Tesseracts Thirteen: Chilling Tales of the Great White North

Canadian horror writers shine in these twenty-three chilly, subtle and hard-hitting tales from the Great White North. Award-winning authors turned editors Nancy Kilpatrick and David Morrell have assembled a diverse feast of stories exploring the particular-and peculiar-psychology of Canada. Including everything from the icy tundra and the wendigo who populate it in Michael Kelly's quietly terrifying ""The Woods,"" to the terror of ice with a mind of its own in Alison Baird's haunting ""End in Ice."" The strongest story of the collection uniquely diverges from the dominant culture; in Jill Snider Lum's ""A Patch of Bamboo,"" a foreigner encounter with a Japanese ghost. Jen-Louis Trudel in ""The Night Before the Storm"" similarly zeros in on a haunted Syrian town on the night before it falls in a Christian invasion. While the stories sometimes feel a little thematically and stylistically similar and some suffer from vague endings, this installment of the Tesseracts series is overall strong, and essential reading for anyone interested in the status of Canadian genre writing. The book also includes an informative-at times tedious-essay by Robert Knowlton on the history of Canadian horror and dark fantasy.