Damnation Games

Description

A horde of criminally good horror writers took a walk down the mean streets of crime.

Their task: to make your blood run cold, to scare you witless and to make your skin crawl.

The rising dread of a good mystery doesn't need anything supernatural to keep you on the edge of your seat. But put the two together - crime fiction and horror - and all sorts of nasty business can come out of the woodwork. Sometimes literally.

The stories herein include urban monsters, outback ghosts, contemporary lawyers, near-future police, and Victorian era mathematicians.

Our Damnation Games are played by 19 Aussie, Kiwi and international authors:
Gemma Amor, Joanne Anderton, J. Ashley-Smith, Alan Baxter, Aaron Dries, Gemma Files, Geneve Flynn, Philip Fracassi, Robert Hood, Gabino Iglesias, Rick Kennett, Maria Lewis, Chris Mason, Lee Murray, Cina Pelayo, Dan Rabarts, John F.D. Taff, Kyla Lee Ward, Kaaron Warren.

Sujets

• Horror
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Clan Destine Press
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780645316865
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published by Clan Destine Press in 2022
Clan Destine Press PO Box 121, Bittern Victoria, 3918 Australia
Anthology Copyright © Clan Destine Press 2022 Story Copyright © Individual Authors 2022
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including internet searchengines and retailers, electronic or mechanical, photocopying (except under the provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-In-Publication data: Editor: Alan Baxter DAMNATION GAMES
ISBNs: 978-0-6453168-4-1(hardback) 978-0-6453168-5-8 978-0-6453168-6-5(eBook)
Cover Design by © Luke Spooner Design & Typesetting by Clan Destine Press
www.clandestinepress.net


Contents
Introduction - Alan Baxter
A Bitter Yellow Sea - Gene Flynn
The Question - Alan Baxter
Miss Jam - Chris Mason
The Resident - Philip Fracassi
Kookaburra Cruel - Aaron Dries
The Zoo - Gemma Amor
The Faces in Morgan Alley - Rick Kennett
The Hungry Bones - Lee Murray
Dangerous Specimens - Robert Hood
Remnants and Bad Water - Kaaron Warren
Black Cohosh - Gemma Files
The Infinity Effect - Joanne Anderton
The End Will Emerge from the Filth - Gabino Iglesias
The Invited - Maria Lewis
Ghost Gun - John F D Taff
Spool - Dan Rabarts
She sleeps, not dreams, but ever dwells - Cynthia Pelayo
Men Without Faces - J Ashley Smith
The Value of Graves - Kyla Lee Ward
Contributing Authors


Introduction
The themes I return to time and again in my work seem to always revolve in some way around horror and crime. I’ve said before that I consider horror to be the genre of honesty. There’s no shying away from brutal reality to supply a happy ending with horror. Even when the evil is overcome, it rarely happens without cost. Survivors are rarely unscathed. Horror looks into the darkness and doesn’t turn away, but confronts it.
In many ways, crime stories are often horror stories too. There are victimless crimes, and white collar crimes that only hurt faceless corporations (which, let’s face it, are often no better than organised crime syndicates themselves), but on a personal level, crime is dark and nasty stuff. Murder, manipulation, kidnapping, stalking and more go hand in hand with burglary and car-jacking and cons. All these things, in one way or another, cast their perpetrators as predators and the victims as prey. And that’s where crime is horror, because being something’s prey is probably the most deep-seated fear any of us have.
Being eaten by something else is a genuinely terrifying concept. Perhaps being eaten alive is second only to being buried alive as a source of fear, and even then only because the latter takes longer. And while someone stealing your wallet isn’t quite the same as being literally eaten, it does turn us into the victim of a predator, and that’s a horror story.
Desperate people can be driven to crime to survive. Again, we find the predator and prey dynamic, where one person will predate on another simply to continue existing. Does that make them a bad person, though? What if they’re not only trying to save themselves but also protect their family? Is it more okay to kill an innocent adult if that will directly save the lives of innocent children? What about killing someone else’s children to save your own?
Crime, by its very nature, is usually horrible, and generally involves horrible people. But not always. It does, however, almost always involve morally grey people, and what is horror at it genesis if not an exploration of the morally grey, human or otherwise? This is where, for me, horror and crime are so inextricably linked. You can probably see why I find these themes so juicy for fiction.
So when Lindy Cameron of Clan Destine Press approached me and asked if I’d be interested in editing together an anthology of horror stories, I said I most certainly would, but I asked, “What about supernatural horror and crime, combined?”
Lindy said, “Hell, yes!” and thus was the concept for Damnation Games born.
It’s no secret to anyone that I’m a huge fan of Clive Barker—his work has influenced mine more than anyone else—so I wanted this book to draw a subtle reference to that passion of mine, and it came out in the book’s title. The name is a nod to the debut Clive Barker novel, The Damnation Game . But that only plays a tiny part in what I hoped to achieve with this. That novel revolves around an ex-con gambler and his entanglement with one of the wealthiest men in the world, who happens to have made a deal with the devil. Barker’s stories often also feature crime at a much more urban and intimate level, like his story, “The Forbidden”, from his collection, The Books of Blood . You may think you don’t know that story, but if you’ve seen the movie Candyman , you know it better than you think. The film was an adaptation of Barker’s short.
I took huge influence as well from comic books of the same era (we’re talking the 1980s here) and things like Jamie Delano and Garth Ennis writing Hellblazer made a huge impact on me. There we have all kinds of supernatural and magical occurrences matched with gritty urban stories and unsavoury characters.
Then there’s William Hjortsberg’s 1978 novel, Falling Angel , which was brilliantly adapted into the movie, Angel Heart , starring Mickey Rourke. In that story, private investigator, Harry Angel, is hired to find a popular singer named Johnny Favorite and becomes embroiled in strange and frightening occult shenanigans.
I could go on and on about the various things like these that have enthralled me over the years, but I’ll stop there for now. I could talk about this stuff for hours. Regardless, you can see the core of my passion, that delicious combination of the supernatural, the horrifying, and the criminal. It’s found its way repeatedly into my own work with novels like Devouring Dark and Sallow Bend , and stories like those in the Tales From The Gulp .
So of course when I was asked to edit an anthology, that’s exactly where I went. I asked a slew of amazingly talented writers if they would send me stories and I couldn’t believe how many said yes. I also had a limited open submissions for members of the Australasian Horror Writers Association (of which I’m currently President) and I got two incredible stories from there as well.
I asked the authors to interpret the theme as widely as they pleased. Those examples above should give an idea about how broadly this theme could be drawn. I was keen to see stories from a variety of locations and eras, drawing from the incredibly wide churches of crime and horror. What I received was better than I could have imagined. From English cosy mysteries to urban monsters, from Victorian mathematicians to contemporary lawyers, from near future police procedurals to outback ghost stories, and more, this book, I guarantee, will surprise you. And it’ll scare you and entertain you.
I hope you have as much fun reading it as I had pulling it together. But all credit goes to the authors, who made the task simple. They are amazing. Thank you to each and every one of you who wrote for this book, and thank you to each all of you now reading it. I hope you enjoy these Damnation Games.

Alan Baxter NSW August 2022


A Bitter Yellow Sea
Geneve Flynn
‘Lucky your gong gong died so many years ago,’ Goh Min Lei’s grandmother said as she rearranged the oranges in front of her husband’s urn. She sighed as she straightened. ‘Too bad I won’t have such dignity when I pass on.’
Min Lei surreptitiously checked her phone. Hunar, her colleague from the police technology department, had sent an alert about the fifth missing child. Nothing had come through yet. ‘You know the UN emissions tax is too high, Poh Poh.’ They had had this conversation many times. But until Singapore lifted its ban on cremation, her grandmother, Ah Lam, would have to accept a government-sanctioned burial in Jurong Island Memorial Park, the now-defunct petrochemical processing plant off the coast. Min Lei peeked at her screen again.
‘Go on.’ Ah Lam flapped her hand. ‘I know you want to get back to work.’
Min Lei’s phone vibrated in her pocket and she gave her grandmother a gentle hug. ‘I’ll come by again tomorrow. I’ll bring you some congee from Market Street.’
‘Go. Go.’ Ah Lam turned and shuffled towards her recliner, leaving Min Lei to let herself out.
As the lift travelled down to ground level, Min Lei tapped on the notification. The link that popped up showed an online auction for a Just Like Me Doll, a wildly popular fad that allowed kids to have a plaything created to look just like themselves. A cold current raced down her back. The doll in the listing had a pointed chin, a dimple on the left cheek, small, single-lidded eyes, and a page boy haircut: exactly like April Teo, the missing seven-year-old. She’d suspected the cases were linked to a possible trafficking operation and had asked Hunar to search for anything that looked like a call to possible buyers.
Min Lei tapped on the details of the listing. An address and a name: Solomon Chow.
The apartment smelled like goat. It was mid-level in the Breakwater Tenements, only two floors away from the artificial community green space in the atrium courtyard below. Min Lei thought of Solomon Chow watching from the shadows as children played on the Astroturf.
‘The doll is almost new,’ he said, holding it up reverently. ‘Do you have a daughter?’ He grinned and bobbed his head. He had a round, nondescript face: one you might pass every day on the street and forget as soon as you saw him. His thick arms and barr