Graced by an insightful Introduction by British horror icon Ramsey Campbell, this anthology assembles thirteen short stories and a little poem.

The quality of the included tales is mostly high and Campbell’s introductory remarks are actually a sort of a commentary on the single  stories themselves, so I will just focus on my own favourite and I will  give a collective honorable mention to the other authors.

“ Instinct” by Catherine McCarthy  is an offbeat, complex tale of graphic violence where events of the past come back to haunt a man living with a bad conscience.
Sonora Taylor contributes “ Meet Me in the Cemetery”, a macabre story of love and death where nothing is as it seems, while Jill Girardi pens” The Roiling” a disturbing SF piece depicting a world dominated by nasty amphibians.

In “ Weeds” by Elizabeth Black - a mix of horror and SF- strange dandelions and toxic pesticides exert terrible effects on the human body.

“ The House of Legion” by Mark Allan Gunnells is a strong, vivid story about an exorcism with an unexpected twist in the tail.

To me the best story in the book is “ Missing Pieces” by Josh Darling, an exceptional piece of fiction where  baffled policemen try to find the culprit of a series of recurring violent murders.
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Other contributors are Brandon Scott, Lydia Prime, Nicholas Catron, Joshua Marsella, Alexander Shedd, Bobbie Lee, Marie Lanza and RL Burwick.

    “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”
                                                       H.P. Lovecraft

​Horror stories, it has been contended, were likely the first types of tales created and told by humans. For primitive, cave-dwelling bands isolated in an unknowable, hostile world not of their making, surrounded daily by pain and terror and death, recounting ghastly events--both real and elaborately imagined--served to process their harsh surroundings in a way that not only entertained, but educated.
    
Do not venture into the valley over the next ridge, one aged Neanderthal says to the disbelieving youths of his tribe. If you do, you shall never return.
    
The valley may be only a malarial mosquito-infested quagmire, and his warning prone to be ignored by the brash and foolhardy if he doesn’t elaborate: You shall never return because that valley is haunted by ghosts eager for you to join their swampy grave!
    
Some of the best examples of modern horror retain those admonitory notes of ancient days, and in short fiction, especially, that essence remains undiminished. It’s in that spirit that author Tony Evans and Dark Holler Press re-releases Better You Believe, a collection of fourteen short stories that firmly establishes him as a modern master of the classic campfire yarn. Initially published in 2018 and deeply steeped in the folklore of the rural American Southeast, each tale is accompanied by notes revealing the regional origins of the unique and often disturbing scenarios contained within.    
    
The father who tells his son ‘A Bedtime Story’ is the reader’s introduction to both the book’s dark-and-stormy-night atmosphere and the nightmarish legend of Bloody Bones. A man lost in a blizzard finds himself at the mercy of a malevolent crone with an unusual assortment in ‘A Collection of Souls’, while witty banter between the stranded city-slicker protagonists livens a bizarre encounter with the titular object in ‘The Donkey Tree’. Creepers crawl in ‘Katsaridaphobia’, a portrait of one man’s psychosis-induced insect infestation (or is it?), while the confined mine-shaft setting of ‘Black Damp’ offers a disquieting claustrophobic counter-punch.
    
The collection’s second half kicks off with the clever ‘Devil’s Night’, which accentuates Evans’ oft-displayed fascination with role-reversal. A chilling synthesis of mourning parents, a power outage, a freaked-out teenager and an oblong pine box set up ‘Blood Sacrifice’, and ‘Grandma’s House’ offers a spooky slice of body-snatching terror evocative of Stephen King’s classic “Gramma’ episode of the revived 1980’s Twilight Zone series. Evans’ background as a wildlife biologist informs the shape-shifting amphibious monstrosity in ‘Grampus’, while Latin American lore, bullying and revenge intertwine in the easily relatable ‘Trouble Dolls’. The wittily self-referential ‘Family Curse’ brings the volume to a skin-crawling (and skin-tearing) culmination when teenage sisters learn their parents, and perhaps they, aren’t as human as once believed.
    
There’s an unabashed enthusiasm for pure storytelling in Evans’s rustic fables; tales lurk within tales like Russian dolls, each more intricately patterned and unnerving than the last, and for sheer palpable alarm, three cast dangerous dagger-like shadows upon their literary kin. Racial injustice and retribution lie at the heart of both ‘An Infestation of Rats’, which pits an unpleasantly prejudiced protagonist against a voodoo loa, and ‘The Woodsman’, a vicious narrative of Native American spectral reckoning abetted by wry character interaction. Yet it is ‘A Storm of Crows’ that unleashes the darkest of frights; with its blacker-than-midnight depiction of the black arts and an ever-escalating dread, witchcraft of the most unholy kind punishes a simple man’s transgressions with one of the most uncompromising and nihilistic finales in recent genre memory and serves as the harrowing seed for Evans’ novel, Sour.
    
A rare, pleasant cohesion exists beneath the surface of Better You Believe; recurrent motifs present themselves, giving weight to themes that for other authors would be mislaid in a random clutter of content. An impassioned disdain for inequality and animal cruelty consistently arises, as does the subject of trespass and its consequence. Far beyond any other topic, however, lies the repeated emphasis on family in all of its myriad forms. Like Lovecraft long before him, Evans showcases with striking clarity the hereditary ties that bind generations--for good and ill--and details how events long past can, and often do, reverberate through history to affect the present in unimaginable ways. The folkloric roots of each story, too, unveil hope that the seemingly distant times of yore when humanity was connected to its myths more intimately than our current technological age allows may not be as lost as many may so casually assume.
    
In a day when most authors are content to blithely redress the same exhausted premises in tattered rags and dub them innovation, Evans’ bold, energetic prose and cackling Crypt Keeper attitude underscore an array of underutilized genre concepts. Coupled with a beautifully macabre sense of artistic visual design, those elements elevate this collection to a vital top tier of modern independent horror strongly deserving of appreciation by any fan seeking fiction uncontaminated by pretense, posturing or pandering, and it’s these qualities that earn Better You Believe the full 5 (out of 5) on my Fang Scale. Better you believe this is one book worth reading. Just wait for a dark and stormy night.

First thing of note about this anthology is that as I read on, the stories got better and felt less fantastical and extreme. But more heartbreakingly plausible. And for me, frighteningly more relatable, yes we all have dark fantasies like the narrator in Bodies are for Burning, but I find it hard to believe that myself or the majority of people would suffer such illusions strongly enough that acting on them is inevitable. I do, however find the concepts of child snatching, parental abandonment and forbidden love far more relatable. You’re Not Supposed to Be Here and I’ll Be Gone By Then were the stories that tugged the most at my heart, especially I’ll Be Gone By Then which was particularly heartbreakingly tragic for me and I dare say will be for others.
    
As well as heartbreakingly human horror, this anthology features a fair amount of body and more extreme horror, the suspenseful tale of You’re Not Supposed to be here fits into this category somewhat. But for me the stand out most extreme body horror story in the anthology was The Trees Grew Because I Bled There, a surreal and monstrous story of giving everything to the person you love and it not being returned.
    
All in all, this is an eclectic mixture of disturbing stories, and there is probably a story for everyone. There are a few recurring themes throughout the anthology including mutilation, homosexuality, failing relationships, unrequited love and making highly questionable decisions.
    
​There are a couple of stories that I felt were below the standard of the others but most of the stories were complex, entertaining and well written.

The Strange Thing We Become and Other Dark Tales collects eight stories of literary dark fiction. Tense and terrifying, these masterful stories by Eric LaRocca explore the shadow side of love.


You Follow Wherever They Go
Bodies Are for Burning
The Strange Thing We Become
The Trees Grew Because I Bled There
You're Not Supposed to Be Here
Where Flames Burned Emerald as Grass
I'll Be Gone by Then
Please Leave or I'm Going to Hurt You

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.
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“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.

The Haunting of Las Lágrimas spirits us back to Argentina, 1913, and has been compared to both Laura Purcell’s The Silent Companions and the work of Daphne du Maurier. If you are a fan of slow, brooding, gothic in style chillers then you will probably enjoy this novel, if you are after jump scares or darker horror then this may not be the book to rock your boat. Its strengths were its fantastic atmosphere, incredible sense of time and place and strong lead character rather than its supernatural angle. On the downside, for many readers (including myself) not enough happened and the creeping slow build-up of atmosphere and threat never truly paid off and at no stage in the narrative did I ever fear for the life of the totally isolated central character.


Why did I not fret for the engaging and spunky star Ursula Kelp? The main reason was the simple fact that the way the story is framed was a genuine tension killer. It starts directly after the events of the book have concluded and Ursula, probably waiting to return to the UK, starts to write about what happened to her when she became head gardener at the huge (and very remote) Las Lágrimas estate. Right from the kick-off the reader is aware the main character survives which for some readers could be seen as rather too obvious, however, this narrative style of writing letters or journals is a popular literary device in modern Gothic fiction.


In the early stages of proceedings, the young (and very independent for 1913) woman leaves a secure but undemanding gardening job to travel deep into the Pampas, the vast empty grasslands, where the estate is situated. She is vaguely aware that this is a job that no male gardener wants and she is given the opportunity because there is nobody else and the manager of the estate is desperate. The property is rumoured to be cursed and the owners have not lived there for many years, but will soon be returning, and it is her task to whip the overgrown estate into shape before ‘The Don’ and his family eventually appear. However, the estate is in a horrible state and even though she has the title of ‘head’ gardener the locals who are her assistants are uncooperative and do not like taking orders from a woman. Even though she speaks good Spanish, there are other language difficulties as the locals speak a native tongue, all of which adds to her isolation.


The story makes a great job of expressing how remote Las Lágrimas is, as it takes Ursula days to arrive there, no welcoming party awaits her, and she is shocked to discover that she can only bathe twice a week without the modern conveniences she is used to. She has no friends, hardly anybody will talk with her and if she is friendly to the skeleton staff is treated with suspicion. All of this adds to her woes, which are made worse by the fact that the wind never stops blowing and she hears whispers of curses and lingering evil from when the house was last inhabited. The horrendous garden, and her failure to manage it, parallels her dwindling spirits as the progress she makes is beset with hitches and problems. The reader quickly realises why this position is tricky to fill and nobody lasts more than a few months.


Ursula Kelp was an engaging central character and readers will tap into her excitement and hope as she embarks upon her new job, hoping to prove that being a woman is not a hinderance to succeeding in such a job, but the garden is an untameable wilderness which crushes her spirits, with the hostile and secretive staff making things worse. For a nearly 400-page book far too much time was spent gardening which quickly became repetitive and I felt that more time was spent on the gardens than on the supernatural element of the story which bubbled in the background. To be frank, it was too far back in the narrative and really needed something more substantial that doors slamming, footsteps on empty gravel paths or frenzied chop of an axe from the encroaching forest when no one is there to get the pulse racing. All this was rather subdued and although the disturbances increase it just was not enough to catch the attention or provide ever the most basic of scares.


I appreciate that novels written in the Gothic style do not reply upon particularly direct or violent horrors, but the malevolent force which lurks in the trees watching and waiting for Ursula which awakens was rather underwhelming and got slightly lost in the overgrown shrubbery and grass the gardener was continually at odds with. The Haunting of Las Lágrimas could also have done with some other major characters, but because of the first-person narrative, the story sticks with Ursula and the estate manager Moyano is the only other person featured in any detail. The Don and his family appear late in the book and perhaps if they had been introduced earlier the story might have been widened slightly further.


The Haunting of Las Lágrimas will be popular with a certain type of reader and may well prove to be a success beyond the horror market as it taps into historical thriller territory with a convincing feminist edge. The setting, beautifully described landscapes and central character were also strengths, but it was hindered by its slow pace, lack of action, and underwhelming supernatural storyline.


Tony Jones

An atmospheric Gothic ghost story, where The Silent Companions meets Daphne du Maurier in South America.
"A phantasmagoric mixture of M. R. James, The Shining and The Turn of the Screw set among the otherworldly Argentinian Pampas." - EDWARD PARNELL, author of Ghostland

Winter 1913.

Ursula Kelp, a young English gardener, has come to Argentina to restore the gardens of Las Lágrimas. The long-abandoned estate lies deep in the Pampas, the vast empty grasslands of South America where the wind blows without end.

Despite warnings from the locals of terrible things that once happened there and the evil that lingers, Ursula sets out to her new post full of hope.

Yet when she arrives, all is not as promised. The garden is an untameable wilderness, the staff hostile.

Setting to work, Ursula is disturbed by the crunch of footsteps on empty gravel paths, while from the nearby forest comes the frenzied chop of an axe when no one is there. But it is only as she unlocks the secrets of the place that Ursula comes to understand the true horror she is facing.
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For lurking in the trees – watching her, waiting for her – is a malevolent force that wants Las Lágrimas for itself.

With his latest book Kevin J. Wetmore offers a cultural and anthropological history of “eaters of the dead”, a demographic he divides into two main categories, humans (i.e. cannibals) and “anthropophagous” monsters or other mythological beings who eat human flesh. The book also considers the “cascade of fears” surrounding the eating of dead people: the fear of being eaten, becoming an eater in turn, the unknown, starvation, corpses, and so on. As the author points out in the introduction, everyone is eaten by something, whether it be other people, carrion beasts, worms, fire, bacteria or even the sarcophagus itself, and geographically speaking cannibalism is very much a game without frontiers.

Things start gently with an interesting look at what might be considered the more civilized side of corpse disposal, with a visit to Tibet, home of the famous bya gtor, and a look at the fascinating Towers of Silence of the Zoroastrians. These resourceful, humane and vulture-friendly methods of “burial” are now aspirational to a lot of Westerners, but sadly the same cannot be said of most of the practices detailed in the ensuing chapters. The tour of Ancient Greece and Rome is predictably bloody and complicated (the Cyclops and Euripides’ Bacchae feature heavily), though I certainly learnt a few things about Saint Christopher’s shady past! Other world religions don’t come in for as much attention as Christianity but the section on the Hindu Aghori had serious wow factor.

After a chapter on Beowulf, fairytales and Ogres, Wetmore gets round to dealing with some more modern writers as he traces the Middle Eastern myth of the Arabic ghul and how it travelled into the West to become the ghoul, an often-mentioned but rather diffuse figure in horror fiction. William Beckford and Edmund Lucas White are credited for introducing the myth into the West, and HP Lovecraft provides some grim humour (the teenage Howard used to cosplay as an “Arab” and even provides some dodgy ghoul art of his own!) before Wetmore goes on to explore other Western writers like Caitlin R. Kiernan. It was a shame to see the 19th-century author Fitz-James O’Brien left out since his “What Was It?” is an early, famous and remarkably creepy ghoul story, but I appreciated the literary focus of this chapter.

Next we go East to meet a host of sinister beings including the jikininki of Japan and the shape-shifting Aswang, a strange and very interesting number from the Philippines which deals in fairy-like sleight of hand in addition to the usual carnage. Then it’s back to North America and Canada for the wendigo. This was the chapter I was most looking forward to, as I love anything to do with wind and was enchanted at a young age by Algernon Blackwood’s brilliant story, The Wendigo. Wetmore rewards the Blackwood fan with an amazing two-page illustration of the tale by Matt Fox (from one of the old Weird Tales), though literary merit is not the focus here; Wetmore is more concerned with pointing out the story’s influence on other works, its factual inaccuracies and its relationship to colonialism. The topic of cultural appropriation looms large here. No effort is made to define what “appropriation” means in this kind of literary context, what is “respectful” and what isn’t, though Antonia Bird’s wendigo film Ravenous gets a clip round the ear for being set too far South (the wind may go where it listeth, but mythology, it seems, has to stay in its own backyard.) On the plus side, Wetmore provides plentiful references to modern indigenous authors (such as Armand Garnet Ruffo, Stephen Graham Jones and Daniel David Moses) so any Western readers worried about cultural imperialism can always check out their wendigos.

Finally we come to the darkest part of the book: the chapter on real-life cannibals. Things get a bit patchy here, with some great historical outbreaks of cannibalism dealt with in detail, such as the horrendous Ukrainian famine manufactured by the Soviets. The section on political cannibalism says remarkably little, however, about the more recent wars in West Africa, which are commonly associated in the Western media with routine acts of cannibalism, not all of which are sensationalist make-believe. For instance, you’d expect Alieu Kosiah, a Liberian warlord who was fingered for cannibalism by a Swiss court just this year, to make a proper appearance. This section also uses a lot of vague words like “allegedly” when it comes to discussing the crimes of people like Idi Amin, but without providing enough information about who is doing the alleging and who is disagreeing. And one of the most potentially interesting sources in this book – Cormac O Grada, who “reminds us that not all famines lead to cannibalism” – is just dropped and left hanging. But why don’t all famines lead to cannibalism? Readers want to know!

The section on pop culture was a list of the usual suspects. It put my back up straight away by quoting from the underwhelming and transphobic Silence of the Lambs film, though it is admittedly hard to think of a more recognizable quote to start the chapter. I was more disappointed that the recent comedy series The Santa Clarita Diet was only mentioned in passing, and that the intersection between cannibal narratives and feminism (or more broadly, personal liberation) is not really covered in this book (despite including a passage on Raw).  That said, Wetmore’s list of movies serves as a useful jumping-off point for general readers interested in exploring the sticky world of films like Cannibal Holocaust. I also liked his more detailed section on the Donner Party, since I loved Steve Duffy’s Donner-inspired novella The Clay Party (Duffy has also written a very good Wendigo story, “The Ice Beneath Us”, which appeared in Ellen Datlow’s 2017 Best Horror of the Year anthology.)

As you have probably guessed, this is a book with a very wide scope that suffers a bit from trying to be all things to all men. It covers a whole planet’s worth of anthropology and several millennia of history, literature, and cinema,  and in a work of just a few hundred pages some stuff is obviously going to fall by the wayside. It doesn’t quite make it as a coffee-table book, either, because although there are some truly wonderful pictures of medieval Hellmouths and suchlike, other pictures are just too small and badly reproduced to really give you a kick.

But from another point of view, its breadth is a selling-point. I know much more about literature than anthropology and cultural history, so I would have liked to have seen more literary content (and someone should probably tell Wetmore that Sabine Baring-Gould was a man.) On the other hand, I loved discovering all the myths, beliefs and rituals from other cultures, and this book is a trove of fun facts, no doubt about it. Wetmore’s pleasant conversational style is anything but dry and dusty, and there aren’t too many of those dreadful puns the subject of cannibalism always seems to bring out in writers and reviewers. 

'Kevin Wetmore cuts to the bone with Eaters of the Dead, and serves up a wonderfully creepy insight into a shocking variety of cannibals, human and otherwise.' - Jonathan Maberry, NYT bestselling author of Relentless and Ink
'A very readable, beautifully researched and written reference work.' - John Palisano, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Ghost Heart
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Every culture has monsters that eat us, and every culture repels in horror when we eat ourselves. From Grendel to Sawney Bean, and from the Ghuls of ancient Persia to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, our fear of being consumed is both universal and terrifying.
Kevin Wetmore explores monsters that eat the dead: ghouls, cannibals, wendigos, and other beings that feast on human flesh. Moving from myth through history to contemporary popular culture, considering ancient Greek myths of feeding humans to the gods, through sky burial in Tibet and Zoroastrianism, and actual cases of cannibalism in modern societies, this book examines those that consume corpses and what they tell us about ourselves and our fears.