Once heralded as one of SF’s best young writers, Somtow Sucharitkul changed his name to S.P. Somtow, and discovered dark fantasy - and fame and fortune. The Pavilion Of Frozen Women is his first short story collection, ten finely crafted masterpieces of dark fantasy.

Each eye-witness story treads the fine line between the fantastic and the real horrors of the world. In the title story, an Amerindian photo-journalist finds herself sucked into a whirlpool of death and mystery, as she tries to investigate the death of an acquaintance in an icy Japanese winter. The real darkness here isn’t the series of mysterious deaths, nor the malevolent bear spirit - it’s the legacy of thousands of years of racism in both East and West.

At the heart of the collection are three powerful tales of the undead, careful explorations of the places where zombies and theology meet. A family disintegrates against a backdrop of the LA riots, a hard-boiled Roman detective cracks an entertainment fraud, and a small boy wanders across a war torn America: each story liberally salted with zombies and voodoun.

But it’s with a non-genre tale that Somtow really grabs the reader. “Fish are Jumping, and the Cotton is High” is a story of summer in the deep south - and a terrifying view through the eyes of a serial killer. The twisted psyche of the narrator slowly reveals itself, and drags you through his heart of darkness, refusing to let you go, even after you’ve read the final words.

There’s a touch of macabre humour in Somtow’s updated fairy tales. It’s not difficult to see Hansel and Gretel’s witch as an LA pimp, but when the Pied Piper of Hamelin turns up to collect his pay (with interest) you’d better watch out for a sting in the tale.

Somtow’s carefully tailored prose is a breath of fresh air in a world of pot boilers and mass-produced bestsellers. This is one of the genre’s finest writers at his peak, proving that there’s still life in the old short story.

A

Originally published in SFX