John Langan, author of the Bram Stoker Award-winning novel The Fisherman, returns with a new book of stories.An aspiring actress goes to an audition with a mysterious director. An editor receives the last manuscript of his murdered friend. A young lawyer learns the terrible connection between her grandfather and an ancient race of creatures. A bodyguard drives her employer across a frozen road … frozen road toward an immense hole in the earth. In these stories and others, John Langan maps the branches of his literary family tree, tracing his connections to the writers whose dark fictions have inspired his own.
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Children of the Fang and Other Genealogies, John Langan’s fourth collection, comprises twenty-one short stories thematically bound by the author’s influences and responses to other writers, particularly given that several of the shorts reproduced here were originally written for homage anthologies to the likes of Robert W. Chambers and Thomas Ligotti or were written with a particular author (and even a few film directors, like David Lynch and Dario Argento) in mind who acted as a compass and inspiration. These twenty-one works reach far afield, genre-wise, and while the majority of them do sit comfortably within Langan’s usual brand of horror, there are also a few sci-fi and fantasy pieces, and even one historical entry set in the day of the Roman Legionnaires.
Langan throws readers right into the deep end with “Sweetums,” a trippy story written for Joseph Pulver’s Chambers anthology. Fans of Lynch’s filmography will be able to recognize the director’s imprint on this story immediately, certainly well before Langan confirms it for us in the extensive story notes included at book’s end (I’m a sucker for story notes like these and always find it a joy to see what the author has to say about their work and their approach to the material). Set during a film production, “Sweetums” is by turns confusing and surreal, but also intricate and subtle, and the end is a clever whopper that fits well with one of Chambers’s most famous creations.
“Hyphae” is another clever winner that begins with an estranged son making a wellness visit to check on his father… but what the heck is that smell, and where, exactly, is it coming from? Langan credits Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King with being his primary influences here and comes through cleanly in the mounting, creeping dread the author induces, while “Into the Darkness, Fearlessly,” is very clearly and openly Ligottian (I might even add John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness to the list of inspirations here). It also has one of the best openers of the bunch with its marvelous hook: “The morning after the police found the final piece of Linus Price…”
While I enjoyed virtually the entire collection as a whole, the real treats for me were those brief diversions where Langan was able to really have fun and let his humor shine – and make a few friendly jabs at his fellow authors. “Muse,” for instance, is a super enjoyable bit of metafiction (…or is it?) that recounts Langan’s discovery of the secret behind Stephen Graham Jones’s talents, and it’s a wonderful bit of ribbing (especially given Jones’s wonderful introduction to this collection!). It also explains a hell of a lot about Jones’s own potency as a storyteller! The last story here, “Slippage,” centers around Langan and Laird Barron transporting a movie prop from the latter’s film adaptation of “-30-” (filmed as They Remain), and taking one heck of a detour.
“Episode Three: On the Great Plains, In the Snow” is another entertaining piece that sees Langan at his most whimsical, tossing in cowboys and Indians and race cars and dinosaurs. “Ymir” is a fascinating bit of arctic horror, and given my predilections toward snowy terror this one was an easy favorite for me, even beyond its neat mythology.
“Inundation” and “To See, To Be Seen” were another pair of A+ endeavors. The former takes place on a flooding Earth, and is suitably apocalyptic with its just-barely-glimpsed horrors from the beyond. (Langan again credits King as being his central inspiration here, but no doubt fans of Brian Keene’s Earthworm Gods and J.F. Gonzalez’s Clickers will find this quite an absorbing read, as well). “To See, To Be Seen” — this story is absolutely perfect, and the supernatural elements are integrated and layered in fantastic and fascinating ways. The story itself is built off a hidden society of the Friends of Borges, and a secret world that I am absolutely dying to learn more about. I desperately need more stories about the Gullet and the work of this secretive organization.
Fans of Langan’s work will find much to appreciate in Children of the Fang and Other Genealogies, including the titular short story which revolves around a brother and sister trying to figure out the secrets their grandfather keeps and what mysteries he has locked away in the basement freezer. Langan’s horror is deft and intelligent, occasionally even obscure in the ways really potent cosmic horrors should be, and this book presents more than twenty fine examples of such, each of which point toward larger bodies of work that have helped shape and inspire Langan’s own creative sparks. The story notes are certain to provide plenty of inspiration for further reading, too.
I think the best way to start this is with a comment I made on Twitter a couple weeks ago- I’ve never read a book so inhabited by worlds. Almost every single story made me want more time with them, more time in those settings, and more time with these characters. I’ve never read world-building like this before and it blew me away. And not just one world, but over 20 of them, some with ancient histories that go back and some that go beyond.
This collection is mostly comprised of stories Langan wrote for anthologies that were dedicated to particular authors and some of the fun in reading this for me was seeing if I could detect the influence of that author. They influenced Langan in one way or another, and therefore became part of his writing, part of his genealogy (hence the title). It’s a really unique way to unify these stories without there being any actual connections between them. The Story Notes actually provide great insight on the influences for the stories and I found myself flipping to the back after each one to see what I could learn about whichever guiding star (his words) led him to write what I’d read. I think I only guessed one right, but it was still fun!
If I have to pick three favorites (and this is hard):
1. With Max Berry In The Nearer Precincts – a story about the light at the end of the tunnel (or is it?)
2. Children of the Fang – a story about a family but also about an entire race and culture of…something else
3. Episode Three: On The Great Plains, In The Snow – a ghost story, but not like any you’ve read before
And what range! There are stories that happen in the afterlife, stories about ghosts, about beasts, about other dimensions…there’s a little (or a lot) here for everyone. Some of it is terrifying, but personally, I was more often filled with wonder and awe at the worlds he constructed. It took me a long time for me to finish this because I wanted to savor each story. Should you decide to embark on these journeys (and you really really should), don’t rush because the details in these stories are worth appreciating.