by Valarie Thorpe

This book was an unexpected delight. I say unexpected only because at the point I received this copy, I hadn't yet read any other of June Hubbard's edited or original work and just wasn't familiar with her. This book prompted me to dig around and find a bunch of her other work (which will be reviewed here soon). And be sure to stay on the lookout for Cemetery Sonata II (I think it's due out in October).

Anyhoo, to the meat of the matter - I'm a great fan of horror short fiction and pick up just about any and all anthologies I can get my hands on. And I think the reason for this is, even if the overall collection isn't as good as it could be, you generally know that you will run across a gem of a story. Admittedly, I've read a few where the gem of a story was just about the only thing worth buying a collection for. This is not the case with Cemetery Sonata. It's a themed anthology (another dangerous area where anthology editors should not tread lightly) that is handled superbly by Hubbard. The title Cemetery Sonata gives some idea of the contents but it's not a ham-handed collection of graveyard angst. The writers cover a lot of ground (no cemetery puns were harmed during the making of this review) with stories of death from every conceivable angle.

It's apparent that Hubbard took a great deal of care not only in selecting these stories, but also in setting a great story order. Sonata's pacing, a very under appreciated anthology art, is set up in waves. We're given time to dip our toe in to check out the temperature, get a teeny bit comfortable and then the realization sets in that the water's a good bit rougher than we realized, a might deeper and the waves are coming a bit more rapidly.

I'm not going to go over every story in here (primarily because this is a humongo 460-page work with 42 stories!) As with any anthology, there are definitely favorites and I'll touch on a few. Steven Lee Climer has a particularly neighborly piece with My Dear Companion. Neighborly might not seem like the description you'd expect for a horror anthology story, but remember how I mentioned we're drawn in slowly (and very deliberately)? This is one of the pieces that makes us comfortable and then…well, then comes Trent Zelazny's Hope is an Inanimate Desire - chilling and, because of placement, much more disturbing.

Eight Words by James Van Pelt is another one you'll take with you after you're done reading. I also really enjoyed the haunting story from Christine DeLong Miller, The Veil.

These are short stories and I don't want to get into any real description of them since it will take away some of the discovery, but definitely do take the time to discover Cemetery Sonata for yourself. This collection may not have one of the familiar horror anthology tags we've become familiar with ('best of,' 'year's best' and all that) but don't let that fool you. This book is a top-notch example of horror anthology and it's this month's Really Scary Recommended Read.