Obviously short story collections are very variable but overall I enjoyed this a lot. There's none I'd super recommend but there were no real clunkers either (although the first story is overall the worst I think)

Some that I liked more than average:

In a Cavern, In a Canyon by Laird Barron - combined a well sketched out background of Alaskan outposts and rough family life with a particularly vivid and uncomfortable monster the help me monster, a creature who appears when people are trying to help others and eats them due to their compassion the monster and the way a disappearance or a single experience can define your life connected well too

Between the Pilings by Steve Rasnic Tem - looking at lovecraftian innsmouth as a smalltime seaside resort. I think *just* the seaside town aspect was enough to make me like it because it reminded me of all the run down seaside towns in the UK but things like the froggy people being hotel clerks tapping on their computer was charming too. And the sense of chasing nostalgia and the past and then sometimes it creeps up and catches you... It's good

The Underground Economy by John Langan - I'm not sure why this stuck with me; it's set mostly in a strip club and there's no attempt at explanation or connections. It just... Is. But for some reason the imagery really compelled me. Hard one to convey

The Rooms Are High by Reggie Oliver - another one where I probably enjoyed it more because it's clearly set in a seaside town I know well (Ramsgate) but I just loved the atmosphere here. It kind of whiffs the ending I think but it really sells the sense of things being slightly off and I love the old style b&b setting. Be warned for descriptions of implied child and adult sexual abuse though. The way it played with memory and age and going back to something actually bad... There's a decent amount left unanswered that I feel wasn't really used well but the parts that are there are very good

Fabulous Beasts by Priya Sharma - this constantly came close to being gratuitously unpleasant but never crossed it. Again heavy warnings for incest, sexual abuse, murder, child sexual abuse there's something slightly absurd about the ending but in a way that's like "fuck it why not, they deserve it". Again it's largely about how your past can destroy your present and escaping that and the consequences of it.

I also liked the Tamsyn Muir entry The Woman in the Hill. The Neil Gaiman entry Black Dog had promise but got a bit screwed by its connection to American Gods which ruined some of the horror. the rest are all at least alright and all very readable. ( )

A pretty solid collection: one or two standout stories and no real duds. Highlights include "Universal Horror" by Stephen Graham Jones (fast becoming one of my favorite horror writers); “Between the Pilings” by Steve Rasnic Tem, a Lovecraftian tragedy; “The Woman in the Hill” by Tamsyn Muir, a contagion-horror spread between women; “Fabulous Beasts” by Priya Sharma, a delightful monster girl story; and "Black Dog" by Neil Gaiman, a story in the American Gods universe. ( )

I'm teaching this anthology in a horror fiction class in the spring, for use at the end of the semester to look at very recent work in the genre. I am interested in which stories my students think are most effective, what influences they see from earlier writers, and what trends they see in new work.

There are a number of Lovecraftian stories here, the best of them by Laird Barron, Steve Rasnic Tem, Tamsyn Muir, and Brian Hodge, the latter in the vein of revisionist Lovecraft stories like Victor Lavalle's Ballad of Black Tom, which critique Lovecraft's reactionary, racist politics while still being creepily Lovecraftian. (Hodge's story turns out to be scarily relevant for Trump's America.)

A number of stories have this narrative structure: someone tells someone else a story. This can work well to involve the reader as listener and create an extra level of ambiguity. Both Tom Johnstone's Irish troubles story "Slaughtered Lamb" and Ray Cluley's Western-inspired "Indian Giver" create rich, believable historical settings, but do not quite create the impact they were going for. (Plus, I'm allergic to Native American curse stories, like Cluley's, no matter how self-conscious they are about what they are doing.) Too much indirectness can make the story feel removed and distant. Both Tamsyn Muir ("The Woman in the Hill") and Carmen Maria Machado ("Descent")(whose stories are my favorites in the whole collection) use this structure to creepy and devastating effect, respectively, both by creating an unexpected twist that turns the telling of the story into an act of violence or confrontation with evil.

Other favorites in the collection are Stephen Graham Jones's "Universal Horror," Letitia Trent's "Wilderness," and Priya Sharma's "Fabulous Beasts."

The other stories have many good features and will be fun to teach. The only story I really didn't care for was Kelley Armstrong's opening story, which reads more like a sketch or the prologue of a somewhat cliche vampire novel. ( )