Frights by Allegra Hyde, 2023
The magic trick:
A climate change future horror dressed up as a traditional ghost story
I found “Frights” to be an interestingly original idea. Our narrator is a ghost in the romantic English tradition of spirits who haunt romantically traditional things like mirrors or attics or graveyards. Its conflict is the story’s true horror, though. As time passes, more and more ghosts are showing up. Too many ghosts really. And they’re no longer just human ghosts. They’re animal ghosts; they’re insect ghosts. What’s worse, the ghosts seem to sense that their time is finite. The world is ending. Living humans aren’t going to be around forever.
Yes, it’s a climate change future horror dressed up in the trappings of an old-fashioned ghost story.
And that’s quite a trick on Hyde’s part.
The selection:
We were curious, yes, but we had other issues on our minds: namely our own obscurity. Some of us coped by dozing for decades; others slept through whole centuries. Most of us wandered, waited. We hoped for a paranormal renaissance: a renewed reverence for our presences, an investment in our fates. In the meantime we avoided bright lights, the scent of burning sage, salt flats. We watched our former cities razed, or raised; the planet’s minerals plundered; land tilled, teased into crops; every square inch strip-searched. Squandered. The living were ever industrious, increasingly frantic. On the move. So we moved with them. We hid in the exhaust ports of combustion engines, tagged onto airplane wings, whooshed along high-speed rail lines. We let Wi-Fi signals prickle the places where our spines once were. We felt the stab-stare of satellites, sonars pulsing through us. We even roved the Internet, striking poses in Google Street View, still hoping to be noticed. But digital imagery didn’t carry the same drama as the daguerreotypes of yesteryear.
When the newly dead joined our numbers, we shared with them our doomed outlook: a dull eternity.
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