A Graveside Gallery by Eric J. Guinard
264 pages, Paperback
Published February 2025 by Cemetery Dance Publications
The art of the short story is one that I have a ton of respect for. I love any kind of short story, no matter the genre, but the short horror tale has a special place in my heart. A story meant to creep the reader out or unsettle the person reading is one of my favorite magic tricks.
Eric Guinard is in a unique position to become one of the best practitioners of these dark arts because of his constant work and study in the genre. As an editor, he not only works with the greats in the fantastic Dark Fiction Primer series, but he also reads slush pile for anthologies he is editing. That combination of working with the best, and let's be frank, the stories I am sure he has to reject, is important.
Reading and poring over some of the best work or the best authors will teach you many important lessons about the craft of writing horror. That said, reading the stories that don’t work, or are almost there, will teach you even more. All that editing, reading, and learning mixed with a writer's imagination is part of what makes Eric a great author of the dark, weird, and unsettling story.
One of the things that also separates Eric from other authors is his keen sense of setting both with place and time in history. It is what makes his work different and special. Stories set in pre-depression Chinatown, in the Beat era, and 1950s LA are well researched. Guinard puts us in these places deep in the past.
My favorite stories were A Kingdom of Sugar Skulls and Marigolds, A story about gay Hispanic teen in 1950s LA, If I Drive Before I Wake, a short piece about self-driving cars, and the Chinatown ghost story Ascending Lights of Yu Lin. The BEST story in the collection was Ommetaphobia, a tale about a blind character gaining sight.
Let's highlight some moments that show off Guinard’s skill. Catch some creepy vibes here…
“I follow, and the door frame creaks when I grab it for support, because my legs go to soup at what I see. I almost turned away, though it's no more crazy than talking to a skull made of sugar or of dead Papa carrying it around.
Jet black and electric blue that's the night sky, shimmering and buzzing like lights of an all-night diner, while agate-dusted shades zoom by, darting through alleys of a crowded universe. My eyes fight to adjust, to make sense, because the Crescent moon is this sideways Grin of teeth, clamping a cigar that blows puffs of firecracker flares, which drip shadows onto the hands I shoot up and reflex. The stars pulse too, like you've never seen.”
Ommetaphobia is the story where I thought Guinard just took his skill to another level. Every word feels like a working gear. The idea of seeing eyes for the first time and being afraid of them. Really cool idea with better execution.
“The eyes were a lunacy by which all the rest of life was now measured, and the longer he examined them the greater in number they seemed to appear. He was terrified of what he saw, with the terror, at least had dulled to a distant sensation detached like knowing a large frothing dog rages on the other side of a leaning, rickety fence; as long as the fence holds, you're safe but Dean wondered what would happen when the fence pulling back those eyes might finally give way.”
Last, I would point to the Chinatown story…The Ascending lights of Yu Lan: “Spirits are released this night, and lanterns guide them to us from the afterworld for communion, then guide them back. Without the lanterns, without loved ones lighting the way, ghosts will get lost. Those lost ghosts are the pretas, the ghosts unloved, unmourned. Lost to existence, wandering forever in the dark.”
That last one is a good example how how Guinard makes use of setting. I loved this collection. I read it off and on in the middle of a reading slump. These stories dragged me out of the slump. For lovers of short horror stories, you can’t go wrong.
