GARDEN OF ELDRITCH DELIGHTS BY LUCY A. SNYDER

Master short story author Lucy A. Snyder is back with a dozen chilling, thought-provoking tales of Lovecraftian horror, dark science fiction, and weird fantasy. Her previous two collections received Bram Stoker Awards and this one offers the same high-caliber, trope-twisting prose. Snyder effortlessly creates memorable monsters, richly imagined worlds and diverse, unforgettable characters.

Open this book and you'll find a garden of stories as dark and heady as black roses that will delight fans of complex, intelligent speculative fiction.
 
The Garden of Eldrich Delights is my first exposure to Lucy A. Snyder’s writing.  This collection showcases Lucy’s ability to write splendidly across a variety of genres.  Many of the stories have a dark or heart-wrenching feel to them, and I love that.  Some of the stories are action-packed adventures where characters are fighting to survive in a violent or a dystopian world.  Others are quieter stories but left me thinking about human nature in the intricacies of lives and worlds mixed together.
 
As is becoming my habit with collections of stories, I’ll summarize them all.  All twelve stories are well-written stories spun with intellect and exploration of worlds or situations beyond our own.  The ones that resonated most with me were That Which Does Not Kill You, Sunset on Mott Island and The Warlady’s Daughter.
 
The first story, “That Which Does Not Kill You,” is a dark story about pain and loss felt at the end of a relationship where the other person ends it for you.  But instead of detailing how the loss feels like one’s heart has been figuratively ripped from the chest, the character is experiencing heartache as though the heart has literally been ripped from the chest and the character must repair herself - and do so emotionally and physically.  A great story to open up the collection.
 
So I finish the first story and dive into the next one, a Lovecraftian one called “Sunset on Mott Island,” and was so very moved by it.  In this story the main character’s mother is dying of cancer.  In addition to the grief of watching a parent die, she is faced with another challenge - she’s been having nightmares of a massive tsunami that will wipe out mankind as we know it now and it may be a real prophecy.  Without giving much away, the ending gave me chills and made me sad, and I like that in an ending. 
 
In “The Gentleman Caller,” Janie is a young woman who works as Lady Rayne on a sex fantasy phone line.  She receives a beautiful jade necklace from one of her callers who is more interested in having actual conversations instead of typical sex talk.  She soon learns the jade necklace is able to transport her into another person’s body.  At first this seems like a great thing for Janie, as she is wheelchair bound and so I thought maybe she’d be able to experience life in ways she could not before.  Unfortunately, the person who gave her the necklace has a specific purpose for her.  Great ending that left me thinking about the effects of unintended consequences.
 
“Executive Functions” had a great premise but didn’t really move me in any way.  The story is told from Bradley Pendleton’s point of view.  This lewd, psychopathic businessman meets a gorgeous woman who starts working for his company.  She is immune to his charms, and has an interesting way to put him in his place.
 
In “The Yellow Death,” Louise lives in a world where people were either eaten by or recruited as a vampire.  These vampires can trick your mind into believing that you are looking at a normal person, but it would be the vampire.  They can be detected only by very minute “glitches” in their appearance.  Her fiance had been bitten and turned into a vampire, and Lucy’s depiction of his transformation was nice and chilling.  Louise later falls in with a gang of other humans trying to survive in a world where you can’t trust anyone.  When her sister walks into the Clubhouse to reunite with Louise, Louise’s life takes an unexpected turn.  I like vampires and this was pretty neat.
 
“Santa Muerte” tells the story of a man named Kai who was tasked to be the getaway driver in case a drug deal turned sour.  While he waits in the car, a car pulls up near him and dumps a young woman carelessly in the street.  He approaches her, and hears a gunshot in the house and his buddies running to the car.  He sweeps up the girl, Alice, and learns she is a witch who just may be able to make things right.  Decent story, but just wasn’t for me.
 
“Dark of the Moon” is an action-packed story that follows a woman named Velocity who is paid handsomely to be an anonymous for-hire badass who does things like espionage for tech corps and other covert ops.  Her job fixer. Felician, sets her up with a job where she must work with another badass.  They’re both tasked to steal a box from the home of the man who owns the huge tech corporation by which all three of them have been affected by the company with malware in their brains that give them hallucinations and lapses of consciousness.  This one is an action-packed thriller.
 
“Fraeternal” kind of confused me a bit, and I don’t want to go into a lot of detail on this one because I want the reader to sort through this one.  It’s a pretty trippy story about fraeternal twins Billy and Lindy who are part of an experimental group in a study of shared memories and mental traits between twins.  Pretty interesting and thought-provoking story, I just was confused by the story - which may be the intent.
 
“A Noble Endeavor” is a tale set on a sugar plantation in Barbados with a Master, his family and his slaves.  Mariette was forced to serve Dr. Bronson, a demented scientist who lived up the hill from the plantation.  Often, when slaves were sent to his laboratory, they either died or went mad.  Mariette learns that he is inventing ways to eliminate people in the lower classes of society so that only the “well-bred” will survive, and has a sinister method to accomplish this using African slaves.  Can Mariette stop him before it’s too late?
 
“Blossoms Blackened Like Dead Stars” is a beautiful story about a special army of people who are training on a warship to fight the spawn of Azathoth who are invading Earth.  Beatrice had been studying to a scientist and working a fellowship at the International Lunar Research Station on the moon when she saw a spawn - and once you see once, you nearly always die.  If you survive, then chances are you will end up in a coma or in a mental facility.  Now she is a soldier and is given a certain “enhancement” that may give her power over the spawn.  The spawns gave me the chills.  I think this would make a good movie.
 
If you like the fantasy genre, you may really like “A Hero of Grünjord.”  I’ve only read a few books that I would consider “fantasy.”  It’s just not a genre that I ever got into.  Even so, I enjoyed reading about the heroine named Vinca and her dragon Bhraxio as they battle the Outlander skyship threatening to attack her world.  This story winds up being a perfect mix of action and drama as Vinca is later summoned to her old home and must face a family that turned their back on her.  I really enjoyed it, even though I was skeptical that I would enjoy a fantasy story.
 
Another one of my favorites was “The Warlady’s Daughter.”  This is another fantasy-based story, and it was inspiring to me.  The story follows Elyria, a teenage girl who feels trapped in a future of being married off to a man of her uncle’s choice within the next few years.  One day an army of women soldiers and women orcs ride into town, and Elyria learns that her biological mother is the leader of this army and is in a faraway land.  The uncle who raised her is actually her father, and never told Elyria that one day her mother would send for her after the war.  Now Elyria must train as a soldier and decide whether to come home or not.  The story ended and left me wanting to read so much more.
 
I am very grateful for reading Garden of Eldrich Delight.  It is much different from ghosts and serial killers and creepypasta stories that I enjoy so much.  It gave me more appreciation for the fantasy genre, which is a genre I’m not at all familiar with.  I like how her darker stories made me think about them long after I’d read them.  Lucy could captivate a wide audience with this collection because of the variety of stories and the believable heros.