The face of horror fiction continues to be enhanced, both in representation and in relevance.
Horror writers representing varied cultures, genders, and sexual orientations contribute stories cataloging anxieties of, and toward, “the other”—whatever that “other” may be.
The subtitle, An Inclusive Anthology, hammers home what Bram Stoker Award winners Liaguno and Mason have assembled: a trailblazing anthology in which LGBTQ+ characters and people of color are both feared and preyed upon in jolting, haunting, sometimes funny, and/or graphically violent tales. Dramatizing fears, anxieties, and phobias held by and against those perceived as socially marginal can be a delicate, even dicey process. But the stories here are mostly tough-minded and emphatic in such provocative variations on this theme as Jennifer McMahon’s tautly woven, wickedly ingenious “Idiot Girls,” about teen lesbian lovers whose secret trysts pit them against the immigrant groundskeeper of their apartment complex—and put them in the path of a serial killer. Then there’s “Night Shopper,” Michael H. Hanson’s revenge fantasy in which a Muslim trans woman with a penchant for Wittgenstein’s aphorisms finds unlikely salvation from hate crime in the shut-ins to whom she delivers groceries. Similar if subtler gratifications are available in Usman T. Malik’s “Mud Flappers,” which reaches further afield to an island off the Karachi coast whose residents have sustained an effective—and grisly—way of resisting would-be exploiters. A different, if no less bizarre, act of retribution is submitted for our approval by the crime writer S.A. Cosby in “What Blood Hath Wrought,” in which a Black history professor calls upon otherworldly powers to seek out from among a motley collection of Pancake Shack diners the homicidal descendant of a sadistic slaveholder. The terrorism of anti-Asian racism aroused by Covid-19 swells into more widespread and profoundly transfiguring scientific phenomena in Denise Dumars’ “Scrape,” while in Hailey Piper’s “The Turning,” adolescent girls are swept up by a plague that transforms them into prehistoric mammals, thus creating newer, scarier forms of “the other” that frighten the grown-ups—and resist any efforts to change back to whatever they were before. One could go on and on citing stories by such writers as, Alma Katsu, Gabino Iglesias, Nathan Carson, and others.
The face of horror fiction continues to be enhanced, both in representation and in relevance.Pub Date: July 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-358-65889-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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