Black is the night Stories inspired by Cornell Woolrich

According to his biographer, Francis M. Nevins, noir master Cornell Woolrich "lived the most wretched life of any American writer since Poe." Out of that wretchedness came stories that have influenced generations of writers and filmmakers. This fine collection brings together 30 stories in tribute to Woolrich. Some, like Barry N. Malzberg's "The Phantom Gentleman" and James Sallis' chilling "Parkview," about reclusive authors sequestered in New York hotels, echo Woolrich's own life spent largely in a Manhattan hotel, living with his mother, while others aim mainly to capture the mood of oppressive bleakness, occasionally mixed with the blackest of black humor, that typified Woolrich at his best. The jewel in the crown here is William Boyle's "New York Blues Redux," an absolute masterpiece of a story about the denizens of a Brooklyn bar who still find that the day's first shot of rye always "feels like a miracle. Loaves and fishes type shit." The darkness lurks, however, and sometimes, as Jane the Stain muses, "a woman's just got to let another woman beat a piece-of-shit man to death with a baseball bat."

The 30 stories in this superior anthology from Jakubowski (Invisible Blood) capture the feel of Woolrich's iconic noir fiction. In a brief introduction, "Why Cornell Woolrich Matters," Neil Gaiman aptly observes: "The world Cornell Woolrich painted for us with his words is a world in which we will always be disappointed... in which our hopes and our dreams burn brightly, but in their burning they only make the shadows darker." Highlights include James Grady's "Eyes Without a Face," in which a man spies on an attractive female neighbor via a hacked security feed while also watching Hitchcock's Rear Window, which was based on a Woolrich story. That classic tale also inspired another standout, Kim Newman's "Black Window," about a man's frantic attempts to get the police to believe he witnessed a matricide. Charles Ardai, the founder of Hard Case Crime, distinguishes himself with "Sleep! Sleep! Beauty Bright," about a man's search for the person who put his wife into a coma. The variations on Woolrich's themes, even when set in the present day, resonate. This is a welcome companion to In Sunlight or in Shadow: Stories Inspired by the Paintings of Edward Hopper, edited by Lawrence Block. (Oct.)