Professor Charlatan Bardot’s Travel Anthology to the Most (Fictional) Haunted Buildings in the Weird, Wild World
Professor Charlatan Bardot’s Travel Anthology to the Most (Fictional) Haunted Buildings in the Weird, Wild World, edited by Bardot and accomplished anthologist Eric Guignard, features the haunting stories of authors from around the globe, with an interesting focus: There are no stories of haunted houses.
With tiny tales of locales ranging from haunted bookstores to haunted temples, to longer short stories that focus on aquariums and tank monuments, Travel Anthology is a wonderful collection that introduces new talented voices to an audience of readers, while also bringing to bat some of the established titans such as Ramsey Campbell. The stories move between conflict from the memory of a decommissioned tank, as featured in Weston Ochse’s “Blood Memories,” to meditations on perspective, place, and belonging, as written in S. Qiouyi Lu’s “Que Vagi Bé.” The personal is implicitly political in many of these stories, but is most beautifully shown in (one of my personal favorites) Octavia Cade’s “Tidemarks”, a deeply poignant story that centers around an abandoned aquarium that frames grief over biodiversity loss.
Bardot and Guignard’s emphasis on including text and art that blur the lines between reality and fiction is also a nice touch. (Could that haunted bookstore actually exist? Does my city have a haunted bookstore?) This collection also successfully asks a very important question: What is a haunting? Many of the authors herein work with staples of the ghost story, but apply them to places and perspectives that readers may not have previously considered. The confluence of all of these factors also makes Travel Anthology a vitally important entry in the ongoing effort to revitalize the ghost story for contemporary readers and markets.
Travel Anthology also continues to demonstrate Guignard’s dedication to diversifying and celebrating the range of talented authors to be found in horror and dark speculative fiction. (Early this year, I read World of Horror, another of Guignard’s anthologies, and I immediately fell in love with the stories of monsters and supernatural from respective cultures from around the world.) I also have to commend the level of design that went into this book: from illustrations accompanying every tiny tale to every longer short story, plus the level of formatting and attention to detail to make these pages work and flow as well as they do, is obviously a talented labor of love and care.
As other book reviewers have astutely hoped for, I also hope to see Travel Anthology become an ongoing series, especially if there is room for stories that investigate how different cultures define “ghost” and “haunting”. Both of these editors, as well as the roster of works by talented authors included in this book, have a lot to offer the horror genre, and I can’t wait to see what comes next.
I was given a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
Article written by Laura Kemmerer
Laura tuned into horror with an interest in what these movies and books can tell us about ourselves and what societies fear. She is most interested in horror focused around the supernatural, folklore, the occult, Gothic themes, haunted media, landscape as a character, and hauntology (focusing on lost or broken futures).
