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Book Review: Miscreations: Gods, Monstrosities, and Other Horrors edited by Doug Murano and Michael Bailey

cover art for Miscreations edited by Doug Murano and Michael Bailey

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Miscreations: Gods, Monstrosities, and Other Horrors edited by Doug Murano and Michael Bailey

Written Backwards, 2020

ISBN-13 : 978-1732724464

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition

 

 

In the foreword to Miscreations, Alma Katsu writes that “we’re told from childhood that monsters exist… we don’t need anyone to tell us they’re real”. Collected within the pages are 23 tales of monsters of all kinds, from the traditional to the unconventional, from the literary to the personal.  Interspersed is artwork from HagCult, who also did the cover art for the book.

Josh Malerman gives us a werewolf tale in “One Last Transformation” with an engaging, murderous narrator addicted to the change, and a number of writers approach the Frankenstein story in different ways. My favorites of these tales were Stephanie M. Wytovich’s poem “A Benediction of Corpses”  in which the Creature addresses his creator directly, and “Frankenstein’s Daughter”, by Theodora Goss, with its surprising and satisfying ending. Christina Sng takes an unconventional approach to an evil Russian water spirit in “Vodoyanoy”.

More personal monsters also appeared.  Michael Wehunt’s “A Heart Arrhythmia Creeping Into A Dark Room” was an effective and creepy tale about the anxiety and dread that accompany someone living in the shadow of a potential heart attack. The story was flawed by the author’s insertion of a fictionalized monster and victim in a story that was far too realistic. Victor Lavalle’s “Spectral Evidence” touched on the way grief lives on, and Scott Edelman’s “Only Bruises Are Permanent” tells the story of a woman who has the bruises left from an incident of domestic violence tattooed on her body.

Monstrous mothers also appear, in Joanna Parypinski’s brutal “Matryoshka”, in which a family tradition of giving each mother and daughter a matryoshka doll goes dramatically wrong, and Mercedes M. Yardley’s ironic “The Making of Asylum Ophelia”, in which a mother raises her daughter to resemble Hamlet’s Ophelia with plans to also replicate her fate.

Other strong stories I especially enjoyed include Nadia Bulkin’s “Operations Other Than War”, Usman T. Malik’s “Resurrection Points”,  Lisa Morton’s “Imperfect Clay”, and the disturbing “My Knowing Glance” by Lucy A. Snyder, which went in a much different direction than I expected it to.

Miscreations is overall a strong collection. The authors have come up with imaginative creatures using a variety of creative approaches, and readers will find sitting down with it well worth their time. Highly recommended.

Contains: murder, torture, violence, gore, body horror

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

 

Editor’s note: Miscreations: Gods, Monsters, and Other Horrors is a nominee on the final ballot for the 2020 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in an Anthology. 

Posted on March 5, 2021 by , Reply

Book Review: The Place of Broken Things by Linda D. Addison and Alessandro Manzetti

The Place of Broken Things by Linda D. Addison and Alessandro Manzetti

Crystal Lake Publishing, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1646338573

Available: Paperback, Kindle

 

Imagine sitting in a poetry gallery appreciating each masterpiece while enveloped in a cloud of perfectly matching music (think Coltrane, Tchaikovsky, Hendrix). In the background, the words of famous poets move you to greater emotion and deeper understanding of each work of art. The Place of Broken Things by Linda D. Addison and Alessandro Manzetti delivers this sensory experience through the poems they have written together.

 

This collection includes poems written by Addison, poems by Manzetti, and poems that are a collaboration. Addison’s poems are spare, clear observations on and assessments of emotions. Her images are dark and sometimes threatening and describe pain and suffering even in the midst of love. In contrast, Manzetti’s poems show a reality that is often unexpectedly beautiful but hints at a hidden or not fully acknowledged darkness. His poems are abstract with colorful, sensual, exotic, and spiritual imagery combined with musical, artistic, and literary allusions. Both poets create poems inspired by the work of other writers such as Neruda, Wheatley, and Ginsberg.

 

The collaboration poems are the most evocative because they take the individual artists’ styles and images to the next level. “The Dead Dancer,” for example, focuses on the music that accompanies this “dance” (“horns mourning,” “can loneliness have a soundtrack?” “dreams become strings played by Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique”), and “Like Japanese Silk” features a church with a bronze cross “which looks like God’s antenna” and a “back” that “looks like Japanese silk.” In “A Clockwork Lemon Resucked,” a poet with “a cure for sorrow” and a knowledge of “the secrets of Mozart and Stevie Wonder” is now suffering “reeducation” in a cell “overlooking a dump and two lemon trees.” “The Yellow House” is a magnificent poem that captures the beautiful rawness and disturbing need that must have been a part of Van Gogh’s artistic desires (“I will give you color – / I will give you stars and revelations”).

 

Addison and Manzetti have collected “broken things” and found a painfully exquisite emotional beauty in them. Highly Recommended

 

Reviewed by Nova Hadley

Editor’s note: The Place of Broken Things was a nominee on the final ballot and lthe winning title for the category of Superior Achievement in Poetry for the 2019 Bram Stoker Awards.

 

 

 

 

 

Posted on April 28, 2020 by , 2 comments

Book Review: Mary Shelley Makes a Monster by Octavia Cade

Mary Shelley Makes a Monster: Conversation Pieces Vol. 70 by Octavia Cade

Aqueduct Press, 2019

eISBN: 978-1-61976-174-2

Available: Paperback

 

 

Instead of reading dry academic pieces on women writers who have made significant contributions to literature and thought, enjoy Octavia Cade’s uniquely creative approach to literary criticism in Mary Shelley Makes a Monster: Conversation Pieces Vol. 70. A group of provocative short poems is devoted to each of Cade’s selected authors including Mary Shelley, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Janet Frame, Sylvia Plath, Grace Mera Molisa, Octavia Butler, Angela Carter, and Murasaki Shikibu.

 

In the poems, each woman represents a part of Mary Shelley’s literary legacy and is viewed as a possible “mother” for her monster. Effects on the monster become a means of describing the effects each writer has had on literature. Cade captures the essence of each woman by using references to the authors’ work, their own life and environment, the ideas that inspired the content of their writing, and their role in overcoming the obstacles facing a woman who writes.

 

The feminist perspective in this book is clear and shines a light on the complexities of the writing life. In the first poem of the section devoted to Grace Mera Molisa, Cade writes of the monster: “It has begun to understand that it has been made / more of parts that women were never meant to emulate. / Anti-custom, with too much of speech patterned over it.” This is the type of observation found throughout the poems. Readers who know the authors will find excellent insights on their writing, and those who don’t will be so intrigued that they will want to read the work of these trailblazers.  Highly recommended.

 

Reviewed by Nova Hadley

 

Editor’s note: Mary Shelley Makes a Monster was nominated to the final ballot of the 2019 Bram Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in a Poetry Collection.

 

Posted on April 15, 2020 by , Reply
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