Charles Grant is one of my literary heroes. I admire him almost as much for his work as an editor and a genre stalwart as I do for his own excellent fiction. I grew up on the Shadows series he edited from the late Seventies until the start of the Nineties, where he showcased writers who could deliver the kind of “quiet horror” he preferred: Ramsey Campbell, Steve Rasnic Tem, Al Sarrantonio, Lisa Tuttle. I loved those anthologies, and I loved the moody, ambiguous stories Grant felt should be the heartbeat of the horror genre. Grant’s own work would fit comfortably in one of his anthologies, character-driven pieces leaning heavily on atmosphere. Grant could write description like few others, and his style possessed a lyricism that approached poetry at times. Like the following sentence: “Listening: the laughter stifled, giggling bitten back, footfalls and running and not a few dares; the snarl of dogs, the spitting of cats, the wingbeats of birds that deserted his trees; and the wind, and the rain, and the sun light to dark.” 
“A Garden of Blackred Roses” appeared in Kirby McCauley’s seminal 1980 anthology Dark Forces, alongside classic stories by Stephen King (“The Mist”), Dennis Etchison (“The Late Shift”), and Karl Edward Wagner (“Where the Summer Ends”). Grant’s story might be a tier below such seminal works, but it is a fine story nonetheless. Essentially a triptych with a coda tacked on, “Garden” follows three different individuals who have stolen flowers (the titular blackred roses) out of an eccentric old man’s backyard. All three receive supernatural punishments for their transgressions, as these are no ordinary roses, and the old man much more sinister than odd. The plot is really a vehicle for Grant’s writing style and handling of character— this is a mood piece, not a chronicle of colorful incidents. I love triptychs (I even wrote one myself, a few years back), and the unusual structure pairs nicely with the subject matter. My only complaint is that each character is limned quickly and sketchily (nature of the beast when your story is broken up into discrete sections, I suppose), and Grant doesn’t do himself any favors by the authorial distance he keeps between himself and his characters. We night get in their heads a few times, but even then, they sometimes come across as odd and hard to love. Still, that is easily outweighed by Grant’s ability to creep you out in the most understated way, to use atmosphere and subtlety as weapons. I think Charles Grant is an acquired taste, and not all readers are going to dig him. But when he’s on his game, he provides a reading experience that is both unique and intoxicating. “A Garden of Blackred Roses” can’t currently be found in an e-book version, but it is in Scream Quietly: The Best of Charles Grant—a stellar collection, by the way—available in trade paperback on Amazon.