Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley Jr. are currently in prison—Echols awaiting execution, the others serving life sentences—for the 1993 murder of three little boys in West Memphis, Arkansas. The evidence against the trio? There is virtually none. No physical evidence ties any of the three to the scene or to the murders. Only Miskelley's confession—which was gained unconstitutionally and was at any rate both internally inconsistent and at odds with the forensic evidence—connected the boys to the scene.

Well, that and rumors of Satanic cult involvement. In 1993, the "Satanic panic" that gripped much of America hadn't quite burned out yet, and the West Memphis Three, as they are called, seemed to bear all the marks of the occult. They listened to heavy metal, read books by Stephen King, Anne Rice, and Dean Koontz. They were outsiders in the community. According to their defenders, that was enough to get the three convicted. More than a decade later, the movement to free the West Memphis Three is still struggling to gain attention for the case. The Last Pentacle of the Sun: Writings in Support of the West Memphis Three (Arsenal Pulp, $16.95/$19.95), edited by M. W. Anderson and Brett Alexander Savory is an interesting if flawed anthology in support of the case. All the material, some of it reprinted, has been donated by the authors and artists, and all proceeds go to the Damien Echols Defense Fund.

Any anthology dedicated to a cause has to play triple-duty. Not only does it have to be entertaining, but it also has to work to raise the consciousness of the reader, and it must do so sufficiently to be worth the price. After all, I could just as easily donate $16.95 to the West Memphis Three and not have some money removed for the publication or distribution of a book if I want to support the cause. Does Last Pentacle of the Sun pull this off? Unfortunately, the answer is only "almost."

Like many non-cause anthologies, Last Pentacle depends on a few major artists to bring in the bucks, and like many non-cause anthologies, the major artists provide only minor material. James Hetfield of Metallica, for example, offers up the lyrics to his song, "… And Justice for All," which we all already know from the millions of high school desks the words have been carved into over the years. Peter Straub offers two linked flash fictions from 1990, and the stories were gimmicky then. The several pieces of Clive Barker's art are all engaging, but the trim size and stock quality are all wrong for the work, making them much less interesting than they should be. Margaret Cho's "Letter" is heartfelt and incredibly personal, but is ultimately too personal—it reads like a breathless blog entry reflecting on her correspondence with Damien Echols.

Breathlessness and ham-fistedness hurt too many stories. "Homecoming" by John Pelan is a revenge fantasy of sorts—a small town makes the mistake of lynching their local outsider/occultist, and pays for it. It's a revenge fantasy "of sorts" because the protagonist doesn't get revenge, but the angry-at-real-life-injustice reader does. That'll teach West Memphis, Arkansas, a lesson! Elizabeth Massie's "Pisspot Bay" is similarly contrived. Gary Braunbeck is one of my favorite writers, but the reprinted "From the Books of Alice Redfearn: a didactic parable" is just too didactic a parable to stand. A witch is burned. A tree grows from her ashes. Paper is made from the tree. Enlightenment spreads in the form of books. But not all books are enlightening, are they? Plenty are published that whip up irrational paranoia, superstitious nonsense, and that appeal to the prurient side of life. That's part of what causes the distrust of horror fiction that informed the West Memphis Three's fate.

Paul Tremblay's "All Sliding to One Side" is more interesting, as it attempts to dredge up some of that rage and hate that inform so much of the politics of crime and incarceration in the U.S., but the second-person narration doesn't quite work, and his last-line appeal to the innocence of "your" young (and presumably sweet and lovely) daughter is just pandering. Scott Nicholson also uses a second-person narrator in his short and powerful "Carnival Knowledge." but to much better effect. It's easy to forget that flying the freak flag isn't just something nerdy kids do when they want to stand out or be cool—it can be a punishment, a humiliation enforced from above.

Adam Roberts also comes close to really touching the center of the issues with his science fiction story "The Afterlives of SweetDeath," a story wherein nanotechnology allows people to choose a death experience. The vast majority demand peaceful or heroic deaths, but a seeming atavist demands to experience an execution. The SweetDeath technician exclaims, "Can human society ever really have held beliefs so bizarre and sadistic? The subject here suffers a painful and degrading death followed by an eternity of torture?" Yeah, it's nuts, I know, but indeed, it happened. And it happens in the story, too, as the narrative flies off the tracks. The atavist is, yup, out for revenge and declares his commitment to making SweetDeath employees experience the agony of electrocution, followed by a lake of fire. A chance to examine the draw of the dark is cheapened by the pulp-shudder ending.

There are also essays in Last Pentacle of the Sun, but like Cho's piece, they only rarely exceed the level of platitude. Philip Jenkins claims, without evidence, that pulp magazines informed the rise of 20th-century cult scares. But were pulp magazines widely read in rural areas? Can we map the distribution of Weird Tales to those parts of the country given to religiosity and clannishness? Is his claim really any different from the claims of right-wing hysterics: that comics and heavy metal breed murder and suicide? No, it isn't.

Brian Hodge attempts to hold up a mirror to the horror/true crime reader's own love of prurience when he says of the 1987 Dardeen murders, "To describe what happened in the Dardeens' trailer and beyond, even in general terms, feels uncomfortably close to pornography. It feels intrusive, a bit like exhuming a grave for no better reason than to gawk at the bones." Then he does so anyway.

Michael Oliveri looks back at his own teen years and wonders aloud if his past—horror, provocative T-shirts from gun shows, once talking trash about slashing some other kid's throat—would have put him on death row had he lived in West Memphis, Arkansas. Perhaps, perhaps. After all, the West Memphis Three were those beloved and feared things: outsiders.

The "outsider theory" is a compelling one, especially since so many authors and artists of the dark fantastic grew up as outsiders and were persecuted for it by bullies, family members, and even by publishers. The notion feels right. But that isn't the whole story. Echols et alia, are really not that all unusual. Metallica is not some obscure death metal band—by 1993, they were a staple of MTV and commercial radio. King, Rice, and Koontz are three of the most popular authors of our time, and King's stuff is certainly all over the movies and television. Black or otherwise "weird" clothing is available for sale at JCPenney, or as Oliveri points out, gun shows, which are certainly popular with rural conservatives.

Nor does one need to wander off into the rural South to find born-again Christian paranoids; the cities are also full of them. One of the candidates for the mayor of my stomping grounds in Jersey City, for example, explicitly insists that he doesn't want the office. "I don't want to do this," Dwayne Baskerville told the Jersey Journal, "But I must obey God." Did he get sufficient signatures to get on the ballot with this rap? More than enough. This is two miles from Manhattan, folks. This is also the same town where, when I was eating at Wendy's, a woman near me spilled her punch and apologized to the worker sent to mop it up by blaming Satan for knocking the drink off her tray. "He's always an obstacle in our lives." She wasn't schizophrenic, and even if she was, the ten people who witnessed the whole thing and nodded solemnly when she explained the Prince of Darkness's anti-fruit-punch agenda certainly weren't.

An interest in the occult, darkness, Satan, and death is not limited to disaffected outsiders; it is a near-universal symptom of our age. For some, the dark fantastic is an entertainment that nonetheless gives their lives meaning, for others, it is literally their religion. It wasn't the outsider preoccupation with the occult that led to the West Memphis Three getting railroaded; it is the mainstream preoccupation with the occult that did so. There are two sides to the dark fantastic—one that celebrates the solitary and antinomian, and one that celebrates the mob and the ritual slaughter of the outsider for the sake of social cohesion. You don't need evidence to convict when logic and reason go out the window; so many people just know that Satan walks the Earth, that the children are at risk, and that the West Memphis Three are guilty. It's instinct. It's magic. Too much of the material in Last Pentacle ignores this conflict.

The men and women of West Memphis, Arkansas, aren't afraid of grue and demons; they crave grue and demons, so they found some. The United States never quite got over its 17th-century birthing pains as an outpost of so-called civilization arrayed against a large and savage darkness. Nathaniel Hawthorne pegged the contradiction between civilized piety and mob bloodlust with "Young Goodman Brown" more than two centuries ago. The Last Pentacle of the Sun panders to that central contradiction of American horror, but doesn't explore it. Given that Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley Jr. are trapped within our national contradiction, the failure of the stories in this volume to tangle with these issues is profound.

All that said, I would recommend buying not one, but two copies of The Last Pentacle of the Sun. One for you, because some of the stories are decent enough, and that's a damn sight more than what can be said for most small press horror/dark fantasy anthologies these days, and one for a friend or relative who hasn't yet heard of the plight of the West Memphis Three. Last Pentacle doesn't provide any solutions, but it does help us ask the right questions.

Donate to the Damien Echols Defense Fund:
Damien Echols Defense Fund
P.O. Box 1216
Little Rock, AR 72203

The Fund also accepts PayPal: LDavis11@hotmail.com is the recipient address.