2007, Crowswing Books

Horror can sometimes be labeled the genre of tragedy, filled as it is with stories about terrible things happening to good people. (Of course, there are also plenty of horror stories that feature terrible things happening to bad people, but those are less about tragedy than they are about comeuppance.) Author Michael Kelly mines a deep vein of tragedy for the stories in his first collection, Scratching the Surface. Almost too deep a vein.

Loss features prominently in each of the collection's 26 stories, of which 9 are previously unpublished: frequently it's the loss of a child, but in some stories it's the loss of a spouse, a friend, or a sibling. All of Kelly's protagonists share a sort of survivor's guilt and have become so overwhelmed with grief and regret as to become deranged. It's such a relentlessly recurring motif that one is left both emotionally drained by the end and wishing Kelly had turned his considerable talents to a few other emotions as well.

In "The Music of Broken Things", a father grieving for his dead little boy keeps hearing the sound of his son's toy piano and seeing a pale, shimmering face in the window at night. In "Sea of Ash and Sorrow", a man leaves New York City after the events of 9/11 and is drawn back to Montauk by memories of a childhood sweetheart who perished at sea, only to find her still waiting for him beneath the waves. In "The Man Who Ate Moths", protagonist Marc is so unhinged by the murder of his little sister Cyndy decades ago, strangled when she was just a child, that he ritualistically hangs himself every day, releasing the knot before he loses consciousness, just so he can feel connected to her by experiencing what she went through. In "When Children Weep", a man takes his son on vacation to help the boy forget the loss of his mother and winds up in an Innsmouth-like seaside town. In "Worse Things" the death of a friend turns a young boy into an emotionless sociopath. And in what this reviewer considers the collection's best offering, "The Smell of Chaos is Written in its Hues", the motivating loss comes not from death but from a simple high school rejection, which, although it strains the reader's credulity because it's such a mundane occurrence, affects the artist K.J. Carter so strongly that his paintings of chaos and tragedy take on a supernatural quality.

Kelly's prose is smooth and evocative - his descriptions of gray, rainy cities and grimy apartments are memorably vivid - though at times his writing is subject to the overstatement one finds in many newer authors' works, such as this excerpt from the story "Summer Ghosts":

My first ghost. My first real memory. Because that's all memories are, really. Ghosts. And that's all that I have left to me. Memories and ghosts.

While it speaks highly of Kelly as a writer that he can provoke emotional reactions in his readers, so many stories focusing on grief and loss can add up to a taxing reading experience. Still, in a genre where emotion is too often neglected in favor of graphic violence or sensationalism, Kelly shows a lot of promise. He's a writer to watch, and this reviewer has no doubt his next collection will be a standout.