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Book Review: The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror volume 4 edited by Paula Guran

The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, vol. 4 edited by Paula Guran

PYR 2023

ISBN:  978-1645060673

Available : Paperback, Kindle edition

Buy:   Bookshop.org  |  Amazon.com

 

 

Editor Paula Guran is one of the two American women (the other one being Ellen Datlow) who keep providing every year the best short fiction that appeared in print the year before in the area of horror and dark fantasy.

 

The present, hefty volume includes twenty-one “best” tales. Frankly. to me 2022 doesn’t appear to have been such a great year for horror and dark fantasy, at least in the short form, because only a few among the selected stories were able to impress me and entertain me.

 

“Red Wet Grin” by Gemma Files, is a very dark, unsettling story where a nurse working in a care home witnesses a series of weird events.

 

Stephen Graham Jones contributes “Men, Women and Chainsaws” an engrossing, although a bit puzzling story, revolving around an old Camaro endowed with dangerous properties.

 

“The Voice of a Thousand Years” by Fawaz Al-Matrouk is a dark fable about an old man endeavoring to give life to an  automaton, while “ How Selkies are Made” by Cassandra Khaw is a splendid fairy tale featuring a beautiful, unhappy bride.

 

“Challawa” by Usman T. Malik  is a powerful, outstanding piece with a distinctive exotic taste, in which ancient gods take possession of an American tourist.

 

“The Long Way Up” by Alix E. Harrow is a disturbing allegory where a woman retrieves her dead husband in a deep chamber, and convinces him to return to the world of the living.

 

AC Wise provides “Sharp Things, Killing Things”, an obscure but intriguing story in which a group of youngsters have to deal with some unexpected deaths.

 

These are my favorite stories. Other readers could make a different selection, but these are the rules of the game and such a huge volume has plenty of material to offer.

 

Reviewed by Mario Guslandi

Posted on November 16, 2023 by , Reply

Book Review: Shakespeare Unleashed (Unleashed, #2) edited by James Aquilone

Shakespeare Unleashed (Unleashed, #2) edited by James Aquilone

Monstrous Books, 2023

ISBN: 9781946346193

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle

Buy:   Bookshop.org  |  Amazon.com

 

This is the second book in the Unleashed series, the first being Classic Monsters Unleashed, previokusly reviewed for this website.  Like its predecessor, the stories are re-imaginings, continuations, or inspired by the Bard’s work.  How does it fare?  Pretty well, the book starts slow but gets better throughout, with the real bangers finishing out the book with a flourish.  If you haven’t read Shakespeare since being force-fed it in high school, it really helps to at least read the Wikipedia entries for his most famous works before reading the book.  Otherwise, a sizable portion of the stories might seem confusing.

 

The stories pull from a variety of Shakespeare’s work, with none of them used as a subject more than three times.  The usual suspects, like Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet are represented, as well as lesser-known ones like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and A Winter’s Tale.  Some stories add a prequel or epilogue, or a separate story involving one of the characters.  The best ones tend to be the ‘inspired by’ variety, where the basic concept is used in a different setting.

 

The first quarter of the book may be the weakest, and the hardest to follow, with the story ‘All Hallowed Tides Break Upon These Shores,’ a coda to The Tempest, being a bloody exception.  The story quality becomes better and more consistent the rest of the way.   Lavinia from Titus Andronicus features in a well-written tale of female revenge, “The Body, The Blood, The Woods, The Stage”, and the lecherous Sir John Falstaff gets a darkly comic dose of payback in “The Hungry Wives of Windsor”.The last quarter of the book is full of excitement and good writing.  Standouts are the Macbethian “Case of the Bitter Witch”, the Romeo-esque “Timeless Tragedy,”, and the King Lear inspired “Fortune”: all are outstanding.  They take the basic Shakespeare premise and run off in an entirely new direction, with excellent results.  It’s worth noting that with only an exception or two, the authors did NOT try to emulate the Bard’s writing style, but wisely stuck with their own styles.   The stories do get slick with blood at times, which is fitting, since Shakespeare’s work could be violent at times.  He just didn’t write graphically, which is something modern authors can certainly do!

 

Bottom line?  The book is a mixed bag, but there are enough good stories to justify the purchase.  Just re-acquaint yourself with Sir William ahead of time before getting the book, then watch the curtain rise on some truly twisted tales.

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

 

Posted on August 11, 2023 by , Reply

Book Review: D.O.A. III: An Extreme Horror Anthology edited by S.C. Mendes

 

DOA Vol. 3

D.O.A. III: An Extreme Horror Anthology edited by S.C. Mendes

Blood Bound Books, 2017

ISBN: 9781940250267

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

Buy from:   Amazon.com

 

The tagline on the back cover of the book reads: “You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll vomit.”  And, they aren’t kidding.  This is one of the most extreme collections ever published: 30 stories of raunchy, sex-driven, blood-drenched mayhem.  The stories are good, just prepare for revulsion.  This is for true hardcore lovers only– keep the kids away from this one.

 

The book’s pedigree is impressive, as Edward Lee, Jack Ketchum, Wrath James White, Bentley Little, and Richard Matheson are among the authors represented.  The stories are generally entertaining and well-written.  If there’s a theme, most of the stories involve horrible people doing horrible things to each other.  No joke: there are some VERY ugly torture sequences in this book that make Eli Roth films seem like Disney movies.   There are some stories with a paranormal bent, which helps keep the book from getting too one-dimensional.  The originality is decent, although not to the level of the Welcome to the Splat Club series.  As we’ve come to expect from Blood Bound Books, there is an undercurrent of dark humor threaded through many of the stories, which helps balance out the overall story mood. Notable stories worth mentioning include:

 

“Hostile” is only four pages, but it is comedic genius.  Jeff Strand’s hilarious twist on the Hostel movie series proves that the worst situations can be amusing, when written correctly.

 

In “Taking Root”, a virulent strain of plant spores has contaminated Earth, turning people into… plants, of a sort.  Two survivors find that, unfortunately, an apocalypse still doesn’t change peoples’ predatory instincts, or their bad nature.  Despite sounding grim, it’s a light-hearted take on doomsday writing.  Plants growing out of a person’s rear can be funny!

 

In “Ritchie”, Jackson killed Ritchie the bully when he was a kid, but Ritchie has a bad habit of coming back from the dead once a year.  So, Jackson has to kill him, again.  And again, and again.  The fun part is, Ritchie’s injuries from each death carry over year to year, and he becomes less intimidating to the point of hilarity… but Ritchie may still have a trick or two up his sleeve…

 

 It’s worth mentioning that this isn’t ‘peek under the bed and close the curtains out of fear’ horror writing.  These aren’t scary, and aren’t meant to be.  This is straight-up extreme splat writing to the max.  

 

Bottom line: if the members of Cannibal Corpse and GWAR decided to write short stories instead of lyrics, then DOA III is probably what you would get.  Recommended for hardcore fans only.

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

Posted on May 15, 2023 by , Reply
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