What counts as horror?

I first heard about Ananda Lima's Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil when I saw her speak at the short fiction panel at Stokercon 2024. She was thoughtful and intelligent, and her presence on the panel at a horror convention made sense: this short story collection was due out in a few weeks' time, and the Devil is a central character in this book.

We chatted later, on the last day of the con, and I asked her about this book. "So, it's a short story collection?" Well, sort of. "Oh. So it's horror?" Well, sort of.

Horror is a difficult genre to pin down, often tied more to the feelings evoked in the reader, rather than a specific definition one can point to. Going into Craft, I had asked if it was horror. Having finished it, my answer is, Sure, why not?

The book opens with the character we know simply as the Writer, reflecting on a Halloween party in 1999, and the first thing she tells you about herself is she slept with the Devil. And even then, he knew hunger that she had to write.

What follows immediately is another story, set at another Halloween party, but slightly different, shifted back almost twenty years. It's the Writer, writing herself, through the lens of fiction. Here she meets a man wearing a costume consisting of a frumpy suit, a bad wig, and smeared foundation. What are you supposed to be? / The future. 

Lima explores the character of the Writer, and the character of the Devil, through the Writer's experiences of him. There are many of the typical trappings of horror – ghosts, a haunted piano, a sort of pseudo-cannibalism in the form of a nurse eating inch-tall humans from a vending machine only she can see – but it never seems to want to terrify the reader, to make you lose sleep at night. And yet, many of the stories are still unsettling, a teacup not fully seated in its saucer.

Is it a short story collection? Not in the traditional sense.

With a more standard short story collection, you can hop around in the book, starting with your favorite story, or in the case of a multi-author collection, your favorite writer. But to take this approach with Craft would be to miss out on what's truly special about this book. Each successive story builds on what came before it, understandable better as a journey experienced whole from end to end, rather than in arbitrary segments in random order. Comments about the ghost in "Idle Hands" only make sense after first having met her 82 pages back.

Lima has done something really special with this book of short fiction, weaving together disparate tales not only with the framing of the Writer's relationship with the Devil, but also connecting them to one another, stories echoing back to moments earlier in the book. It's a quick read at only 176 pages, perfect for a relaxing afternoon. Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is worth not only a read, but a re-read, once to enjoy the story, and once to see how the Devil and the Writer do their tricks.