Acquired Taste by Clay McLeod Chapman

Titan Books, 2025

ISBN-13: 9781835410783

Available: Hardcover, audiobook, Kindle edition

Buy: Bookshop.org | Amazon.com

I attended a great panel at the 2025 American Library Association Annual Conference in June titled “Crossing Thresholds: The Rise of Transgressive Horror,” moderated by the amazing Becky Siegel Spratford with Clay McLeod Chapman, Eric LaRocca, and Hailey Piper at the 2025 ALA Conference. They discussed how their stories subvert genre norms and push boundaries, their creative processes, and future projects. Shortly afterward, the Titan Books reps ushered attendees to their booth in the exhibit hall for signed copies and to meet the authors. After devouring all their books, I felt compelled to write reviews for each of them.

Clay McLeod Chapman’s Acquired Taste is a collection of 24 previously published short stories and 1 novelette, each with strong characters and themes.

In “The Fireplace,” a family moves into a new home, and the hearth beckons to the man of the house. In “Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Key”, a pastor gets his reward after leading some Boy Scouts to a book burning. In “The Spew of News,” people are becoming something else after their obsessive viewing of a popular right-wing news channel, and a son finds his parents have fallen victim to its influence. “Baby Carrots” will leave the reader wondering about the bag in their own refrigerator. In “Fairy Ring,” a son visits his elderly mother, who has been afflicted with some kind of fungal infection, in the hospital. In “Pump and Dump”, a new father finds a breast pump for his wife at a garage sale but really needs to test it to make sure it works. Strange stuffed toys in “Knockoff” show the obsession and materialism of viral media toys.

These are only a fraction of what the reader will encounter. Rest assured, all the short stories in this collection will live in your brain well after you have finished them. If you are looking to add short horror story collections to your library, pick this up. Highly recommended.

Reviewed by Lizzy Walker