No One Is Safe (2024) by Philip Fracassi

“YOU GUYS ARE GONNA LOVE it.” [sic]

Apr 07, 2025

Readers unfamiliar with No One Is Safe may wish to read my notes only after reading the collection.

No One Is Safe contains fourteen short stories and novellas. With them, Fracassi attempts to ring powerful and arresting changes to old genre conventions, much like his earlier novellas, “Sacculina” and “Altars.”1

Authorial skill and subversive pleasure in the task is palpable.

"The Wish" begins with six year old narrator Jonathan furious that his dad died during his birthday party. Jonathan's birthday wish is that his dad will not miss any more of them. At first, yearly visits seem like we're shaping up for a Tuesdays With Morrie: filled with life-lessons and fatherly wisdom. But, this being a horror story, the coming-of-age trope turns out to be sour and rusty, if also double-edged.

And revising birthday wishes?

“See, I heard your wish,” he continued. “And the void opened, Jonathan. Opened like a giant mouth, ready to consume me, to let me … go on.”
I swallowed. “Why didn’t you?”
“Because …” There was an almost childish glee in his voice. “I like it here. With you. And I was thinking, Jonathan, thinking about all the birthdays you have left. One day, you’ll have a girlfriend—something other than your hand, I mean—and then a wife, perhaps. Then, who knows?” He made a weird smacking sound with his mouth. An icy chill stitched its way up my spine. “Children.”
“Maybe,” I said, but the word was choked. My throat was tight with fear, a raw panic I’d never felt before.
“Yes, children. And I’ll visit you, Jonathan, I’ll visit you every year on your birthday. No … matter … what. And then, one day, I’ll visit your children. Won’t that be nice?”

"The Last Haunted House Story" works changes on classics like Algernon Blackwood's 1906 "The Empty House." Fracassi's house narrates itself in first-person, confiding to one of the four troubled teens trespassing after dark for a look-see.

The house's voice, garrulous and omniscient, has a lunatic clarity, and executes its solemn obligations with brutal gusto.

You should really be thanking me.
“Come on, Brad. It’ll be fun. This place is harmless,” you say, flashing your lovely green eyes my way. Your cheeks are so plump, your hair bursting with blonde curls. An angel fallen from heaven, truly.
I pretend to sulk, buying time. Honestly, I really don’t know what the question is. I was busy, you know? Taking over.
“Well ….” The other girl pipes up, trying to take ownership from you. I hate her. Her voice is shrill and vexing. I fight back the scowl reaching for my new lips. “I think we should play Truth or Dare,” she says, wiggling her eyebrows like a whore.
How trite. But … yes. A game. Of course! Well, this will be much easier than it should be. Usually it takes time, you see. To separate them. You know, one uses a bathroom. One wants to explore a place the others don’t dare. Two will sneak off for a fuck. One time? Three boys locked a fourth boy in the cellar. As a joke. When they let him out, I was already working him from the inside. The revenge was so sweet that the boy I’d taken over wasn’t even upset. He was cheering me on, the rascal.

Whatever the content, the form of the form is the final arbiter.

"Murder by Proxy"

It's a recurring ill of fiction writers to pastiche Hammett or Chandler, welding them to the worries about anxious facts of the present moment. Done well or poorly, it's still a fashion of showing off.

"The Rejects"

Scientists investigate a not right fossil menagerie discovered inside the Moon by the astronauts of Apollo 23.

"My Father's Ashes"

This is a clever approach to the vampire as a fictional subject, particularly relations between vampiric mothers and mortal sons.

"Aquarium Diver"

Hangar Foxtrot, somewhere in Colorado, houses a blob that landed in Pennsylvania five decades ago. The blob has decided to communicate with the man sent into its interior. Bob meets blob.

If you could see sound, or music, as I can, your perceptions of your world would change forever. To you, my shape is amorphous, an auditory rendering of a foghorn instead of a sonata. If my shape were human, would my ability to consume energy be any less repugnant? My way of devouring nutrients and absorbing thoughts, memories, genetic code less horrifying? Would I be less of a threat if I had teeth or tentacles?
I think not.
Bob counts his knee-bends. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen ….
Your people wonder about my existence here, in the universe. Why I came to this world to feed. The secret, Bob, is that I only come to worlds that are dying. Or, in your case, worlds that are already dead but don’t yet realize it. Like the light from a distant, long-extinguished star, the fate is written, waiting for perception to catch up.
Bob, sweating freely, begins to do push-ups, his palms flat against the cool concrete floor as he counts. One, two, three ….
When I devour this world, crossing the floor of oceans, feasting on the largest cities, toppling the deepest forests, consuming all the life which exists, I will grow to such size that the planet itself will feel my weight upon its surface. And then I will burrow, Bob, crushing the core of this world, and the continents will collapse, and the seas turn to ash. The atmosphere you breathe will wither and the planet will erupt into dust and rock, flung out into space as meteoric detritus....

Yes, the blob is a space-faring self-fulfilling prophecy.

"Serial Numbers"

A small-time crook learns that blood-money, too, can develop a taste for violence.

"Overnight"

Ambitious and continually thickened with dread, "Overnight" masterfully portrays a man who turned his back on petty crime, but is now tempted by easy money peripheral to his new job. A family man who needs a new car, a widescreen tv, and a computer for his gifted daughter -- how quickly will the old rotten habits take to resume control? And who will be made to pay?

"Over 1,000,000 Copies In Print"

A bookstore manager supervises an event, hosting a seven year old pastor's son who has written a memoir about his near-death experience, “The Boy Who Saw Heaven”. But did he see Heaven? The effect of reading the book and then meeting the kid leads to some suspect behaviors.

While "Over 1,000,000 Copies In Print" does not overtop the bookstore event in Ramsey Campbell's novel The Overnight, its implications are hard to dismiss.

"Autumn Sugar"

A young husband and wife spend the day intermittently searching for their little boy, who has gone in search of his missing dog. Is the boy missing? Is he dead already? Are we in a Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? lala land?

"Marmalade"

The neighbor's cat, Marmalade, starts saving people by absorbing their terminal illnesses in this superb story.

Fracassi organizes the story as a retrospective oral history, a series of interviews nicely overlapped in their hysteria and negative capability.

"The Guardian"

#Lured-horror: stories in which unsuspecting people are brought to resonant locations by knowing locals for purposes of sacrifice. "The Guardian" follows a group of U.S. vacationers on Bora Bora who are offered a day at a special beach.2

"The View"

A recondite prose poem of posthumous horror.

"Row"

"Row" is another example of #lured-horror, or perhaps I should term it #It's-a-trap horror. "Row" is also a #final-girl tale: young men feeding duped young women to a lake monster for ritualized jollies. Final girl stories, with their reverse vigilantism, inverted misanthropy, and celebratory cynicism, ring hollow today — probably because all the arguments used to promote them have staled so fast. Don’t we know this is the guilt-free horror junk food of the moment?

Compared to the heights of "The Last Haunted House Story" and "Marmalade," "Row" is weak beer.

Jay

10 January 2025

Reading After Dusk

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