Screams from the Dark: 29 Tales of Monsters and the Monstrous

Much as she did for the ghost story in the award-winning anthology Echoes, Datlow here turns her focus to monsters, collecting original stories from 29 authors, including best sellers Stephen Graham Jones and Joyce Carol Oates as well as emerging voices like Chikodili Emelumadu and Priya Sharma. The result is a book that redefines this classic and much-beloved subgenre for a 21st-century audience with stories that actively explore the monsters that surround us, both supernatural and human. With so many talented authors represented, there is also a satisfyingly wide arc of writing styles, settings, types of monster, and range of fear induced, from psychological dread to visceral terror to darkly humorous, with all stops in between. Two stories that stand out are Kaaron Warren’s “The Smell of Waiting,” a compelling and creepy tale of a young girl with a gift (or is it a curse?), and John Langan’s mesmerizing “Bloedzuiger,” a tale that is both innocuously mundane and terrifyingly disturbing.