The Monkey's Other Paw: Revived Classic Stories of Dread and the Dead

In a worthy celebration of fright fiction's ancestry, fantasists pay homage to macabre masters with short prequels, sequels, and reimaginings of the classics. Disconcerting dream logic and psychosexual imagery haunt Damien Broderick's "The Unheimlich Maneuver," a tribute to E.T.A. Hoffman's "The Sandman." A presumably mad woman's life inspires Lovecraft in Don Webb's "The Doom That Came to Devil's Reef," a mythos story evoking cosmic menace with a satiric edge. Obsession leads to domestic horror in the Robert Louis Stevenson%E2%80%93inspired "Eddie The Great" by Steve Rasnic Tem, and a girl's fantasies become threatening reality in Scott Edelman's "A Most Extraordinary Man," a brooding exercise inspired by Saki's "The Open Window." A reclusive lighthouse keeper struggling to perceive reality finds disastrous consequences in the "The Alighted House," a Poe fragment completed by K.J. Cypret. Unfortunately, Alegria Luna Luz's "The Monkey's Other Paw" mimics the gruesome implications of W.W. Jacobs's "The Monkey's Paw" without its suspense or tragic resonance. The collection also includes homages to W.F. Harvey, Dylan Thomas, Franz Kafka, and Charles Perrault. While they don't surpass the source material, these grotesque tributes entertain while displaying the interconnectedness of literary themes and characters. (June)