SMILE SO RED AND OTHER TALES OF MADNESS

Dalia pushes her characters to terrifying extremes in this horror collection.

In this set of disquieting tales, it doesn’t take much to turn a normal person into something monstrous. In the title story, a man loses his job, and instead of telling his wife, he just starts going on long walks in a nearby wood. There, he discovers an abandoned house littered with graffiti, along with a pentagram and the corpse of an animal that appears to have been sacrificed. When his job search comes up short, he discovers he’s desperate enough to try making a sacrifice of his own. In another story, a boy is convinced that a man on his paper route is responsible for the recent disappearances of local girls…until he is forced to consider the real killer might be someone closer to home. A third story tracks a bullied young bookworm and a new father pushed to his limits—their lives converge by way of an old handgun hidden in a hollow stump in the park. Both have reasons to use it, but what would happen if they did? (“Maybe he’d leave it there, in the stump,” thinks the bullied boy. “Maybe just knowing it was there, should he ever need it, was enough.”) In “The Trunk,” an immigrant who long ago escaped from a warzone discovers an old trunk in the basement of his newly purchased home—and in that trunk, a seemingly mummified dead body. Across these eight stories, the author walks her characters right up to the point of the inconceivable, challenging them to make sense of the world’s underlying darkness. Dalia’s premises and prose possess an imaginative directness reminiscent of Stephen King’s work. “Sometimes you could see them coming and get a chance to steel yourself in preparation,” she writes of life’s pivotal moments. “Sometimes—usually, in Bogdan’s experience—they snuck up on you, like a clown in a haunted house attraction.” Horror fans will find much here to gasp and squirm over—in a good way.

A delightfully dark collection of horror stories.