By Reason of Darkness Book

(3.25 stars)

Harper's Mill, the setting for many of Simmons' stories, is much like Charles L. Grant's Oxford Run: a place whose facade of normality continually leaks with intense darkness. And were it not for amateurish excess, Simmons' prose style would be strongly reminiscent of Grant's. When a character in "Becoming October" is described as a "candy-corn soul of freedom," even forgiving readers might wonder if the author's sense of stylistic restraint hasn't been swept away by the autumnal winds whistling through many of these stories; which leads to this collection's main strength: atmosphere.

The opener, "The Wind, When It Comes", along with "The Right Size" and "Following the Stones," uses the sensuous decay of autumn to reflect the characters' emotional turbulence, often to very haunting effects. Even in explicitly psychosexual tales such as "Skin" and "Daddy's Little Bitty Pretty One", Simmons' attentiveness to scene-setting, especially in terms of light and space, effectively dramatizes the dark, desperate desires of the protagonists.

Littered with rudimentary errors of grammar and spelling, By Reason of Darkness certainly is not a truly exceptional debut; even its two arguable virtues--atmosphere and style--are sometimes excessive. However, for those who appreciate small-town horror which alternates between realism and surrealism, Simmons' only collection to date offers mood and violence in equal measure.