Extraordinary tales of terror that are as grim as they are delightful.
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
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.
Book 2 of Hearne's latest fantasy trilogy, The Seven Kennings (A Plague of Giants, 2017), set in a multiracial world thrust into turmoil by an invasion of peculiar giants.
In this world, most races have their own particular magical endowment, or “kenning,” though there are downsides to trying to gain the magic (an excellent chance of being killed instead) and using it (rapid aging and death). Most recently discovered is the sixth kenning, whose beneficiaries can talk to and command animals. The story canters along, although with multiple first-person narrators, it's confusing at times. Some characters are familiar, others are new, most of them with their own problems to solve, all somehow caught up in the grand design. To escape her overbearing father and the unreasoning violence his kind represents, fire-giant Olet Kanek leads her followers into the far north, hoping to found a new city where the races and kennings can peacefully coexist. Joining Olet are young Abhinava Khose, discoverer of the sixth kenning, and, later, Koesha Gansu (kenning: air), captain of an all-female crew shipwrecked by deep-sea monsters. Elsewhere, Hanima, who commands hive insects, struggles to free her city from the iron grip of wealthy, callous merchant monarchists. Other threads focus on the Bone Giants, relentless invaders seeking the still-unknown seventh kenning, whose confidence that this can defeat the other six is deeply disturbing. Under Hearne's light touch, these elements mesh perfectly, presenting an inventive, eye-filling panorama; satisfying (and, where appropriate, well-resolved) plotlines; and tensions between the races and their kennings to supply much of the drama.
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-345-54857-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.
A grandmaster of the hard-boiled crime genre shifts gears to spin bittersweet and, at times, bizarre tales about bruised, sensitive souls in love and trouble.
In one of the 17 stories that make up this collection, a supporting character says: “People are so afraid of dying that they don’t even live the little bit of life they have.” She casually drops this gnomic observation as a way of breaking down a lead character’s resistance to smoking a cigarette. But her aphorism could apply to almost all the eponymous awkward Black men examined with dry wit and deep empathy by the versatile and prolific Mosley, who takes one of his occasional departures from detective fiction to illuminate the many ways Black men confound society’s expectations and even perplex themselves. There is, for instance, Rufus Coombs, the mailroom messenger in “Pet Fly,” who connects more easily with household pests than he does with the women who work in his building. Or Albert Roundhouse, of “Almost Alyce,” who loses the love of his life and falls into a welter of alcohol, vagrancy, and, ultimately, enlightenment. Perhaps most alienated of all is Michael Trey in “Between Storms,” who locks himself in his New York City apartment after being traumatized by a major storm and finds himself taken by the outside world as a prophet—not of doom, but, maybe, peace? Not all these awkward types are hapless or benign: The short, shy surgeon in “Cut, Cut, Cut” turns out to be something like a mad scientist out of H.G. Wells while “Showdown on the Hudson” is a saga about an authentic Black cowboy from Texas who’s not exactly a perfect fit for New York City but is soon compelled to do the right thing, Western-style. The tough-minded and tenderly observant Mosley style remains constant throughout these stories even as they display varied approaches from the gothic to the surreal.
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4956-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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BOOK REVIEW
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