Eddie Generous

This is the perfect antidote to the commercialised saccharine tsunami of Valentine’s Day (when I was reading this). Seventeen stories by seventeen new(ish) writers. The style, genre, and length are diverse, but the content is consistently high. The best are brilliant, and the rest are pretty good.

Most are dappled with stains of dark fantasy or light horror, and some have a distinct fairytale feel. Three have central LGBTQ themes.

Love comes in a cornucopia of forms. Sexual, platonic, show more parental, self, taboo, and indescribable. Generous and gentle, or desperate, destructive, and vengeful. Heartbreak comes in many forms too, including, betrayal, sickness, stupidly self-inflicted, rape, and death. One speck of rot can infect the crop. Even the purest can turn sour or tragic, and although it’s not the victim’s fault, where supernatural forces are involved (in one sense, when are they not?), it’s not always the perpetrator’s either.

There are plenty of surprises, and enough quirk, charm, humour, and hope to balance the deeper, darker strands.

Even though these tales are about the sometimes agonising consequences of love, the overall message felt like an optimistic one of courage and acceptance. It's worth the risk. (Or maybe I unknowingly drunk the Hallmark Kool-Aid.)

Love is love.*
*Until it isn’t.

40 Ways to Leave Your Monster Lover, by Gwendolyn Kiste

“You won’t meet with him again. That’s what a good girl would do. But you already know it’s not what you’ll do.”

Magical, knowing, feminist, hopeful, and funny. It’s conversational advice of all the things you know you shouldn’t do, but do anyway. It progresses from “Don’t become his lover in the first place”, though stages of an increasingly disturbing relationship - for more than the obvious reason. “You could still run. You know you won’t. But you could.” There are nods to fairytales (wolves, “a forest darker than heartbreak”) and mythology (pomegranate seeds, and the elements of fire, water, and earth). Loved it.

It Breaks My Heart to Watch You Rot, by Somer Canon

“More enduring than the object of her love was the hole he left behind. There’s no happiness in holes.”

The love of an object. But which of them is really rotting?

What is Love? by Calvin Demmer

“As my wings grew tired, the devastation below bored me. The cracks within my soul demanded more than papering over.”

African folklore: The Lightning Bird. A shape-shifting, blood-drinking semi-human, wanting to escape his enslavement and find “companionship - preview of love”, based on truth. Can he escape his destiny? The “love” he finally experiences does not fit the usual definition.

Heirloom, by Theresa Braun

“Mottled in her head were bits of a dream.”

It would be easy to dismiss this as a write-by-numbers collection of clichés, but it’s more original, and better written than that. Rachel is a psychiatrist with no maternal instinct, who inherits a large mirror from her mother, which turns out to be a portal to another and place, where she is pregnant by The Master. Their child has a dark and important destiny. She moves between the two realms a few times, becoming more disturbed with each switch, exacerbated by possible connections with a couple of her patients. As her perception of reality shifts, so does the reader’s, but even so, the ending was a slight surprise.

The Recluse, by John Boden

A harmless crush on a colleague? Beware the shy guy. He may not be what he seems.

Dog Tired, by Eddie Generous

“Prince drove like a Sunday man skipping church and drinking in the real glory of a day off work.”

A road trip, but something’s not right. Cassandra is not well, and it’s clearly crucial for Prince to keep her awake. He repeatedly reaffirms his love for her, and she reciprocates. The sex scene on page 101 is a possible entrant for the Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex In Fiction Award, but the rest of the story is much better. Unease gradually swells to vague worry, until the true horror of their situation comes into focus.

The Pink Balloon, by Tom Deady

“The brightness of the day began to dim, only at the edges first, then closing in like the ending of an old movie fading to black.”

A mother takes her young daughter and baby son to the town fair because the father won’t. His love for them is questioned. A balloon, a candy-proffering clown, and dramatic consequences where love seems proven in a cruel way. The crushing guilt of failing a loved one, and never being able to rectify matters proves unbearable. There is a hint of psychological or fantastical mystery, but I found the writing itself rather plodding.

It’s My Party and I’ll Cry if I want to, by JL Knight

“He gulped her air hungrily into his lungs, devouring her.”

Short and agonising portrayal of bereavement (that’s not a spoiler). A shame it follows The Pink Balloon, as at first it seems as if it might be similar. It’s not.

Consumed, by Madhvi Ramani

The grass is always greener on the other side - literally, to a lawnmower salesman. In this story, the state of the grass mirrors the state of his life and relationships and the price of blow jobs can be very high . Brutal.

“The grass grew darker, blending with the woods beyond.”

Burning Samantha, by Scott Paul Hallam

“A daughter that her mother never knew she had.”
“His grin that melts away the outside world.”

A trans girls is preparing for a school dance with her best friend - her first outing as a girl (not a spoiler). It’s sweet and mostly positive. But by the end, I desperately hoped it was set in the past. I fear it is not.

Class of 2000, by Robert Dean

“When I got up this morning, murdering Alex Stanchon was not on my To Do list.”

So opens this story about a college baseball star, returning to his home town, stirring memories of his first love, and the different way the two of them were treated.

“Driving around town, seeing things I’d buried, I’m intercepting memories differently.”

Learning to Love, by Jennifer Williams

“My love leaves marks… Scars form that wind and twist like knotted rope… maps of our knowing, a guidebook of on how not to be. But they are also like the touching of stars. ”

The narrator has been in love 45 times, with men and women, and wants to learn to love without leaving marks. The old mantra is to love yourself.

“They say love hurts. It’s true. It hurts like hell.”

Brothers, by Leo X Robertson

“I just hope you forget about me too one day… You’re sleeping with a ghost and you don’t even know it.”

Biological brothers, and friends as close as brothers, gay lovers and mothers, too, set over more than a decade of troubles (political and personal/psychiatric) in Ireland. It’s told from different characters’ perspectives, including a couple of diaries, which means the chronology jumps. At first, I wasn’t always sure about the relationships and sequence of events, but I think that was deliberately to unsettle the reader. It’s gritty and raw and probably realistic (drugs, graffiti, arrest, prostitutes, and psychosis are outside my experience). That made the introduction of more supernatural aspects startling (though this was the first story I read; if I had read the preceding ones first, it would have been less unexpected). Powerful and clever.

“Walls had crumbled, and those that remained held Hugo and Bobby’s names only in the palimpsest of their spray’s eroded bumps beneath the white paint that had erased all their colors and images.”

Porcelain Skin, by Laura Blackwell

“I’m not sure I like your world… But I’m not sure I care for mine anymore, either.”

A lonely old woman is given a wooden box with a clockwork ballerina on top that belonged to her best friend who died thirteen years earlier. There is a fairytale innocence that made it feel more YA than the others in this anthology. Not really my thing, but others may find it charming.

The Heart of the Orchard, by Erin Sweet Al-Mehairi

“Once your roots are planted on a land for long, it claims you for its own.”

Melissa lives alone, on a small part of what was her family’s farm, growing the best peaches for miles around. But they are not as good as they were. A mysterious orchard man offers the possibility of improving her crop. If something seems too good to be true, maybe it is, in fairytales at least as much as real life. She gradually notices misplaced objects, but can’t remember how they got that way. Worse things are going on in the town. She keeps a journal to try to join the dots, though the reason was disappointingly obvious to me from the off. Nevertheless, it reminded me of Angela Carter’s adult reworkings of traditional fairytales The Bloody Chamber (see my review HERE) more than any of the others.

Meeting the Parents, by Sarah L Johnson

Short, amusing, sweet. As a standalone story, the twist might be more of a surprise - welcome or unwelcome, depending on what you feel about arachnids - and maybe The Fly and Kafka.

Matchmaker, by Meg Elison

“She left a hole in me so ragged and bloody that I didn’t know whether I needed a bandage or a bullet.”

Asimov as Cupid (indirectly). #GeekLove. I love.

As Margaret Atwood writes in The Blind Assassin (see my review HERE):
"All stories are about wolves… Anything else is sentimental drivel." show less

A couple have a breakdown on an isolated road on their way home from a party. They're in a good mood from cocktails and don't really look at the guy who stops to help out until they're in his truck. The man, covered in what looks like heavy stage make-up, begins telling the couple some very disturbing stories. The first is about local teenagers who go missing, the second about a rapist who wakes up from a coma to a world run by women.

I am a little late to this party (TBR list is serious this year), but this issue was worth the wait. Perfect mix of emotional dark fiction with a few informative nonfiction articles, including a helpful piece for writers. The stories are the meat, each seasoned with its own flavor of heartfelt horror and speculative strangeness. Gut punches and tear jerkers, in the best way. Unnerving always introduces me to authors I had no idea I loved, and this issue is no exception. It is my favorite show more indie horror mag! show less

Some hearts are tougher to stomach than others.

Short stories running the rusty knife gamut of love, from the insanely familiar strains of the obsessively romantic and the deeply sexual and passionate, to infinitely complex and weighted familial bindings. Despite the welcome variety in the stories selected for this collection, and the attempt to traverse as wide a spectrum of styles as possible, the subject is too grand and doomed to glorious failure. Which is fitting of course. The show more collection burns bravely, and ends up above average, and even a little wiser as a result, if we are allowing such things. I like the ambition.

Nothing more frightening and unendurable than an exquisite heart hardening against you. show less