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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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