The Cutting Room

Starred review from August 25, 2014
Superstar editor Datlow makes no missteps in this reprint collection of dark tales involving movies and moviemaking. The one original piece, Stephen Graham Jones’s “Tenderizer,” is a haunting exploration of tragedy on both a personal and national level. A.C. Wise’s “Final Girl Theory,” about a cult film that’s an “infection, whispered from mouth to mouth in the dark,” is disturbing and gory without fetishizing its horrors. Kim Newman’s brilliant “Illimitable Dominion” tells an alternate history of Edgar Allen Poe, Roger Corman, and American International Pictures that’s particularly suited to film buffs who will probably spot the (initially) subtle changes to the time line. Film critic and author Genevieve Valentine provides both an entertaining story (“She Drives the Men to Crimes of Passion!”) and an enlightening introduction, while even Douglas E. Winter’s “Bright Lights, Big Zombie”—the literary target of which has long faded—still holds up reasonably well. Strong stories by Gary McMahon and Gary A. Braunbeck, as well as poems by Lucy A. Snyder and Daphne Gottlieb, are also worth noting, but really, the entire volume is outstanding.

October 15, 2014

This anthology's subtitle is apt, as the 21 stories and two poems collected here all look at the dark side of movies. From the gruesome legends of snuff films depicting real-life on-screen deaths to sad tales of Hollywood strivers looking for their big break, most of the selections skirt the borders of dark fantasy and horror. Among the best tales are F. Paul Wilson's "Cuts," a creepy account of a vengeful screenwriter's inventive torture of the director who mangled his script; "Final Girl Theory" by A.C. Wise, about an obsessive fan's encounter with the star of a cult film; and Genevieve Valentine's "She Drives the Men to Crimes of Passion" involving a director and the actress he discovers. VERDICT World-class editor and anthologist Datlow (Snow White, Blood Red; The Best Horror of the Year) has picked a marvelous theme for this volume. While not every story is a hit, many of the pieces make it worth the price of admission.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.