Queer Little Nightmares

For this enormously fun horror anthology, Ly (Mythical Man) and Zomparelli (Everything Is Awful and You’re a Terrible Person) bring together 32 pieces of short fiction and poetry unified in their stance that to be a monster is not such a bad thing—and that it is perhaps the only possible escape from the heteronormative world. The best stories take this theme and run with it: Hiromi Goto’s shockingly graphic “And the Moon Spun Round Like a Top” features a perimenopausal woman birthing bloody creature-shaped clots of menstrual blood which she in turn devours, while in Amber Dawn’s charmingly retro “Wooly Bully” young lesbians turn into wolves and terrorize their local farm country. As Zomparelli says in his introduction, “the queer community loves a monster.” Indeed, the relationship between horror and queerness is nothing new, and the less successful pieces here struggle to break new ground within this idea. Both Victoria Mbabazi’s “The Creation of Eve” and jaye simpson’s “#WWMD?” stick to the straightforward: queer woman as monster. Despite a few hiccups, this many-ways diverse anthology has the power, like the monsters within, to captivate, ensnare, seduce, and hold hostage its readers. (Oct.)