
I’m copying over some reviews of titles I’d written up in 2018 and earlier, just in case these titles are new for other people.
Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories is a fascinating anthology of short fiction from a variety of diverse authors…providing an assortment that varies in both style and substance to a huge extent.
I don’t know that a lot of these stories are “horror” in the sense that some of you might expect, but they are quite deeply unsettling as a whole. Many of what you’ll find are examples of the horror that we carry within us or manifest internally, like in the unexpected choose-your-own-adventure tale ‘A Haunted House Is a Wheel Upon Which Some Are Broken’ provided by Paul Tremblay or the devastating ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ by Lisa Mannetti.
Clive Barker’s ‘Coming To Grief’ was my personal favorite, and a more subtle tale than a lot of his short fiction. Strangely enough, because I normally love his short fiction, my least favorite story was ‘The Problem of Susan’ by Neil Gaiman, a dark and perverse take on the world of Narnia…it wasn’t necessarily a bad story in any way, but it felt like the weakest inclusion.
I definitely recommend this book, especially if you’re looking to discover new authors you might not have already been familiar with.