Herculine by Grace Byron is a funny, sad, horrific story about friends, family, and being sacrificed to or otherwise ripped apart by demons.

And bonus points for the reference to the dark Americana popularized by shows like Twin Peaks. I don’t even like pie, but, thanks to Dale Cooper, I always want to have pie in diners.

Margaret Culpeper is desperate. She has a rare autoimmune disorder whose symptoms - especially the pain - and the impact they have on her make it hard to keep a job or relationships; even her family doesn’t understand, and she’s struggling to stay afloat. So when she gets an opportunity to join a highly experimental study at Graceview Memorial Hospital - which includes a stipend along with complete coverage of all treatment expense - that could cure her, she is quick to accept, in spite of an urgent warning she receives from Isabel, one of the nurses, who urges her to leave.

One of Us by Dan Chaon explores themes of the self, otherness, found family, and what it means to live and die in the trappings of a thrilling adventure novel.

The novella and the short stories all seem to have a nod to folklore or urban legends but (mostly) from a slightly different angle than I’ve seen before, and overall some were more my taste than others.

Why did I do this to myself?! Or, more to the point, Gemma Amor, why did you do this to me?! I guess the new way Gemma Amor fans will recognize each other is by the squirming and scratching. I only made it about half a dozen chapters into ITCH! before the creepy-crawlies commenced, and I haven’t stopped itching since. 

There are moments where I felt my stomach drop as I realized what was happening to someone, moments where I felt my stomach tighten in grief as the women lost loved ones, and moments where I felt my stomach heave at the descriptions bordering on body horror of how the ghost/demon manifested.

Perfect Happiness by Jeong You-Jeong is dark, tense, sad - and I could not stop reading it. Twelve hours later, and I still have a knot in my stomach thinking about Yuma Shin. 

It’s not as lyrical, but Perfect Happiness could have been called, “It’s Yuma’s World, and We’re All Living In It”. 

The October Film Haunt by Michael Wehunt is “it’s going right back in my TBR so I can read it again” good. It’s scary, funny, the characters are so real, you feel like you’re right there with them, maybe you were even part of the original October Film Haunt because you, too, always assume that you’re living in a horror movie where you don’t take your eyes off the doll as it could come to life at any moment, you do not say Bloody Mary or Candyman in the mirror because you’re no dummy, and you make a wide berth around that that tree because it could be the Pine Arch Creature.

Body of Water by Adam Godfrey brings to mind some of my favorite Stephen King short stories like The Mist, Trucks, and The Raft, as Godfrey’s characters are trapped in a diner by something in or of the water. But there are other “bottle” horror stories out there, so it’s not just this similarity that brings the King to mind. 

Saltcrop by Yume Kitasei is a sci-fi, dystopian, eco-thriller -  and a domestic drama about three sisters with absent fathers raised by their grandmother after their mother commits suicide - and I am here for all of it. 

Veil by Jonathan Janz is a fast-paced sci-fi action novel about family, what makes a family, and the expectations they have of us and we have of ourselves for them - oh, and about invisible somethings taking people right off the street or out of the park or even right out of their own freakin’ backyard to who knows where for who knows what purpose?

Exiles by Mason Coile (pseudonym of the late Andrew Pyper) drops us in the deep end by outlining the harsh realities of space travel that usually get skimmed over (which, tbh, is fine with me, but that’s because blood is about the only bodily fluid or excretion that doesn’t gross me out. I know. That level of TMI is probably on par with what I’m getting from the first pages of Exiles). 

I went into Black Flame by Gretchen Felker-Martin knowing little about it except that it was about a cursed film and, according to several people, I had to read it. They were right.

As the very good boy and at least part Australian cattle dog (just like my old girl Laika, also rescued from a shelter) alerts them almost immediately, evil is afoot.

Part folk horror, bigger part body horror, You Weren’t Meant to Be Human is a beautiful, brutal read.  I was uncomfortable almost immediately as blurred (or non-existent?) consent lines were crossed in the opening paragraphs (see note on content warnings below) - and that feeling never totally left. 

My suggested taglines:

• The sound bath will be a blood bath!

• Instead of meditation, decapitation!

• They came for inner peace, they’ll leave in pieces!

Some things I liked:

• Some of my favorite phrases

  • ”secret squirrel shenanigans”

  • “eponymous plastic raincoat”

• Herman!!! Everyone should have a black cat.

• The names of the mushrooms like “Father of Lies” and “The Harlot’s Progress”

Nowhere Land by Pamela Kinney starts with a bang as a group of ghost hunters in Virginia who’ve been hired to investigate a property outside of Gloucester called Burkett make a fatal discovery - that there is definitely paranormal activity in Nowhere Land. 

What I got that I was expecting: dark comedy and vampires

What I got that I was not expecting: family drama, characters dealing with misogyny and/or racism, and some legitimately scary and/ or tense scenes - made especially so by the amazing audio production.

Reading this collection was like taking a walk through a dark, dappled forest where mushrooms grow and wild creatures populate inside and outside of us, where sunlight only rarely makes it way through the canopy.