edited by Sara Tantlinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
Extraordinary tales of terror that are as grim as they are delightful.
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Colors haunt, unnerve, and kill in this polychromatic horror anthology of stories written by women.
In Sonora Taylor’s “Eat Your Colors,” Eve craves a healthier diet; she decides to follow a seemingly simple plan to eat foods of every color of the rainbow each day.However, she learns the hard way that not following the diet’s strict rules has sickening results. Most of the 25 tales in this collection instill a sense of dread into seemingly innocuous hues. For example, in Red Lagoe’s “Tangerine Sky,” a woman is repulsed by orange, as it’s shown to remind her of her lost sister. Elsewhere, the bright colors of a “radiant sunset” comprise Death’s wings in Nu Yang’s “Elegy,” and a man’s suicide precedes an unexpected “blazing array of blues” on display. Other tales take a more traditional approach by accentuating the glaring redness of blood, which tints many pages. G.G. Silverman turns the gloominess of an overcast day into full-scale horror in “The Gray” as a mist relentlessly terrorizes a town, draining residents of hope. These works make use of numerous familiar genre elements along the way, from ghosts and things with sharp teeth to unhinged murderers and terrible psychological torment. The book’s opening story, Frances Lu-Pai Ippolito’s “Hei Xian (The Black Thread),” is particularly sublime; in it, Taiwanese American Xing-Yun discovers an enigmatic black thread attached to his wrist. A red thread signifies love, but his symbolizes “inescapable death,” and his attempt to save himself leads to something unspeakable—and unforgettable.
Tantlinger, the author of the poetry collection Cradleland of Parasites (2021), has gathered a set of admirable stories featuring delicious twists, eerie creatures, and visceral imagery. They necessarily linger on assorted colors, befitting this anthology’s theme, but the prose throughout is vibrant in other ways. As Bindia Persaud memorably writes in “The Dyer and the Dressmakers,” “I forgot how to breathe for a moment. I wasn’t the only one. Elation, tinged with fear, rendered us immobile.” Throughout, the authors effectively evoke a range of senses, describing the touch of cool water, the loud hum of a passing helicopter, and any number of putrid smells. KC Grifant’s “The Color of Friendship” conjures impressive atmosphere as a woman continually looks for whatever is swimming in a nearby lake during her friends’ weekend getaway. These elements set the mood for stories that deliver shocks and ghastly plot turns. Women are frequently the main characters in these tales; Christa Wojciechowski’s “The Oasis” ably explores a woman’s post-abortion depression, and in Chelsea Pumpkins’ “Toxic Shock,” the protagonist’s “technicolor” menstruation is the start of a harrowing and inexplicable ordeal. In some stories, women initially seem to be passive victims only to be revealed as aggressors. Overall, readers will fly through these works, some of which could have easily been expanded to novel length. It’s a fine sampling of an array of voices in the horror genre that will assuredly garner a bevy of new fans.
Extraordinary tales of terror that are as grim as they are delightful.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-946335-43-2
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Strangehouse Books
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Leigh Bardugo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2019
With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally...
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New York Times Bestseller
Yale’s secret societies hide a supernatural secret in this fantasy/murder mystery/school story.
Most Yale students get admitted through some combination of impressive academics, athletics, extracurriculars, family connections, and donations, or perhaps bribing the right coach. Not Galaxy “Alex” Stern. The protagonist of Bardugo’s (King of Scars, 2019, etc.) first novel for adults, a high school dropout and low-level drug dealer, Alex got in because she can see dead people. A Yale dean who's a member of Lethe, one of the college’s famously mysterious secret societies, offers Alex a free ride if she will use her spook-spotting abilities to help Lethe with its mission: overseeing the other secret societies’ occult rituals. In Bardugo’s universe, the “Ancient Eight” secret societies (Lethe is the eponymous Ninth House) are not just old boys’ breeding grounds for the CIA, CEOs, Supreme Court justices, and so on, as they are in ours; they’re wielders of actual magic. Skull and Bones performs prognostications by borrowing patients from the local hospital, cutting them open, and examining their entrails. St. Elmo’s specializes in weather magic, useful for commodities traders; Aurelian, in unbreakable contracts; Manuscript goes in for glamours, or “illusions and lies,” helpful to politicians and movie stars alike. And all these rituals attract ghosts. It’s Alex’s job to keep the supernatural forces from embarrassing the magical elite by releasing chaos into the community (all while trying desperately to keep her grades up). “Dealing with ghosts was like riding the subway: Do not make eye contact. Do not smile. Do not engage. Otherwise, you never know what might follow you home.” A townie’s murder sets in motion a taut plot full of drug deals, drunken assaults, corruption, and cover-ups. Loyalties stretch and snap. Under it all runs the deep, dark river of ambition and anxiety that at once powers and undermines the Yale experience. Alex may have more reason than most to feel like an imposter, but anyone who’s spent time around the golden children of the Ivy League will likely recognize her self-doubt.
With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally dazzling sequels.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31307-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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by Leigh Bardugo ; illustrated by Dani Pendergast
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by Tim O’Brien ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 28, 1990
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
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