The most striking thing about this issue is how few of its pieces are anything close to what one normally thinks of as horror; only a couple (Stephen King's "The Dune" and Sarah Hall's "She Murdered Mortal He") really fit the bill and, at a stretch, perhaps Rajesh Parameswaran's "The Infamous Bengal Ming", told with touches of whimsy, pathos, and subtle commentary on the nature of horror, from the point of view of an escaped human-killing tiger, plus a metafictional (meta-thematic) Bolano story about a zombie movie. That's to be expected, I suppose, from a high brow literary-plus journal perhaps engaging in a bit of self-conscious boundary-crossing in devoting an issue to a form that's often thought of as populist - and so we get a selection of fiction and reportage ranging across personal, domestic, international (war zone) and historical 'horrors' (albeit with a couple of interesting recurring sub-themes, most notably that of addiction), but little in the way of the supernatural, including from luminaries such as DeLillo and Auster - but the overall effect is of an edition whose title is almost a category error, or a concept stretched so far as to lose much of its definitional meaning/capacity, rather than of a genuine reappraisal or reshaping of the notion of 'horror'. It may be no coincidence that the most memorable of its pieces are those first, more recognisably horror-ish, three that I mentioned.
