Manzetti, 150 Exquisite Horror Books (2021)

Alessandro Manzetti, 150 Exquisite Horror Books. Crystal Lake Publishing, 2021. Pp. 210. ISBN 978-1-7377-2187-1. $11.99.

Reviewed by Rachel Verkade

There is an art to creating a “Best of” list, whether that be a “Best of Shakespeare’s Plays” or “Best Singles by Take That.” You are inevitably going to make a lot of people angry. Art and tastes are subjective, and one man’s trash is another person’s treasure. And nowhere is this more true than with horror fiction. Fears are as individual as fingerprints. The film or book that terrify us and make chills run down our spine might make be utterly dull to another. And we horror fans are desperately protective of our best beloveds. I have seen knock-down drag-out fights between fans who can’t agree whether Matthew Stokoe’s Cows is trash or a masterpiece. So creating a volume in which you want to compile the best of modern horror fiction is a bit of a risky endeavour. Fortunately for all of us, Alessandro Manzetti decided to take on the challenge, and he took it on with grace, courage, and a library I can only dream of possessing.

Brozek & Rambo, Reinvented Heart (2022)

Jennifer Brozek & Cat Rambo (edd.), The Reinvented Heart. Caezik SF & Fantasy, 2022. Pp. 274. ISBN 978-1-6471-0042-1. $34.14/£21.01.

Reviewed by M.L. Clark

Sometimes an anthology is just a really good excuse to sit with strong and wide-ranging storytelling. Such was certainly the case with The Reinvented Heart, a collection of 24 stories centered on a wide range of emotional bonds, challenges, and opportunities. Across the board, the writing was deft and immersive, the stories were distinct and memorable, and many worked in striking conversation with their neighbours. The organization of this collection into three overarching “movements”—”Hearts,” “Hands,” and “Minds,” each opening with a small but potent bit of poetry by Jane Yolen, and revealing plenty of resonant story placements—also makes for an excellently curated reading experience, best read in the provided order. My only caveat, before I leap into high praise for the pieces themselves, is that I don’t think all of these stories reflect the anthology’s explicit mission statement. Then again, an anthology is often expected to carve out a singular role for itself in the market, and promotional material often makes sweeping claims to bring readers in.

Parrish, Trenchcoats, Towers and Trolls (2022)

Rhonda Parrish (ed.), Trenchcoats, Towers, and Trolls: Cyberpunk Fairy Tales. World Weaver Press, 2022. Pp. 240. ISBN 978-1-7340-5455-2. $15.95 pb/$4.99 e.

Reviewed by Lisa Timpf

In Trenchcoats, Towers, and Trolls, the third and last in the “Punked Up Fairy Tales” series, which also includes Grimm, Grit, and Gasoline and Clockwork, Curses, and Coal, Rhonda Parrish brings together twelve cyberpunk tales in a collection that is both engrossing and thought-provoking. Edmonton, Alberta-based anthologist and author Parrish is no newcomer to the anthology game: she has edited a number of other themed collections, including one about swashbuckling cats and an “Elemental Anthologies” series.

Galaxy’s Edge 53 (2021)

Galaxy’s Edge, ed. Lezli Robyn. Issue 53 (November 2021). Online at galaxysedge.com.

Reviewed by M.L. Clark

The latest Galaxy’s Edge is warmly introduced by editor Lezli Robyn, who is excited to share in this issue the winning story for The Mike Resnick Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Short Story by a New Author. In this inaugural year for the award, the prize went to Z.T. Bright, for “The Measure of a Mother’s Love.”

This winning story, which opens the issue’s fiction section, involves a mother in an orbiting station over Guangdong Province. Its occupants are a mother and her “son,” an insectoid alien who has chosen the name Zhuang after her first son, buried on the Earth below. The story follows the mother as she relives her initial struggle to understand her first son’s choices to set out on his own, in keeping with his sense of service to nation and species—and her chance to respond differently now, when her second “son” also presents his own need to move on.

Bestwick, Devils of London (2021)

Simon Bestwick, Devils of London. Hersham Horror Books, 2021. Pp. 114. ISBN 979-8-7321-2063-9. £8.00.

Reviewed by Jason Kahler

The new novella from British Fantasy Award-nominee Simon Bestwick, out now from Hersham Horror Books, dances between urban fantasy, horror, and social commentary. The story is decidedly British, with British sensibilities and concerns that flavor the narrative throughout its brisk telling. When a story is light on plot, as it is here, success is measured by the story’s execution. Originality. Commentary. A situation that lingers with you long after you’ve finished reading. Devils of London has the pieces to be successful—timeliness, an interesting point-of-view character, high stakes—but ultimately, the execution of the story as a whole falls short of its promise.

NewMyths issue # 55 (2021)

New Myths, ed. Susan Shell Winston. Issue 55 (June 2021). Online at newmyths.com.

Reviewed by M.L. Clark

NewMyths’s latest issue offers fiction, poetry, and nonfiction with an overarching connection to science-fiction and fantasy; and yet, the work ranges widely across traditional genre set-ups.

Twisted Moon #5 (2020)

Twisted Moon, ed. Hester J. Rook, P. Edda, Liz Duck-Chong & Selene Maris. Issue 5 (2020). Online at twistedmoonmag.com.

Reviewed by Djibril al-Ayad

Twisted Moon is a yearly magazine of speculative erotic poetry based in Australia that has been published online since 2016. Editors Rook, Edda, Duck-Chong and Maris are all also writers (some of whose work we’ve seen and loved elsewhere), and they bring a lover’s touch to the selection and presentation of poems in each issue. The contents are eclectic, as is perhaps inevitable with collections of poetry, and range from delicious, lyrical verses to the most discordant, experimental or opaque of forms, always tantalizing and excruciating and challenging.

Reckoning #5 (2021)

Reckoning, ed. Waverly SM, Giselle Leeb et al. Issue 5 (January–July 2021). Online at reckoning.press.

Reviewed by M.L. Clark

Editor Cécile Cristofari opens Reckoning 5 with a call to action shaped by how pandemic has significantly isolated us from nature; we cannot simply rely on nostalgia to deepen our fight against ongoing natural depreciation from climate change and other human-made devastations. Editor Leah Bobet adds, in her following editorial, that the quest for poetry here was shaped by little intimacies, “flecks of possibility” for reconnection with the world around us, in our most personable and fleeting interactions with the rest of nature.

Xueting, Sinopticon (2021)

Xueting Christine Ni (ed. and trans.), Sinopticon: A Celebration of Chinese Science Fiction. Solaris Books, 2021. Pp. 448. ISBN 978-1-78108-852-4. $14.99.

Reviewed by Cait Coker

The 2014 translation of Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem by Ken Liu into English became an unexpected defining moment in the field; there is now only “before” and “after” when talking about Chinese science fiction in the Anglo world. It is significant, then, that in her introduction to Sinopticon: A Celebration of Chinese Science Fiction, that editor Xueting Christine Ni describes her experience looking for science fiction books after walking into a Xinhua bookstore (China’s biggest bookseller chain). She is surprised by the lack of genre fiction aside from Wuxia (historical fiction concerned with martial artists)*, and when she asks for Kehuan (Chinese science fiction) the clerk gestures her towards the children’s section. When Xueting protests and asks if they are really shelving material like Liu there, the clerk responds with “Oh! Why didn’t you say so before?” and leads her where the material is shelved near science education textbooks. This preliminary scene explains the value placed on Kehuan in China: still at the margins of popular culture despite undergoing a remarkable renaissance both at home, and especially, abroad. Xueting’s purpose in editing this volume is to illustrate the wide range of Chinese science fiction, translating thirteen stories that were originally published between 1991 and 2021. This thirty year review, as it were, is not presented chronologically or thematically, but rather lets each work stand against one another for the reader to enjoy. Xueting also provides, after each story, notes that discuss the author as well as context for the story’s creation and contents. Xueting also makes a point of providing gender parity in these selections, with just over half of the authors being women. The overall result is an incredibly solid, thoughtful, and exciting anthology that is genuinely one of the best I’ve read in ages.

The Dark issue #78 (2021)

The Dark Magazine, ed. Sean Wallace & Veronica Giguere. Issue 78 (November 2021). Prime Books. $1.99 or online at thedarkmagazine.com.

Reviewed by M.L. Clark

The Dark magazine’s November 2021 issue offers four stories that address different ways in which we find ourselves swept up by and made complicit in the unconscionable. In all, a binding thread is a perceived lack of agency—in some cases, even when the protagonist has absolutely made choices to do harm to others, too.

Kaleidotrope, Autumn 2021

Kaleidotrope, ed. Fred Coppersmith. Autumn 2021. Online at kaleidotrope.net or Kindle.

Reviewed by Gwen C. Katz

I know I’m not the only one asking “What’s the deal with Kaleidotrope?”

I say that with the utmost admiration. Kaleidotrope is a small penny-a-word publication; I happen to love reading penny-a-word publications, but most readers (and writers) turn up their noses at them in favor of the splashy pro mags. Yet Kaleidotrope consistently appears alongside the likes of Lightspeed and Strange Horizons in reviews, award nominations, and best-of collections—virtually always the only subpro magazine on the list. Luminaries like Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Genevieve Valentine, who could presumably place a story anywhere, still sell their stories to Kaleidotrope for a couple of tenners. What makes it so special?

Gadz, The Workshop of Filthy Creation (2021)

Richard Gadz, The Workshop of Filthy Creation. Deixis Press, 2021. Pp. 258. ISBN 978-1-8384987-3-3. $15.99.

Reviewed by Jason Kahler

In the days leading up to me finishing reading Richard Gadz’s excellent The Workshop of Filthy Creation, my significant other and I braved the COVID-draped movie theater for a special double-feature of the classic (1931) films Dracula and Frankenstein. I’d seen both of those movies before, of course, but I don’t think I’d ever watched them back-to-back, and certainly never on the big screen.

As much as I love both of those films, and appreciate them as important artifacts of film and cultural history, I don’t think I’d understood just how much I prefer Frankenstein until experiencing them in such direct juxtaposition. For starters, Dracula is just so slow, with so much of its menace focused on Bela Lugosi’s eyes just emoting dread. Frankenstein crackles with intensity, with desperation, and ultimately, with deeper questions about the nature of living and humanity. There’s just more on the shelf. Lugosi’s count may win the trophy for best performance between the two (though Karloff really does a great job of showing the monster’s despair through all that make-up), but Frankenstein is just a better movie.