It should be inert, just wood or plastic. A doll looks like something intelligent, but it should not be. We can talk all day long about the uncanny valley and the like but this, ultimately, is at least a part of the fear at the heart of the trope of the sinister doll. Who amongst us hasn’t had the thought, before we crushed a spider or stepped on a bug, that its kin would know what we had done, and would come for us? If not specifically the cockroach or the toad, that idea of intelligence where none should be.

These things scare him, it says, because he is still a child, he does not “understand words like bestial, sadistic, diabolic.” But they scare us all, don’t they? At least a bit. “To him there was fear in a creaking tread on a dark landing there was terror in the tapping of a twig on his bedroom window, when all the house was asleep there was horror in the sudden squirm or hop of a toad, or the startled freezing of a cockroach when the light is switched on, and especially in its scurrying when it knows it is discovered.” “That was his idea of nightmare: the knowledge of sly intelligence where none should be.” In Brian Lumley’s novel Necroscope, this is the end of a several-paragraph meditation on the things that terrified the book’s villain during his boyhood, culminating in an account of a cricket “leprous grey from the sightlessness of its habitation” that jumped on him in his father’s wine cellar.

1925, d.GREY’S GROTESQUERIES ORRIN GREY Intelligence Where None Should Be: The Horror of Inanimate Objects

Steve Berman, “Kum, Raúl (The Unknown Terror) – b.

Paul Tremblay, “Our Stories Will Live Forever”.

Nick Mamatas, “The Shaft Through The Middle of It All”.

Molly Tanzer and Jesse Bullington, “Tubby McMungus, Fat From Fungus”.

Bradley, “The Pearl in the Oyster and the Oyster Under Glass”

Julio Toro San Martin, “A Monster In The Midst”.

Jeff Vandermeer, “Corpse Mouth and Spore Nose”.

Daniel Mills, “Dust From a Dark Flower”.

Chadwick Ginther, “First They Came for the Pigs”.

Camille Alexa, “His Sweet Truffle of a Girl”.

Andrew Penn Romine, “Last Bloom on the Sage”.

Pugmire, Lavie Tidhar, Ann K.Schwader, Jesse Bullington, Molly Tanzer and Simon Strantzas through a dizzying journey of fungal tales. Join authors such as Jeff VanderMeer, Laird Barron, Nick Mamatas, W.H. Stories range from noir to dark fantasy, from steampunk to body horror. In this new anthology, writers reach into the rich territory first explored by William Hope Hodgson a century ago: the land of the fungi. A collection of fungal wonders…and terrors.

Fungi by Orrin Grey