A couple of quick mentions before I get into the thing that will take up the majority of this column.

The first, a movie, is the horror-adjacent film Dangerous Animals, in which a surfer chick finds herself the captive of an Australian shark-tour captain whose particular kink is chumming the waters and taking videos of his victims being eaten by the fishies. Great art it is not, but neither is it the rancid little fourth-generation Jaws knockoff you might very well mistake it to be; it is the tale of his latest target, surfer chick Zephyr (the terrific Hassie Harrison), who is brave and resourceful and will not go gently into that dark night. I report that she makes the killer, Tucker (Jai Courtney), suffer for his designs on her, and also that, in one beautiful frisson, a great white does the one thing fifty years of movies have conditioned us from ever suspecting a great white would ever do—but which is actually the stone truth about the species. It is a terrific thrill machine that should be on streaming by the time you see this.

The novel The Work of Vermin by Hiron Ennes (Tor, $28.99) is a dark fantasy set in one of the grittiest created worlds we have seen since Mieville’s Bas-Lag, a city carved into the roots of a giant tree, where people exist in uneasy competition with nasty insects, disgusting monsters, a vicious justice system, and a thoroughly corrupt economy. This is not one of those fantasies whose readers sigh that they would like to visit it for a while, and that is saying a lot, because I have caught people wistful for, I swear to God, Westeros. Ennis is a dense and deeply sensory prosesmith, empathetic toward his people but not gentle toward them.

A Poet of Darkness

For many decades, the field of horror and suspense was blessed to have a prolific short story writer by the name of Edward Bryant, who long before his demise went silent, for reasons that included career-length struggles with writer’s block and failing health that sidelined him for quite some time. I knew the man slightly, which was similar to knowing the man well, in that doing so meant being at the receiving end of his warmth and good humor, something that made him beloved on the convention circuit. In his entire career, he wrote only one book-length work, Phoenix Without Ashes, a novelization and expansion of his pal Harlan Ellison’s award-winning teleplay for the pilot episode of a Canadian TV series that (I recall from viewings fifty years in the past) showed glimmers of the genius Harlan brought to the project, but which the producers interfered with and harassed and lowballed until it became (I also remember) stupid and lifeless, a thin ghost of what it deserved to be. Bryant’s novel, which represented about two-thirds his expansion of an hour-length teleplay, was terrific, a heartbreaking visit to the cultural touchstone the show could and should have been. But beyond that he was a short story guy, gradually migrating from science fiction to horror, where he then stayed for as long as he remained active.

The Complete Works of Edward Bryant, Volume One: On the Road to Cinnabar
Edward Bryant
Hardcover
ISBN: 9783558635740
Belanger Books, August 2025, 510 pages.

Now Belanger Books is bringing out a multi-volume compilation of Bryant’s works under the reasonable umbrella title of The Complete Works of Edward Bryant, of which two volumes came out in 2025. The first two are subtitled On the Road to Cinnabar and Dark Angels ($50.00 per hardcover, $25.00 paperback, with a more expensive edition planned). Two more volumes should be available by the time this sees print.

There is more to be savored in these pages than can possibly be covered in the few hundred words available to me, including some of the ancillary material Bryant wrote to accompany his fictions, and, in volume one, an entire section devoted to things he wrote about his friendship with Harlan and their collaboration on Phoenix. But with my available space waning I focus on some of the horror, centered on volume two and the as-yet unseen four. The stories include “Buggage,” about a man wandering America on foot who finds himself infested by an intelligent ant colony that actually makes his life better—for a while; “Mr. Twisted,” a deceptively light tale about a man beaten nearly to death by local thugs, who, as he recovers, proves capable of a very nasty and uncanny revenge; and “Dying is Easy, COMEDY is Hard,” written in collaboration with Dan Simmons, a Batman vs. Joker story in which the caped crusader’s survival, and the survival of many struggling comedians, depends entirely on the dark knight developing the one skill that appears beyond him, being funny. Those who know the character may be surprised to find out that he is not automatically doomed.

There are many such stories, all good, but the one theme that seems to unify many of Bryant’s best is a deep concern with the plight of women confronted by testosterone-fueled malice. This is not the same thing as a compilation of atrocities committed against ladies by inventive serial killers, gleefully reported by the author. A lot of horror sometimes devolves to that, and I agree that it can be a slippery slope. Bryant was different, in that he wanted to examine it. Thus, we have his “A Sad Last Love at the Diner of the Damned,” the saga of a small-town waitress for whom the zombie apocalypse appears only slightly worse than the sexual harassment she endures from local men who believe increasingly more aggressive threats will finally render her sexually available to them; and “Doing Colfax,” about a group of predators whose murderous intentions toward a young hitchhiker is examined with a wholly unflinching eye, and closes on a note about as infuriating as the killing itself.

Then there’s Bryant’s probably best-known story, “While She Was Out,” the twice-filmed tale of a young mother and unhappy wife whose night-time trip to the mall is interrupted by a human wolf pack intent on rape and murder. What the two film versions—one a Lifetime movie unseen by me and one an indie starring Kim Basinger, that I have seen and which I felt deeply disappointed by despite a close fidelity to the beats of Bryant’s story, marred only by a much stupider ending—reportedly have in common is that they feel rote, just the latest additions to the cinema of women in jeopardy, and the major problem is that Bryant’s voice is not present. The story is actually about a woman’s desperation and rage, fueling a fight for survival that has its own deep body count, even as she relates much of what’s happening to the blathering condescension of her oafish husband. The story is not about fighting those predators to the death. It is about what she has been enduring closer to home every day.

Finally, there’s “Human Remains,” about a group of women meeting for lunch prior to a gathering of others who have all survived the same serial killer. Though he has a different name, internal evidence suggests that Bryant is “really” talking about the prolific Ted Bundy, and what needs to be said is that their digressive conversation, like so much Bryant dialogue, follows the beats of the way people talk, while circling back to the subject that lies between them. At one point the women are accosted by an angry diner at another table, who thinks a digression about male strippers marks them as disgusting. It needs to be noted: A lesser writer who lays out his stories in a straight line, and a reader who thinks they must, might consider this incident extraneous, distracting. Bryant was smart enough to know that it was central, another manifestation of aggression toward them, lesser but of a kind with what’s been endured. It is an additional epiphany.

These volumes will remain on my bookshelf for the rest of my life, just as Edward Bryant will continue to occupy my gray matter for as long as I live.

Boy, do I miss him, the stories and the man.