Wrong Things

Poppy Z. Brite &
Caitlin R. Kiernan

The title of this small collection seems rather redundant, really. Readers of the books of either of these authors should know well by now that nothing, in the world of either, is ever right, per se.

Wrong Things collects three long stories; one each from the two ladies, and a third that is a collaboration between them. The collaboration was originally supposed to be in Kiernan's From Weird and Distant Shores; at a guess, no one who reads the afterword in that book will be able to resist traking this down and reading “The Rest of the Wrong Thing.” It's worth it. The story is set in Brite's fictional town of Missing Mile, taking two tangential characters and a tangential event and making them the focus of a creepy story about, as Kiernan puts it, “urban archaeology.” Lovely stuff.

But the real gem here is Kiernan's solo story, “Onion.” It's impossible to describe “Onion” without making it sound purely idiotic, but it comes off anything but. You'll just have to trust me on this one; “Onion” did more for raising a sense of dread in me than any story I've read since, probably, my first experience with the story “Slime” still trying to track the author of that one down) back in 1980.

You want to read this. Honest.