 ‘The Hidden Track’ provides the collection’s most irrefutable proof of Woodworth’s status as a gifted creator of immersive, believable new realities. Stephen Woodworth has been at it for decades, penning novels and short stories for the US horror market for nearly thirty years. I’m not quite sure how I managed to remain unaware of his existence all this time, but his new collection A Carnival of Chimeras is here to fix that problem. Woodworth, it turns out, arrived on the horror scene in 1992 with a bang, winning the Writers of the Future contest for his long story ‘Scary Monsters’. Even before I found this out I was already very taken with this story, which is even more impressive when you consider that it was his publishing debut. In it, a young man embarks on a relationship with a work colleague who turns out to be suffering from agoraphobia. Despite the taunts of his oafish co-workers and his own misgivings he persists with the budding romance, only to discover that the fears that force the object of his affections to hide in confined spaces are anything but imaginary. I like to see stories that deal with trauma and mental illness (and the heroine does seem to be mentally ill, even though the origin of her fears is real) in an intelligent and sympathetic way, and this definitely falls into that category. It also succeeds in being original and very dark but at the same time offering a message of hope, and both the main characters are well-realized. It’s aged very well – the casual reader may feel that the attitudes of both the hero and his awful workmates are a bit old-fashioned, and that people are more accepting of mental illness now, but as a recovering agoraphobic myself, I’m pleased to inform you that they aren’t. Woodworth, it turns out, specializes in stories about illness, disability and abnormal perception. Some of the best material in the book belongs to this category. ‘In the City of Sharp Edges’ stars a blind guy who is driven to desperation by a series of nightmares about a weird urban sprawl populated by threatening entities. Much is written nowadays about the need for writers to watch their step when creating characters belonging to a social minority of which they themselves are not part (I’m assuming Woodworth is able-bodied here), with some authors now preferring to avoid “going outside their lane” altogether. However, I think this story is definitely one to stack on the ‘For’ side of the argument about whether able-bodied writers should tackle subjects like disability. It’s interesting, original and very absorbing to the extent that, by the time you’ve finished the story and look up from the page, you actually have to take a second or to remember that you can see. Elsewhere, ‘The Colourless People’ deals with a young woman who can see auras in the manner of a Kirlian camera, and an even stranger physical peculiarity is showcased in ‘Her’, a good solid piece of body horror about gender identity, traditional masculinity and the revulsion with which certain men contemplate their ‘feminine side’. Appalling and touching by turns, this has a lot more emotional impact and realism than a lot of allegorical horror. Sadly, the collection’s numerous other allegorical stories fail to hit this high note. Most of these now seem dated, given how this type of story – short, high on concept and low on characterization – has fallen from favour since the 90s. And when Woodworth tries to pad out his philosophical and political points into longer-form tales, it tends to leave an unpleasant taste in the mouth, as with ‘The Olverung’, a stab at the European 19th century conte cruel that offers a blend of heavy-handed allegory and good old-fashioned zoosadism that I personally found quite unpalatable (I hate horror stories that are really about the Agony of Creation almost as much as the animal cruelty stuff.) However, though a few of Woodworth’s ideas may have lost their shine over the years, the long period of time covered by this collection, combined with the author’s obvious commitment to originality, does ensure that the book is free from a number of story types that have been saturating the market lately. There is a refreshing absence of folk horror stories, nothing about the end of the world, and no feminist retellings of fairy tales (though Woodworth certainly has an interest in feminism, if ‘Her’ and the convincing serial killer piece ‘Mr Casey Has Left The Building’ are any indication.) Lovers of the bizarre should also get a bewildered laugh out of ‘The Silent Majority’, an extremely affectionate portrayal of a zombie Richard Nixon. The one modern trend that Woodworth’s collection does cater to is cosmic horror, though ‘In The City…’ aside, these haven’t really stood the test of time, even though stories like ‘The Revival’ and ‘Street Runes’ admittedly feel more TED Klein than HP Lovecraft. The former story is just too thin, and ‘Street Runes’ has an interesting basic premise but doesn’t really fulfil it. A teacher in an inner-city school has to stop one of her more promising students becoming drawn into an odd cult, which initially manifests in the form of enigmatic graffiti scribbles but has more wide-reaching ambitions in the long term…The embattled teacher vs. ‘rough diamond’ pupil dynamic feels very Dangerous Minds and the characterization isn’t good enough to help out the predictable plot. Though of course, it doesn’t help that in recent years the theme of language as an active, contagious agent of evil has been explored very thoroughly by modern writers. This story may well have felt much fresher when it came out. Sadly, there’s no such get-out clause for ‘Voodoo’. This is your average occult story set in New Orleans, but it suffers from the way it trades very heavily on the use of French, which the author doesn’t speak well enough for the purpose. As far as I can tell British and American horror authors never, EVER get their French right, and proper human translators (as opposed to the inept computer algorithms I suspect are behind this fiasco) are too expensive for your average starving author/small-press publisher anyway, so I normally wouldn’t bother to remark on this kind of thing. But this story not only features too many chunks of dodgy French in order to lend its Francophone narrator veracity, its whole plot hinges on a French pun on the word ‘Voodoo’, and the pun itself doesn’t hold up half as well the author thinks it does. None of this is a good look for Woodworth, given how much of ‘Street Runes’ he spends bemoaning the loss of literacy and education standards in society. However, where A Carnival of Chimeras does well is in its thematic diversity, and as I’ve said, many of the stories have the power to stimulate even a jaded palate. It also contains one tale that is pretty much unmissable for lovers of weird fiction, ‘The Hidden Track’. This terrific offering combines three of my favourite things: weird old records, (hence the ‘track’ of the title), Victorian séance photography and geometrical figures that make you feel a bit ill. The plot, meanwhile, concerns an audio expert and a dodgy physicist, who investigate an old wax cylinder recording of a group of occultists’ attempts to summon beings from another dimension, with suitably disturbing results. A very original and deeply unsettling story with the ability to make the fabric of reality around us seem very thin indeed, ‘The Hidden Track’ provides the collection’s most irrefutable proof of Woodworth’s status as a gifted creator of immersive, believable new realities. Review by Daisy Lyle  Over the past two decades, Stephen Woodworth has established himself as one of the leading writers of weird fiction in our time. His short stories have appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and many anthologies. In this volume, his first short story collection, Woodworth demonstrates his mastery of a diverse array of themes and motifs and his power to evoke terror and weirdness with skill and panache. Woodworth’s tales range widely in setting and subject-matter, from “Voodoo” (which summons up terrors in New Orleans) to “Street Runes” (set in Woodworth’s native Southern California) to the dream-world of “In the City of Sharp Edges.” A distinctive sort of zombie is found in “The Silent Majority,” while “Serial Killers” and “Scary Monsters” find terror in other familiar tropes of weird fiction. “Voodoo,” “Revival” and “A Tour of the Catacombs” evoke Lovecraftian terror at their most chilling. Throughout his tales, Woodworth displays a humanity that portrays his troubled and disturbed characters with sympathy and psychological depth as they wander through a world whose terrors are both real and fantastic.   Comments are closed.
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