Reassuring Tales

Collecting a dozen stories, along with verse, an essay on Arthur Machen, story notes, and an interview gathered from sources ranging from hardcover anthologies to Lovecraftian fanzines to a children’s magazine, Reassuring Tales presents an overview of Klein’s career over six decades.

It opens with a story inspired by the framed journal structure in Machen’s “The White People,” in which an English instructor offers commentary on the gothic tradition from Shakespeare to Faulkner while increasingly uncanny and threatening “Events at Poroth Farm” take shape around him. Later expanded into the novel The Ceremonies, the original has lost none of its power to compel and chill.

Accompanying it are a clutch of briefer stories in a variety of modes, leavened with the irony implicit in the collection’s title, manifested not only through wit, but also in the tension between the stable, comfortable reality we wish existed and the destabilizing forces lying at its fringes. Thus the seemingly innocuous campfire tales in “One Size Eats All,” the flattering enticements of the “Well-Connected,” the fear of exposure that makes a person “Camera Shy,” the strange pattern that leads a man to the “Ladder,” the shifts in reality that mean “Curtains for Nat Crumley,” the anxiety a new homeowner might feel as he senses “Growing Things,” the border between shadow and self in “Imagining Things,” and more are handled with a deft mordant magic, while “They Don’t Write ‘Em Like This Anymore” acts as a bittersweet epilogue.