Havoc After Dark: Tales of Terror - Softcover

Fleming, Robert

3.6

35 ratings by Goodreads

9780758205759: Havoc After Dark: Tales of Terror

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0758205759 ISBN 13: 9780758205759

Publisher: Dafina, 2004

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From Spanish Harlem to a Caribbean isle shadowed by a haunted voodoo moon, this powerful collection of short stories cleverly partners traditional horror with political and sociological terror, vividly depicting a dark realm of serial killers, satanic traditions, black magic rituals, Nazi torture, and slavery. Original. 20,000 first printing.

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About the Author:

Robert Fleming has written for Essence, Black Enterprise, The Source, and The New York Times, among others. A former award-winning reporter for the New York Daily News, he is the author of The African American Writer's Handbook and The Wisdom of the Elders. His work was featured in Brown Sugar and he was the editor of After Hours (both from Plume).

From Publishers Weekly:

In "Arbeit Macht Frei," the best story in this first collection of short horror fiction, a revelatory moment comes when a black WWII GI compares the atrocities of racial prejudice experienced by blacks in America with those known to survivors from the Auschwitz concentration camp: "I couldn't figure which was worse: the actions of these Nazis killing people in bulk or the lynchings of these cracker white folk still fighting the Civil War." The tacit suggestion that horror is a fiction of victimization that cuts across ethnic boundaries is evident in these 14 tales, whose characters wrestle with issues of racial identity but find themselves confronting horrors that are mostly colorblind. In "The Ultimate Bad Luck," a black man cornered in a bayou by a redneck lynch mob is saved magically by a good deed done in childhood to overlooked residents of the swamp. "Punish the Young Seed of Satan" features an inner-city youth whose grim fate in the criminal justice system is less a horror story than a critique of parental irresponsibility and negligence. Fleming's enthusiasm and passion is evident in the themes and flashy details of his stories. Less obvious is the influence of "Poe, Lovecraft, Hawthorne, Bierce, and Collier," whom he cites in his introduction as his teenage reading. Several of the stories are awkward in their construction, and their turn into horror seems largely an afterthought. Many feature coarse stereotypes that thwart sympathy for their characters. Readers may find much room for improvement here.
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