Usman Malik | Musings of the Monster Librarian

Book Review: The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror volume 4 edited by Paula Guran

The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, vol. 4 edited by Paula Guran

PYR 2023

ISBN: 978-1645060673

Available : Paperback, Kindle edition

Editor Paula Guran is one of the two American women (the other one being Ellen Datlow) who keep providing every year the best short fiction that appeared in print the year before in the area of horror and dark fantasy.

The present, hefty volume includes twenty-one “best” tales. Frankly. to me 2022 doesn’t appear to have been such a great year for horror and dark fantasy, at least in the short form, because only a few among the selected stories were able to impress me and entertain me.

“Red Wet Grin” by Gemma Files, is a very dark, unsettling story where a nurse working in a care home witnesses a series of weird events.

Stephen Graham Jones contributes “Men, Women and Chainsaws” an engrossing, although a bit puzzling story, revolving around an old Camaro endowed with dangerous properties.

“The Voice of a Thousand Years” by Fawaz Al-Matrouk is a dark fable about an old man endeavoring to give life to an automaton, while “ How Selkies are Made” by Cassandra Khaw is a splendid fairy tale featuring a beautiful, unhappy bride.

“Challawa” by Usman T. Malik is a powerful, outstanding piece with a distinctive exotic taste, in which ancient gods take possession of an American tourist.

“The Long Way Up” by Alix E. Harrow is a disturbing allegory where a woman retrieves her dead husband in a deep chamber, and convinces him to return to the world of the living.

AC Wise provides “Sharp Things, Killing Things”, an obscure but intriguing story in which a group of youngsters have to deal with some unexpected deaths.

These are my favorite stories. Other readers could make a different selection, but these are the rules of the game and such a huge volume has plenty of material to offer.

Reviewed by Mario Guslandi

Long Fiction Review: Dead Lovers on Each Blade, Hung by Usman Malik (Nightmare Magazine, Issue 74)

“Dead Lovers on Each Blade, Hung” by Usman Malik

Nightmare Magazine, Issue 74, November 2018

ASIN: B07K386T2B

Available: Kindle edition

“Dead Lovers on Each Blade, Hung” is an #ownvoices novelette that takes place in Pakistan. The narrator is a cleaned-up heroin addict who has been accused of killing a doctor in Uch, a site of pilgrimage, at various times, for Sufis, Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims. The tale is his confession to the police, who he is certain will turn him over to some very angry heroin dealers who think he swindled them.

The narrator tells the story of being rescued and sobered up by a doctor studying snake venoms for their healing uses, who has been asking addicts in the park if they have seen a girl in a photo he carries. The girl turns out to be his wife, Maliha, purchased by him when she was eight years old, who became a herpetologist. Maliha ran away to seek the Serpent Pearl, a mythological stone given by the Serpent King of the underworld to his wife, which gave her the power to command animals and birds, immunity to venom, open a gateway to other worlds, and immortality, that she believed could be found in Uch. The doctor decides to follow her to Uch, accompanied by the narrator, who is now on the run from heroin dealers.

In Uch, they approach a shrine during a musical festival. The narrator follows the doctor past the crowd and into the shrine, and witnesses the doctor’s apparent, and fatal, reunion with his wife, who may be a cobra, or an apparition, or may be something else entirely, driving him to poison the water supply of Uch with snake venom as he loses touch with reality.

The setting and much of the language are way outside of my realm of experience, and I don’t feel that I can truly do this story justice, but I can say that the summary above in no way can express the feeling of this tale. It is a fever dream that creates a world that envelops the reader in a combination of the grim life of a heroin addict, with a dark mythology grounded in both Pakistani folklore and cosmic horror. At the same time, it is grounded in a terrible real-life story: the doctor who purchases a wife when she is eight, and chases her down when she runs away as a young woman. In “Dead Lovers on Each Blade, Hung” Usman Malik steps the reader into an unreal, fantastic, and horrifying world that he makes very, very real.

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

Editor’s note: “Dead Lovers on Each Blade, Hung” is a nominee on the final ballot of the 2018 Bram Stoker Awards in the category of Superior Achievement in Long Fiction.