Extremities: Stories of Death, Murder, and Revenge by David Lubar (review)

Lubar takes a dramatic shift in tone from his popular Weenies series (Invasion of the Road Weenies, BCCB 12/05, etc.) with this offering of thirteen gruesome stories (most previously published but in journals or adult collections) that are not, as the author's foreword is clearly aware, for the skittish. In one story, a teenaged boy meticulously plans the murder of his abusive father, but the devil's in the details, and the boy ends up losing not one parent but both. In others, a homeless man exacts his revenge on a group of thugs; two friends must outwit a shapeshifter in Chinatown; a high-schooler does nothing as a nerdy classmate drowns in a reservoir and later finds that the town's water supply is out to get him. The stories vary in length from just a few pages to around thirty, and Lubar utilizes the short-story form wisely, ending the briefer tales with terrifyingly abrupt conclusions (like when a runaway is torn in two by trains) while allowing the longer stories to linger with unanswered questions. The tone remains macabre throughout the collection, with even a seemingly lighthearted romance taking a turn toward the dark. While most of the tales contain a supernatural element, it's really the characters here that are chilling: each protagonist is at least amoral, if not truly wicked, and it is often a character's indifference, greed, lust, or envy that propels the story toward certain doom. This is an obvious sell to horror fans looking for a quick fix beyond the obvious Stephen King, but it might also serve as discussion fodder or as a useful example of short-story writing.