 Where Decay Sleeps by Anna Cheung Formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook Published: 28 October 2021 | ISBN: 9781916234734 Red across black, the blood moon smeared her lunar cycle across the night shedding the sky from scarlet to rust. His garden awakened Where Decay Sleeps lays 36 poems on the undertaker’s table, revealing to us the seven stages of decay: pallor mortis, algor mortis, rigor mortis, livor mortis, putrefaction, decomposition and skeletonisation. Readers are summoned to walk the Gothic ruins of monsters, where death and decay lie sleeping. Tread carefully through Satan’s garden. Feast your eyes on the Le Chateau Viande menu (before your eyes are feasted upon). Read the bios of monsters on Tinder. Discover the unpleasant side effects of a werewolf ’s medication. Blending traditional Gothic imagery, modern technology and Chinese folklore, Where Decay Sleeps is the debut poetry collection from the haunted mind of Anna Cheung. (review by Rebecca Rowland) Anna Cheung’s new collection by Haunt Publishing is comprised of thirty-six poems of various styles organized into seven categories, and the topics and mood range from everyday grotesque to nightmarishly creepy. I developed a morbid interest in horror poetry over the past year and was intrigued to read Cheung’s release, and Where Decay Sleeps exceeded all of my expectations. The cover is gorgeous, the interior design is meticulously eye-catching, and the writing itself is exceptional. There wasn’t an entry of the thirty-six that I did not enjoy, but a few stood out in originality of form/approach or content and absolutely should not be missed. The collection begins with “In Utero,” likely one of the best synopsis of the ten months of pregnancy, both the excitement and the terror culminating in a Cesarean section, as experienced by a new mother that I’ve ever read: “I swelled/ rib-bending/ enormous/ I was ravenous/ a hungry beast/ with odd cravings/ ice, mud, raw steak.” Another experience Cheung captures acutely well appears in “Aftermath,” where the narrator grieves the loss of a love only to have it haunt her bed continually; the result is an achingly gorgeous diorama. To provide even a snippet from the poem would spoil for a reader its terrible beauty. “The Thing on the Subway” follows a passenger as she rides a nearly vacant train late at night only to catch a disturbing glimpse of a ghoul lurking about at the other end of the car: “Clickety-clack, the train left the station./ I snatched a glance and saw its head/ bowled over, a dead weight lolling on/ its bony neck. It rolled from side to side,/ sawing loose with the rhythm of the train.” Similarly, in “The Faceless Man,” the narrator is repeatedly haunted by a visitor that is both familiar and frightening: “Closer and closer you crept,/ cobweb-clinging, a spider on my spine./ But nothing prepared me for that night./ There you sat on the couch, folded and neat/ in my pin-striped suit, reading the newspaper./ Your face was a blank sheet of skin. No eye slits/ or nostrils. Only a gaping hole for a mouth.” The Chinese tradition of a ghost marriage, where one party to the nuptials is dead (and often, buried), is something of which I had no concept until I read Yuriko Publishing’s Tortured Willows collection earlier this autumn. Cheung tackles the ritual in “Ghost Brides” with imagery that is both disturbing and effective in very few words, told from the grave-diggers’ point-of-view. The progression of time is visually juxtaposed against the monetary gain of unearthing corpses for marriage in only twenty-four short lines, but the complex, emotional impact is lasting. Another poem with a smart physical arrangement is “Covid-19: Delirium,” as it visually mirrors an open newspaper, a semi-stream of consciousness report of the pandemic spilling forth to communicate both the claustrophobia and the madness of the past two years. “Decay, the Stalker” begins with “Decay crawls beneath my skin/ and squirms under my fingernails,/ maggoting like parasitical poltergeists” and the gruesome imagery only blossoms from there. “Tears of Medusa” articulates the myth of the Gorgon and her fall from beauty and paints the demigod not as a monster but as a victim worthy of pity. It’s a lovely retelling full of striking imagery and visceral pathos. Anna Cheung truly blew me away with this collection of verse, and I immediately turned to her biography in the back of the book to see where I could seek out more of her work. Any reader with an appreciation for language and beautiful darkness is certain to find themselves similarly rapt. Final verdict: take a chance on this one, even if you aren’t usually drawn to poetry. It’s well worth the plunge. PURCHASE A COPY OF WHERE DECAY SLEEPS BY ANNA CHEUNG (PAPERBACK) DIRECT FROM HAUNT PUBLISHING BY CLICKING HERE TODAY ON THE GINGER NUTS OF HORROR WEBSITE THE HORROR OF THE 41ST MILLENNIUM: GENESTEALER CULTS THE HEART AND SOUL OF HORROR REVIEWSComments are closed.
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