Early on in Oscar winner Kathryn Bigelow’s Texas horror classic Near Dark (1987), a Winnebago speeds across a dusty Lone Star landscape. The dingy RV becomes a telling vehicle for the entire plotline: monsters on the run, trying to survive, picking up fresh blood along the way.
Starring film legend and late Fort Worthian Bill Paxton and Lance Henriksen, the movie is the perfect metaphor for Texas’ actual, perennial mobile home of horror, Road Kill: Texas Horror by Texas Writers, which is now in its ninth volume.
Over the years, Road Kill has featured Joe R. Lansdale, Katherine Anne Porter, Robert E. Howard, Stephen Graham Jones, O. Henry, Russell C. Conner, Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, Madison Estes, filmmaker Glen Coburn, David Bowles, Mario E. Martinez, William Jensen, Jonathan Duckworth, Patrick C. Harrison III, Cedric May, Patrice Sarath, Joe McKinney, Rhonda Jackson Garcia, and myself, among many others. Lesser states produce a few gory writers here and there, but Texas breeds horrorsmiths like plagues of locusts, and this year’s swarm is awesome.
Kathleen Kent joins the motley assemblage with a chilling take on the repercussions of the New London School Explosion in 1937 which killed more than 300 students and teachers. In “The Last of the Kilgore Boohags,” the New York Times bestselling author depicts an unassuming spirit who returns to mete out misery to heedless descendants of those responsible for the tragedy.
In “Civilized Homes,” William Jensen lends his creepy prose to a curse befalling a young heir and his girlfriend, who have a look at an old house he was just given but find the place comes with a George Armstrong Custer-like curse. You assume maybe they’ll fix it up and flip it, but the ending may flip you out.
Then there’s Lucas Strough’s “Toadflax,” a story that, in an almost Chaucer-esque fashion, eerily mirrors the sociopolitical status quo, and Houstonite Aimee Trask’s “Internal Rhyme,” which places compelling stand-ins for the Lone Star political patriarchy in her crosshairs, wickedly terminates their male exigencies with discerning prejudice.
In “Feral,” San Antonio native C.W. Stephenson gets back to nature with a harrowing tale of an encounter with an alpha member of the state’s fastest-growing population, and Houston splatterpunk writer Jae Mazer returns with “Garden Dirt and Hill Country Wine,” a frightening riff on postpartum depression, introducing a method of “mother’s little helper” that may cause shrinkage in half the male readership.
Armando Sangre’s “Fine Leather” may scare the pants off you, and M.E. Splawn’s “The Thing on Falling Star Hill” will make you think twice before reaching for the stars.
Published by HellBound Books, Road Kill 9 is a superior collection of horror fiction that leans on your sensibilities, fades out to allow you a breath, and then wallops you square in the craw often when you least expect it. The protagonists (who may also be antagonists) are compelling, the plotlines are usually tight, and some of the shocking denouements practically dare you to look away, but that’s not really an option.
Just a smidge over seven centuries ago, Dante Alighieri explored the nine circles of hell in The Inferno. Curator Bret McCormick’s Road Kill 9 lays out a survey of some of the same territory — the circles of hell lying just below Texas soil. It’s a fine Texas two-step, performed on your eyelids instead of a dance floor.
Road Kill: Texas Horror by Texas Writers, Vol. 9
HellBound Books
323 pps
$16.99
