Children of the Kingdom

[MoeShinola1]

Included in the Dark Forces anthology, and certainly my favorite of all short stories or novellas. The setup for the main action is actually the best part, in which Klein goes into the colorful life of the protagonist's grandfather, Herman Lauterbach, a personage you would certainly profit from knowing personally, were he real. The horror part is introduced gradually, and not really explained except in a magical realism sort of way, through the discourses of Father Pistachio, and the monsters are never directly confronted by the protagonist(he never gets a chance to do enough to qualify as 'hero'). Still the story is wonderfully creepy, entirely satisfying and is far and away better than even Stephen King's The Mist, which also had it's debut in Dark Forces.

 

[Masonwire]

"Dark Forces" is an extremely strong anthology. I bought it years ago at a secondhand bookstore in the Netherlands.

 

[bendk]

But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into the outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Matthew 8:12

Klein has stated that he got the inspiration for this novella while witnessing the New York blackout of 1977 and the subsequent rioting. He watched the chaos unfold from the balcony of his Manhattan apartment. He envisioned creatures that normally stay hidden from the light seizing this moment of darkness.