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The year is winding down, I’m still catching up on all the wonderful work published in 2024, and I fully recognize that catching up is impossible. That said, every year, I try to shout out the the works that most stuck with me from what I did manage to read. Posts focused on novels, novellas, and short fiction, are forthcoming, but to kick things off, here are the collections and anthologies that I enjoyed the most this year.

Slow Burn by Mike Allen features gorgeous illustrations by Paula Arwen Owen, with stories that provide a nice sampling of horror and dark fantasy. I always enjoy revisiting stories I’ve read previously and discovering new ones. My favorite stories in the collection included “Strange Wisdoms of the Dead” co-written with Charles M. Saplak, “Falling is What it Loves”, the titular “Slow Burn”, “Abhor”, “The Butcher, the Baker”, and “Comforter”. I reviewed the collection in more detail earlier this year, and that review can be found here.

Limelight by Lyndsey Croal is another excellent collection published this year. The opening story, “Patchwork Girls” was one of my favorites, exploring the fetishization and sexualization of violence against women on film, as a woman made from lab-grown parts dies over and over again on camera until she finally finds a ways break the cycle. Another stand-out was “Hush, Little Sister”, a lovely, heartbreaking, and complex exploration of loss and grief, as Isabelle is forced to deal with the copy of her sister that her parents made after her death, once they die as well. Overall, the collection does an excellent job of using speculative fiction to explore the human condition, from science fiction, to fantasy, to horror, and everything in-between.

Death Aesthetic by Josh Rountree is a slim collection that packs a punch. I always enjoy Josh’s work, and as with Mike Allen’s collection, it was a pleasure to revisit stories I’d read before and discover ones that were new to me. One of my favorites in the collection happened to piece an original piece, “The Green Realm”, which has a nice subtle eeriness to it as the main character revisits childhood memories, returning to the site of a camping trip where something inexplicable happened. Another favorite was “We Share Our Rage with the River”, a dark animal bride story of women fished up from the river and forced into marriages.

The Crawling Moon: Queer Tales of Inescapable Dread edited by dave ring, is a wonderful anthology of gorgeous, decadent, and atmospheric stories. Everything Neon Hemlock publishes is pretty much a must buy for me, and this anthology did not disappoint. There’s an overall Gothic vibe, where crumbling houses, beautiful decay, and unhealthy and obsessive relationships abound. There really weren’t any stories that didn’t work for me, which is rare. In an overall strong anthology, my favorite contributions were by Hailey Piper, Lyndall Clipstone, M.L.Krishnan, Suzan Palumbo, E. Saxey, Marianne Kirby, E. Catherine Tobler, Natalia Theodoridou, Shaoni C. White, Bendi Barrett, and Caitlin Starling.

Northern Nights edited by Michael Kelly is a truly excellent anthology of Canadian horror and dark fiction. (Full disclosure, I do have a story in the anthology, but it would be one of my favorite reads of the year regardless.) Like Neon Hemlock, pretty much everything Undertow Books publishes is a must buy for me. The anthology captures what, for me, is one of the hallmarks of a lot of Canadian horror – a deep sense of place. Whether or not the environment is actively adversarial in a story, it frequently plays a central role. The stories in Northern Nights lean into that, full of rich, immersive sensory detail that immediately transports the reader to whatever locale is being described. My favorite contributions were by Simon Stranzas, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Siobhan Carroll, David Nickel, Rory Say, Premee Mohamed, and Camilla Gurdova.

Death in the Mouth Volume 2 edited by Cassie Hart and Sloane Leong is a worthy follow-up to the first volume. The anthology as a physical object deserves mention; each story is accompanied by an original illustration, and the design and cover art are compelling – bright colors and dark creatures, a combination that was true of the art gracing the cover of the first volume as well. My favorite stories were by Ana Hurtado, Nadia Bulkin, Xavier Garcia, J.A.W. McCarthy, Radha Kai Zan, and Alexandra Stochach.

Honorable Mentions (work published before 2024)

No One Will Come Back for Us by Premee Mohamed has picked up a whole host of award wins and finalist spots, and with good cause. It’s a gorgeous collection of dark fiction and horror. Pretty much every story in the collection sings, full of evocative prose suggesting lived-in worlds that extend beyond the page.

Out There Screaming edited by Jordan Peele and John Joseph Adams has also received a good deal of well-deserved attention. It won’t come as a surprise that Jordan Peele has a good eye for compelling stories and in particular, compelling horror. I thoroughly enjoyed this anthology overall, but my favorite contributions were “Eye & Tooth” by Rebecca Roanhorse, “Invasion of the Baby Snatchers” by Lesley Nneka Arimah, “The Rider” by Tananarive Due, “Dark Home” by Nnedi Okorafor, “Flicker” by LD Lewis, “A Grief of the Dead” by Rion Amilcar Scott, “A Bird Sings by the Etching Tree” by Nicole D, Sconiers, and “Hide & Seek” by P. Djeli Clarke.

Out of the Window, Into the Dark is the latest fiction collection from Marian Womack, who was kind enough to send me a copy for review. The collection comes out November 16 from Calque Press, and is available for pre-order now.

The stories are divided into two sections, the first grouping primarily set in the future, looking at how the world and technology may change, but also reflecting on the past and what might be lost. “Pink-Footed” depicts a future where birds and many other animals have largely gone extinct, and as a result, food is scarce. While set in the future, the manners and speech of the characters harken back to another age. “The Museum” explores how memories are captured, and how technology impacts the way we remember and re-experience moments in the past. There’s an underlying thread of melancholy, nostalgia, and anxiety running through the stories – again, expressing fear and concern for the future while also looking back to the past.

The second section’s stories are set in the present day, but still resonate with unease and anxiety. Two of the standouts for me in the collection as a whole were “Ready or Not”, which effectively draws on horror imagery as the protagonist imagines then catches sight of her elderly neighbor silently standing just on the other side of the fence as if staring toward her property, her appearance subtly wrong and uncanny. Alongside the suggestion of supernatural horror, the story also deals with real world horror, with the protagonist stuck in an oppressive marriage full of microaggressions where her husband controls the finances and uses her status as an immigrant to further exert control. Unease hangs over the story with the edges of reality blurring and questions regarding the objective truth of the situation left unanswered.

The other stand out was the titular “Out of the Window, Into the Dark”, in which the protagonist recalls an obscure comic book series she and her friends were obsessed with as children, in which a stranger would appear at children’s windows in the middle of the night and take them flying out into the dark to witness things they shouldn’t – in particular the town’s secrets. She also recalls an incident as a child where she came down with a fever and hallucinated, or experienced, a journey right out of the comics, flying to the home of a man known as Odd Paul, and discovering a missing boy held captive in his shed. She and her friends go on to stage an improbable rescue, but afterwards, the boy swears up and down that Odd Paul died by spontaneous combustion allowing him to escape and that equally improbable story becomes the official one. Like other stories in the collection, it effectively explores the unreliability of memory, the way narratives shape our experience of the world, and blurring between reality, dreams, and imagination.

The publishers of Queer Mythology (Running Press) were kind enough to send me a copy of this lovely book to review. As the title suggests, it contains stories from around the world, retold by Guido A. Sanchez, with each story getting its own, lovely full-color illustration by James Fenner. Incidentally, Fenner also did the cover art for We Mostly Come Out at Night: 15 Queer Tales of Monsters, Angels & Other Creatures, and John Wiswell’s debut novel, Someone You Can Build a Nest In. His work is really stunning, and I highly recommend checking it out.

As Sanchez writes in his introduction, queer people and queer stories have always been part of history, all across the world. This collection is about reclaiming those stories, which have either been lost or erased, drawing on multiple sources and retellings to bring them back to light. While many of the myths do include death, violence, and cruelty – as myths often do – overwhelming, these retellings focus on the positive. These are stories of hope, affirmation, and love, and even when the characters suffer, the stories don’t linger on that suffering, but highlight the positive – as characters learn, grow, and come out stronger on the other side of loss and adversity.

It’s a slim volume, and each story is brief, perfect bite-sized myth that take readers all around the world. Sanchez writes a mini-intro for each story, putting it in context, and sharing a bit of history about the story itself – approximately when it first started to be told, or when it was written down, or the impact the story may have had.

This is the perfect book for anyone who enjoys mythology and/or queer stories. It absolutely brought me back to the books of mythology I read and re-read as a kid. I remember one book in particular – a hefty volume of Greek mythology whose stories and illustrations I returned to over and over again, inspiring a love of mythology in general. I can very much see Queer Mythology by Guido A. Sanchez, with its lovely illustrations by James Fenner, being exactly that kind of book for a young reader today, (or a reader of any age, really) sparking a love for story, and a desire to learn and read more.

Slow Burn, the latest collection from Mike Allen, will officially be published July 16, 2024, but I was lucky enough to get a sneak peek. First off, shout out to Lasse Paldanius for the eye-catching cover art, and to Paula Arwen Owen for the interior illustrations. Owen has worked with Mythic Delirium Books before, and her pieces are always stunning – evocative of stain-glass windows and intricate cut paper shadow puppets.

The collection itself mixes fiction and poetry, with many of the pieces existing in a shared setting and some with overlapping characters. In his Acknowledgements, Allen frames it as part of an unofficial trilogy along with two of his previous collections, Aftermath of an Industrial Accident and Unseaming. It’s not necessary to read the other two to enjoy this one, however it does add another layer to the stories, as they do build on and enrich each other.

There are multiple flavors of body horror on offer in Slow Burn, along with dark fantasy, cosmic horror, and science fiction. Feather Stitch balances horror with an emotional core by centering a grandmother trying to discover the fate of her grandson who has literally gotten mixed up with a terrible monstrosity. One of the standouts in the collection, The Butcher, the Baker, also keeps the focus on the main character’s emotional journey amidst the horror. Trukos is a golem-like creature baked by a woman named Auntie Mayya for the purpose of killing her abusive husband. When Trukos subsequently kills in self-defense, Mayya orders him to kill the dead man’s widow as well in order to keep his true nature secret, but he refuses, and she banishes him. There’s a bittersweetness to the story, which is reminiscent of Frankenstein. Here too a creator turns their back on their creation, but this time for refusing to commit violence and wanting to be something more than monstrous, making for a nice inversion of the theme.

Strange Wisdoms of the Dead co-written with Charles M. Saplak has a historical-yet-timeless feel, as a man trapped on a ghost ship surrounded by corpses finds those corpses waking, leading him to doubt which is crumbling – his mind or reality. Falling Is What It Loves brings elements of both cosmic horror and science fiction, set in a world where people have “roommates”, extra dimensional beings that can see through the timestreams and also pick up signals from the humans with whom they co-habit. As Rae works through her complicated relationship with her dying father, her roommate both exacerbates the situation and helps her heal. Machine Learning is another story with a science-fictional feel as two women on a road trip are led astray by AI and find themselves in an abandoned landscape filled with eerie machines intent on doing them harm. Abhor is an effective piece of body horror where a physical therapist discovers creatures living under one of her clients’ skin and takes them into herself.

The titular story, Slow Burn, and the longest piece in the collection, Comforter, share a setting as well as common characters. As part of a larger story cycle, both have the feeling of a world extending beyond the page, but also work well as standalones. There’s a strong voice to both, bringing in elements of cosmic horror, but also grounding the characters in lives and in a world that feels lived-in and real.

Overall, Allen is a master at serving up striking imagery and evocative, atmospheric settings. He also excels at creating characters who feel fully realized, then dropping them into horrific situations, keeping the reader invested in their journeys and well-being. Slow Burn is another strong addition to the line up of Allen’s work, with plenty to offer fans of multiple genres.

I was lucky enough to receive an advance copy of the YA anthology We Mostly Come Out at Night: 15 Queer Tales of Monsters, Angels, and Other Creatures edited by Rob Costello. The anthology will officially be out in May 2024, and is currently available for pre-order.

First off, a shout-out for the gorgeous cover art by Frances J. Soo Ping Chow; it’s striking, and perfectly suits the tone of the anthology, and even better, each story within the anthology is paired with a lovely header illustration by the artist as well.

On the whole, the anthology strikes a nice balance of hope and queer joy, while also acknowledging the pain and uncertainty that can be a part of the queer experience. There are stories of angels, gargoyles, cryptids, mer-folk, and fae creatures, which are also stories of young people finding their place in the world, forming new friendships and romances, and learning to embrace their truths. All of the stories are well-written, and there are some truly lovely descriptions and emotional moments within these pages. There are a few in particular that I want to highlight, though all of them are well-worth reading.

Bastian and the Beast by Jonathan Lenore Kastin opens the anthology with a lovely, queer retelling of Beauty and the Beast. There are many familiar touch-points from the various versions of the tale, and centering a queer, trans protagonist adds extra resonance to the themes of characters learning to see themselves and others for who they truly are. Other Fish by Alexandra Villasante is a wonderful reimagining of the Little Mermaid, that explores what it means to be the child of immigrants, and how sometimes that comes with the pressure and expectation to perform identity a certain way in order to fit in, and to sanitize your personality and image in order to be more palatable to others.

Be Not Afraid by Michael Thomas Ford is both heartbreaking and hopeful. Willet’s grandmother firmly believes in Mothman – a cryptid who only shows up when trouble is coming, and there is plenty of trouble in Willet’s life. His older brother, Pike, is selling drugs to try to help cover their grandmother’s medical bills, and even so it’s barely enough. Meanwhile Willet’s best friend Burlie skipped town to figure out the growing feelings between the two of them after his parents forbid them from having a relationship. The story does a nice job of looking at what is considered monstrous and what it means to be monstrous and an outsider. Delving into some similar themes, The Freedom of Feather and Fur by David Bowles has a strong voice, and makes good use of its historical setting as Lope searches for his shapeshifting brother in order to take revenge, and discovers some truths about himself and the nature of monsters along the way.

The House of Needs and Wants by Kaylynn Bayron is a sweet story about a young, queer woman who has been bounced from foster home to foster home. She deeply distrusts the system, and expects to find more of the same in her new home, not to mention the rumors that the house is haunted. Instead, she finds other queer kids and a semi-sentient house that strives to give everyone what they need. It’s a cozy and comforting story, but one that doesn’t shy away from acknowledging pain, or showing how difficult trust can be and how much courage it takes to open yourself up to others. The Girl with Thirteen Shadows by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor is similarly a painful story, but with a hopeful ending. Melanie has more shadows that she should, and is also trying to come to terms with her asexuality. She goes to a doctor who claims he can fix her, that her shadows are killing her, but ultimately learns that he only wants to control the so-called monsters of the world. She finds allies however, and new friends, taking the first steps toward building a community of fellow “monsters”.

How We Founded Club Feathers at the Discard Depot by Sarah Maxfield is the perfect story to close out the anthology. Ashley lives in a super-conservative town that strictly enforces heteronormativity, especially when it comes to prom. She and her secret girlfriend, Em, along with the other queer kids, are relegated to the sidelines serving punch, counting court ballots, and working the photobooth, rather than getting to enjoy themselves. But a “wicked” fairy godmother/Uncanny Presence known as Carabosse appears to whisk them away to their own prom while putting everyone else to sleep, giving them a lovely moment of queer joy and a safe space to celebrate, while also acknowledging the bravery required to choose your happiness amidst pressure to conform.