Psychological horror dominates the dark fiction of Tesseracts 13

Published at 10:44 pm on February 9, 2010
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Stephen Humphrey
Stephen Humphrey is a freelance writer and journalist who has lived in Toronto since 1994...

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What scares Canadian writers?

According to horror writer and critic Robert Knowlton, it’s wide-open spaces.

“Searching for Canadian dark fantasy is akin to peering into a dark wood,” he writes. “The foreground is densely foliated, but the background recedes into darkness.”

Knowlton’s essay, titled “Out of the Barrens: Two Centuries of Canadian Dark Fantasy and Horror” follows 23 “chilling tales from the great white north” which comprise Tesseracts 13. Calgary publisher Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing chose a darker direction this time for the influential sci fi anthology’s latest installment, in homage to the number 13’s sinister reputation.

The stories, submitted from nearly every province, suggest there is more to the national psyche than tall trees and weather. They don’t so much make the landscape the character, as the familiar CanLit trope goes, as they make characters the characters. The supernatural and suspense add nuance to personality studies. They’re not simply special effects.

Nancy Kilpatrick, one of the T13’s editors, is well-known for vampire and horror fiction that sells to American markets. The above distinction is not lost on her.

“Canadians write with a real depth of character,” she says. “You get the feeling of these people being real even if it’s a fabulation, mythology or something like that.”

For example, the ghost of a troubled teen in “The Weak Son” by Ottawa writer Matthew Moore is not a room-wrecking poltergeist, but a window on emotions and secrets of his family. The threats of real violence in the present and possible crime in the past drive the story, but its payoff is in small discoveries, not bleeding walls and butcher knives.

Co-editor David Morrell is best known for the novel First Blood, which inspired the Rambo movie franchise, but he has written his share of horror fiction. He believes the field’s reputation suffers from an overage of schlock-and-awe monster and slasher fare.

“I think this is how horror got a bad name in the 90s, is because they relied strictly on plot and shock,” he says. “For me horror is mood, it’s atmosphere and fear. Those are the two things that attract me to it.”

Morell points to “The Tear Closet”, by Kitchener author Suzanne Church, as good psychological writing. In that poetic and heartbreaking tale supernatural activity pales against horrors wrought by the living.

Like Church, Morrell was raised in Kitchener-Waterloo. He moved to the U.S. in 1966 to further study his favourite author Ernest Hemmingway.

“In those days, it was easier take a course in American literature than you could in Canadian literature,” he explains.

The tables had turned by 1970, however. Canadian universities, steeped in newfound nationalism, were indifferent to his specialty. He earned his PhD and academic postings in the States, where he still lives.

“I got trapped in a kind of historical shift,” he says.

Kilpatrick, based in Montreal, knew Morrell through trade events like the World Horror Convention. She eventually approached Morrell to co-edit Tesseracts 13.

“She and I talked about it and basically she said hey, you know, you were raised here, maybe it would be fun for you to sort of tip your hat in that direction again and be a Canadian for a while,” Morrell says. “I liked that idea.”

Morrell and Kilpatrick’s selections have plenty of ghosts, but are strikingly short of monsters. Considering Kilpatrick’s output, the lack of vampire content is surprising. She says it wasn’t for lack of submissions – there were several – or quality.

“I thought they were good enough, but they weren’t going to fit,” she explains. “It would have changed the whole tone.”

The book’s overall tone emanated partly from Morrell’s attachment to fiction that was, in his own words, “sort of psychologically dark and disturbing along the lines of, say, the Silence of the Lambs.”

Vampires will have their day, however. During the editing process Kilpatrick took a comment of Morrell’s to heart: that there were enough vampire tales start another anthology. She approached Edge to do precisely that. The imprint will release Evolve, an anthology of vampire fiction, edited by Kilpatrick, this spring. The title Evolve suggests that vampires, victims to fictional typecasting over the years, must grow and change to stay relevant.

Morrell says much the same about horror fiction in general.

“Like any other genre it should evolve and grow,” he says. “What we were seeing in [Tesseracts 13] was a sense of reality. But no matter what, the feeling was that these were real people to whom a real thing was happening.”