read - and I have a massive collection of anthologies. The premise of the collection was great, I love chilling stories, but the book just didn't deliver.
It's pretty disappointing, especially since I have never read a bad book from Edge.
September 18, 2013
The horror anthology Chilling Tales is a collection of 18 short stories. These have been gathered from Canadian authors living around Toronto. At first, I worried that this could be a group of people trying their first go at horror tales, but this was not the case. Each of these authors has been in the game for a while and this is just one of their many credits in the field of horror writing.
Read the rest of the Chilling Tales, Evil Did I Dwell: Lewd I Did Live review at SFReader.com
Read the rest of the Chilling Tales, Evil Did I Dwell: Lewd I Did Live review at SFReader.com
October 18, 2013
A compilation of Canadian-only horror? I'm in! And once done, mildly disappointed. A large enough number of stories here were enjoyable that I kept reading to the end, but I admit, this was more miss than hit for me. A lot of conceptual work, some great but the majority not, I kept with this for the few stories that worked (in some cases, very well) but overall I wanted more. Compilations are like that, I suppose, but still, Canadian authors writing horror set in Canada, and I'm in Canada and can catch every local cultural reference, I'd hoped for more...
July 14, 2013
Disclosures up front: I have a story in this book. I know, to varying degrees, over half of the contributors, including Michael, the editor, and had previously read little of their work. Overall, the collection was more subtle than graphic, lyrical throughout, and some stories deeply affecting. A solid anthology.
July 20, 2012
Canadians are very weird. Most of these stories made my brain hurt. They just didn't make any sense. Two I liked were Sympathy for the Devil and My Body. The Needle's Eye really freaked me out.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews