THE WISHING POOL

Holy hell: These 14 stories from author and film historian Due might scare even the most dauntless horror fans to death.

These tales of fright are both intellectually keen and psychologically bloodcurdling, no surprise from an award-winning writer whose command of the Black horror aesthetic rivals Jordan Peele’s in originality and sheer bravado. The opening salvo, “The Wishing Pool,” takes a universal familial worry and paints it with shades of “The Monkey’s Paw.” The hairbreadth between acute tragedy and the blackest of humor are child’s play for the author in “Haint in the Window,” which masterfully nods to Octavia E. Butler in the story of a bookseller facing elements out of his control. The five tales in The Gracetown Stories give a sense of Stephen King’s fictional Derry or Jerusalem’s Lot: It's just a bad patch of ground ripe with horrors ranging from Cthulhu-like abominations in “Suppertime” to demonic possession in “Migration,” in which a friend helpfully asks, “Is that thing acting up again?” Another pair of stories visits a woman named Nayima whose post-apocalyptic endeavors include some light stand-up comedy in “One Day Only” and, much later, the necessity to protect and school her young charge even as her own mind fails in “Attachment Disorder.” A final triptych of stories labeled “Future Shock” wouldn’t go amiss as episodes of The Twilight Zone. Although the tales vary greatly in length and style, it’s the Hitchcock-ian, Black Mirror–tinged reveals and existential questions that stand out—a dying man’s final vow, a teeth-grinding amount of child endangerment, or the awful, pedestrian confession, “I broke my daughter’s arm.” Even in a far-off future, Due finds that big questions endure: “Was it better to die free?”

A patchwork of stories that somehow manages to be both graceful and alarming, putting fresh eyes to the unspeakable.