protean depravity

Ever since an editor told me that in anthologies and collections the best short stories are traditionally placed in the beginning (to get the reader hooked), I have been wondering about the placement/arrangement of short stories and whether or not what he told me is even true. Is it like an album where there's a sort of continuity between the pieces? Or was he right and you get hooked with the first story and the rest of your read is but a chase for that same high you found in the beginning? How do they even decide which the “best” story is? In my own reading experience, I have seen it all – anthologies that start strong but fizzle out, anthologies that have a strong middle streak, collections that end with a banger, or those that suck all together.

Probably everyone has some kind of story revolving around the first author they enjoyed reading, and for many people in my broader generation that author is Stephen King, since fear as he writes it moves children and younger people on a deeper level. I first read The Stand  in middle school and back then it was already all the hype to read Stephen King, it was even more impressive to read this particular book because it was so thick and the cover was so crazy. Still, then and now, it has never been my favorite King book. The reasons for that are many, but mainly because I see it more like a dark Fantasy book and it has many religious implications I personally don't very much enjoy. I can still acknowledge the importance of a book without necessarily loving it, though, and that's what I'll do in this case. So, ever since I heard about The End of the World As We Know It , this mammoth project of 35 short stories set in the The Stand universe by 35 contemporary horror authors ...

C'est le moment où un homme sain d'esprit qui cause avec un fou ne s'est pas encore aperçu que c'est un fou. The above quote by Marcel Proust from À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs , the second installment of his In Search of Lost Time series, describes a moment you haven't yet realized that the person you are chatting with is, in fact, insane. It is this quote, oddly enough, that has always sprang to my mind, the feeling that surfaces from within me, when I listen to the American folk rock band Neutral Milk Hotel. It is the core of what this music's surface of pleasantness and harmony, conveyed by melodious, honeyed, smooth tunes, hiding outbursts of intense emotion and distorted, disrupted by glimpses of insanity, by cacophony, awakens in me. And it intrigues me, it haunts me, I can listen to them and be inspired to a different feeling every single time, but that basis of oddity, of weirdness remains.

In almost every horror anthology there's one recurring name that piques my attention because the stories under that name almost always land among my highlights: Joe R. Lansdale. I also keep on hearing how great he is, even more so since I started working at a crime and mystery bookshop, because Lansdale shines both in horror and crime fiction. So, you know how you have an endless back list of authors' names you want to read some day? Well, Lansdale was one of those names perpetually in the back of my head. I even have his The Best of Joe R. Lansdale sitting on my shelf, because you know me, I'll buy it and let it sit there for years before finally reading a book and then get frustrated because I had this gem in my home all these years.

What comes to your mind when you think of the “Wild West”? Horses, bandits, desperados, cowboys, wise natives, prostitutes in petticoats dancing to piano songs in wooden saloons, rangers, scorching heat, guns, dust, grave diggers, Sheriffs and Reverends, public hangings, even Chinese railroad workers and wandering medicine men? Well, Hot Iron and Cold Blood adds flesh eating birds, vampires, worshipers of Yog-Sothoth, revenge spells, headless warriors, ghost dinosaurs, spirits, crazy pimps, and speaking holes to that, and so here we have one of the most original and well-done anthologies of the past decade which absolutely succeeds in wonderfully integrating the weird, the unsettling as well as the horror and terror into this intrinsically surreal and hostile, but at the same time free and hopeful environment. The idea of living in a time without my dentist and Nine Inch Nails is terrifying to me. Any historical story set in a time without these is principally uninteresti...

Of course one can never know the hardships of curating and editing a horror anthology as iconic as Datlow's Best Horror of the Year and there may be reasons beyond our knowledge why some stories don't make it there and why others do. I'm pretty sure that 2022-2023 was an exceptionally good time for horror short stories, but unfortunately I don't see that reflected in this book. In consequence, this year is one of those years in which the Datlow Best of Anthology does not quite strike my fancy. It happens.

  So here's my not so surprising surprise I said I would announce this week: Revealing the cover of my translation project of a Turkish SF-anthology (cover art by Alessio Gherardini), and the publication date which is October 9th 2024!

There are books on this Earth, which can take you away - not so much into another world than rather into another reality. You know that place exists, only it is different from where you are, they do things differently, the history is another, and the horrors, though similar in nature, are different there too. In ten stories from various Latin American countries, Through the Night Like a Snake: Latin American Horror Stories takes you into such a different reality where it’s nothing astounding to have a vulture as neighbor, where you can see the ghost of a serial killer, where supernatural, extraterrestrial beings are among us, in our houses, in our gardens, and where the haunting remnants of Nazism brought here from far away mesh with cults and communes and reign in terror.

A couple of months ago Caro had offered me a copy of Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror, edited by Jordan Peele and John Joseph Adams, to review for the Otherland Newsletter. Even though I was really anxious to read it and I knew I would eventually get my hands on it, I declined nevertheless, because it's 400 pages long and I didn't see myself finishing and reviewing it any time soon. It was then a surprise to find an audiobook edition at my local library, not only because it was available so quickly after the publication of the print book, but also because it is very seldom to find audiobooks of anthologies or short story collections in general. I put a hold on the audiobook edition and eventually had the chance to listen to it, which I'm SO glad to have done! In the printed text, each story is already of a very high quality level - I wouldn't expect it any other way with two gigantic names like Peele and Adams printed on the cover. I love a good au...

Spectacular! Another excellent horror anthology by Chrystal Lake Publishing, and this time the contributing authors were asked to write and put their own dark twists into the works of William Shakespeare. Beware before starting to read this, though - a rudimentary knowledge on featured plays would provide an additional level of appreciation for the reader, and I don't think they should be sufficiently enjoyable if you don’t know the source plays. So I definitely recommend to at least read the Wikipedia entries of the original works, it will be so much more rewarding. There are 42 contributions in total - so the number of highlights in this already wonderful anthology is accordingly high. And so is the number of stories and poems revolving around neglected characters or characters treated unfairly by The Bard, in an attempt to give them redemption or show their own points of view, bringing about a dark but karmic quality. Yes, “REVENGE” in capital letters is the motto for th...

Screams from the Dark: 29 Tales of Monsters and the Monstrous ed. by Ellen Datlow Reviewing any one of Ellen Datlow’s excellent horror anthologies is always a pleasure as they unanimously feature stories of high-quality writing and are a kind of go-to place for us horror readers who want to discover fresh blood. So I was lusting for her latest themed anthology, the massive Screams from the Dark: 29 Tales of Monsters and the Monstrous anthology ever since the announcement of its publication in the summer and gifted it to myself as a birthday treat in the fall, intending to read a story a day in October, which I did.

If done right, found footage can be one of the most chilling, dread inducing subgenres in horror cinema. Unfortunately, it became a venue for filmmakers too lazy or inept to carry out proper camera works trying to conceal their shoddiness behind this once revolutionary and exciting, but now simply exhausted category. So I was interested in how the translation into literature would work when I heard about Found: An Anthology of Found Footage Horror , edited by Andrew Cull and Gabino Iglesias, but was admittedly not very hopeful. What I found didn’t exceed my expectations by very far, yet I still was able to enjoy quite a few good stories.

Not only is the living easy during summertime, so is reading summer-themed horror books! While most people feel that Halloween is an especially good time for horror, I, not completely uncontroversially, argue that the summer is much more terrifying. The oppressive heat, the unknown waters, buzzing insects, nature and creatures coming to life all at once, crippling boredom... It can certainly be too much for some. Then there's my personal story - a couple of years back I had explained on the Otherlander's Blog how there is an intense connection between hot summer days and horror movies for me and maybe that clarifies this whole subject some more. We're not talking movies right now though, I will talk about summer-themed horror books. And luckily there are a lot of them.  Incidentally I'm joining a water-themed reading challenge for my Horror Aficionados group called "Summer Horror Reading Challenge", prompting me to look up aquatic horror books set in and arou...

Spring and summer time are also awards time and it is exciting to watch the ballots of all major horror and SFF awards slowly trickling in. A couple of weeks ago the first Bram Stoker preliminary ballots and later the final lineup were announced and that lineup is, together with the Shirley Jackson lineup as well as recommendations from my network of fellow horror fans and friends, one of the major sources from which I make my tbr-list. So naturally I wanted to take a closer look at the nominees and the books who got "so close": the books that will be competing for the titles of superior achievement in bold and below them the other shortlisted books that haven't made it into the top five. In my experience these titles are almost always just as good and if you ever wonder what to read next you can without hesitation grab one of them. There are quite a few titles I have already read and reviewed here, so I'll just link those to the corresponding Protean Depravity review...

The Best Horror of the Year Volume Thirteen was to be my final book of 2021, the perfect closure of my reading year… Or so I thought. What actually happened is that it didn’t even make it to the first book of 2022 because it starts so damn slow! My initial impression of the first few stories is such a poor one that I seriously wondered if this really can be the best horror of any year at all! I was wrong, though, a slow start does not necessarily mean a bad anthology. And as we all know anthologies usually are a mixed bag – it’s next to impossible to find consistently awesome ones and even if they were filled with only good stories we’d start petty bickering and comparing them to each other. Even though I was a little disappointed of the weak start (and honestly thought it would all go downhill from there because anthologies usually start really strong to get you hooked), I was very pleasantly surprised by the middle streak of genuinely scary and/or original stories which basically ...

High were the hopes for 2021 - after a disastrous pandemic year, tons of confusion, losses, sickness, bush fires, earthquakes and other catastrophes the world was going to enter a new, better era in 2021 with vaccination for all, freedom days everywhere, return to normality... It didn't turn out that way. Having reached the end of this year, having seen that the worst was yet to come, that those vaccines don't really work, 2021 actually feels like an extension of the most unpopular year 2020. The good things about the collective state that we are in can be counted on the fingers of one hand and one of them is certainly that there is much more time for reading compared to the old normal. So much did I read this year that it was seriously difficult to choose the winners for the Protean Depravity Best Books of 2021, but finally here they are!

Editor Ellen Datlow's new collection of short stories inspired by the infamous Shirley Jackson is simply SUBLIME. Believe me, I'm saying this as someone who isn't even an overly great fan of Jackson: each story in this book is magic! In her introduction, Datlow explains the essence of a Shirley Jackson story as "filled with hauntings, dysfunctional families, and domestic pain; simmering rage, loneliness, suspicion of outsiders; sibling rivalry and women trapped psychologically and/or by the supernatural", adding that Jackson embodies the "dark undercurrent of suburban life". And indeed, in each and every one of the 18 stories in this collection there is a piece of good old Shirley - haunted houses bring about madness, poisoning women in abundance, evil mothers, collective guilt, small-town horror... As I already mentioned above, I am not the biggest Jackson-fan but it was a great pleasure to recognize traces of say, "The Lottery" or Haunting o...