For most of my life, I’ve been the kind of reader who skims the back of a horror novel, thinks its premise sounds fascinating, but ultimately chickens out before cracking it open. Growing up as a sensitive kid with a vivid imagination and a severe case of evangelical rapture anxiety, I wasn’t exactly a prime candidate to become a horror convert in adulthood. But after hearing enough bookish people rave about horror’s ability to explore real-life fears from the safe distance of fiction, I’ve recently been dipping my toes into the genre.
Whether you’re a horror-curious reader like me or a seasoned fan, the new collection Red Line: Chicago Horror Stories serves up a smorgasbord of styles, themes, and perspectives that will satisfy a range of tastes. Edited by Michael W. Phillips Jr., these stories delve into spooky Chicago history and painful aspects of modern urban life, employing a range of supernatural and speculative elements while maintaining a strong sense of place.
Red Line: Chicago Horror Stories edited by Michael W. Phillips Jr.
From Beyond Press, paperback, 246 pp., $13.99, frombeyondpress.com/product/red-line-chicago-horror-stories
Red Line: Chicago Horror Stories release party8/27, 6 PM, Comfort Station, 2579 N. Milwaukee, comfortstationlogansquare.org, free
The anthology features 19 Chicago-area writers of diverse ages, genders, and ethnicities, from established authors such as Cynthia Pelayo, the first Latina to win a Bram Stoker Award, to newer voices like R.L. Gehringer, a septuagenarian and former cab driver who took up writing in retirement. Under the umbrella of horror, the collection’s eclectic subgenres include science fiction (“The River’s Revenge” by Jen Mierisch), ghost stories (“The Last Graveyard Shift at the Englewood Branch” by Tara Betts), and cosmic battles (“Li’l Flubber” by Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.).
Pelayo opens the book with “Saint Maker,” an atmospheric tour of Chicago’s graveyards that introduces many of the ghosts, saints, sinners, and devils who “haunt our bloodlines.” “Chicago is heaven and hell. We are above and we are below. . . . There’s a thread of viciousness that runs through our parts, yet there’s a glimmer of holiness to it too,” Pelayo writes.
This deep sense of local history continues through several other early selections, including Sandra Jackson-Opoku’s “Lucky Charms,” a time-travel tale featuring the young daughter of Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, the Black man known as the first non-Native settler and founder of Chicago, and his Potawatomi wife, Kitihawa. In the epistolary “Notes from the Dunning Asylum,” Aleco Julius imagines a sinister case of mistaken identity set in a notorious mental institution, evoking the psychological fascination of gothic classics such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White.
In addition to its enticing offerings for history buffs, this collection excels in its treatment of contemporary terrors, especially those faced by vulnerable populations. Nick Medina’s “A Good Kid” captures the dreadful sense of inevitability surrounding gun violence for many of the city’s youth, taking a moving, personal approach to an issue that is often sensationalized in news coverage. In “Just Another Friday Night in Bucktown,” Lauren Emily Whalen spins a gritty revenge tale about femme, nonbinary, and queer burlesque performers taking back their agency after years of harassment and exploitation. Child sexual abuse, suicide, police brutality, and elder abuse feature in other stories, as noted in the content warnings at the end of the book.
Collectively, Red Line’s contributors create a thrilling mosaic of Chicago—past, present, and future—in all its complex, terrifying beauty. From golden hour on an el platform to the labyrinthine depths of Wacker Drive, familiar settings become unforgettably uncanny in these writers’ hands. And for the record: this scaredy-cat’s to-be-read list now includes several novels by authors that I first read here.
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