From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Burke (
Quietly Now) offers an intoxicating blend of original and reprint fiction in an anthology with an all-star cast of contributors who know that the damnedest stories come out in bar settings, where inhibitions are low and emotions run the gamut from hilarity to despair. An Irish pub whose air is supernaturally tainted by the political hatreds of its patrons infects musicians who gig there with the will to kill in Chet Williamson's "The Smoke in Mooney's Pub." Paranoia runs deep in Ramsey Campbell's "The Winner," where a wanderer who makes his way into a local watering hole misinterprets the customs of the locals and finds cryptic bar talk leading him to a dismal fate. In Gary Braunbeck's haunting "The King of Rotten Wood," a tavern is just a convenient locale where the dead lecture the living about the proper way to remember them. There are stories to suit just about every taste here, ranging from the comic Lovecraftian inflections of Neil Gaiman's "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar" to the light dark fantasy of Charles L. Grant's "Friday Night at the Wicked Swan." There's even a spectacularly choreographed barroom brawl in Norman Partridge's "Buckets of Blood," a straight-no-chaser shot of dark suspense. Horror readers who appreciate both vintage and nouveau will find this book well stocked and well worth tapping.
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