Re-Read This: The Year’s Best Horror Stories
The Year’s Best Horror Stories was a twenty-two volume annual anthology series that ran from 1971 through 1994. Christopher Lee himself wrote the introduction to 1972’s Volume II.
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Read This: M.R. James’s Complete Ghost Stories
M.R. James is perhaps the most reliably frightening author I can think of. Although Montague Rhodes James only published 34 stories over the course of his life, each one is a polished gem of unwise inquiries, lurking supernatural threats and terrible ghostly vengeance. What could be better, with Halloween looming?
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Read This: The Maiden Voyage and Other Departures
The Maiden Voyage and Other Departures by Jessica McHugh is a collection of six loosely related stories that hinge on a promising steampunk concept. In McHugh’s take on the early nineteen-tens, the world is polluted by industrial pollen technology and humanity shares the stage with apisthropes–bee/human hybrids living in disguise
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Read This: The Legion of Regrettable Supervillains
Jon Morris’s The Legion of Regrettable Supervillains is a natural sequel to his The League of Regrettable Superheroes. Let’s face it: Without anyone to fight against, the superheroes are just a bunch of folks running around in funky spandex underoos. Let’s also face that very few supervillains will have the
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Re-Read This: Of Dice and Men
Revisiting another blast from the past Of Dice and Men The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and the People Who Play It David M. Ewalt Scribner: 288 pp., $26 Back in 2013, when David Ewalt’s Of Dice and Men came out, I had not
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Re-Read This: The League of Regrettable Superheroes
Revisiting an oldie but goodie Some comic book superheroes make you think, and some make you wonder. Guess which ones show up in Jon Morris’s The League of Regrettable Superheroes? “More sophisticated storytelling, including such high-profile critical successes as Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen, encouraged a new generation of
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Read This: Lovecraft Country
Lovecraft Country starts with a fascinating premise–what would it be like as an African-American to battle the forces of darkness while also battling the rampant racism of 1950s America? Matt Ruff gives the idea a good run in his episodic 2016 novel. The interconnected stories are well-paced and well-told, and
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Read This: Harlan Ellison Is Gone
Harlan Ellison died last week at the age of 84. He was a genuine legend in science fiction, by all accounts larger than life and twice as abrasive. I never met the man, but he has still been a part of my life for decades. When I was around eleven
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Read This: Trade Yer Coffin For A Gun
Trade Yer Coffin for a Gun by Mer Whinery is one truly weird Western. It reads like a mash up of From Dusk Till Dawn, High Plains Drifter, and Zombie–this is a big, bold, B movie of a book that revels in its inspirations. Let’s face it: any tale that brings
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Read This: Figures Unseen
Figures Unseen: Selected Stories, the latest collection by Steve Rasnic Tem, is a master-class in weird fiction. The circumstances in these thirty five stories are disturbingly familiar, the settings uncomfortably domestic. Tem’s flawed and damaged characters struggle to hold on to some semblance of normalcy as their lives come apart.
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