Booklist Review
The stories in this anthology focus on both monsters and love for family, for friends, and, of course, for lovers but the heart of each story is the experience of being a teen. From Luke, whose harpy DNA is emerging in Sarah Reese Brennan's Wings in the Morning, to Alaine, a young woman caught between a lecherous stepfather and the kraken who calls to her from the sea in Paolo Bacigalupi's Moriabe's Children, the characters in these stories are struggling with first loves, identity, family problems, friendship, and the death of loved ones. Most of the tales are dark fantasy, though a few, such as Holly Black's Ten Rules for Being an Intergalactic Smuggler (the Successful Kind) and Kelly Link's The New Boyfriend, have a more sci-fi focus. Link and Grant clearly spent a lot of time building this collection, which includes a graphic entry, and consequently none of the stories disappoint. Authors such as Cassandra Clare and Patrick Ness along with the monster dripping blood on the cover will draw in readers eager for creepy, atmospheric tales.--Wildsmith, Snow Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
YOU DON'T SCARE your children enough. I mean, to be fair, I don't know you. Maybe you scare them plenty. But most of us don't. We screen our children's books and movies for content that is "inappropriate"; incidents that might give them "nightmares." As we should. But when we're doing this, are we being too protective? Maybe. Children like to be scared. Ask a group of 9-year-olds if they'd like to hear a funny story or a scary story; they'll ask for a scary story just about every time. Why? Because they have an uncanny knack for knowing what they need. The best fiction weaves the ineffable into narrative; the warp and weft of scary fiction is the unsettling and the taboo. And because so much of a child's experience is novel, inexplicable and unsettling, narratives, including scary ones, are crucial. They help the child explore her most difficult feelings. Still, children want to feel safe. So you should do some censoring. For example, Emily Carroll's "Through the Woods," a collection of tales told in graphic form, is too disturbing and frightening to help an 8-year-old understand her internal world. A 13-year-old reader, though, or a 60-year-old reader for that matter, will be richly rewarded. And richly terrified. Carroll knows how to capture uncomfortable emotions - guilt, regret, possessiveness, envy - and transform them into hair-raising narratives. In a story inspired by Charles Perrault's "Bluebeard," a new bride stands before enormous panels of blue wallpaper, with stripes like prison bars. A song echoes through the house at night: "I married my love in the springtime,/but by summer he'd locked me away./He'd murdered me dead by the autumn, / and by winter I was naught but decay." In another tale, Carroll explores fraternal jealousy: The narrator begins by admitting, "Just last week, I killed my brother." And yet the brother, handsome and popular as ever, does not seem dead. The concluding panel of that tale literally made me yelp with fear. Like the best debut novels, "Through the Woods" is packed with ideas and experiments. New artistic techniques unfurl as the terror mounts, stunning visuals splash across the panels. Carroll effectively paces each tale, and the collection as a whole. "Through the Woods" is, in every sense of the word, thrilling. "Monstrous Affections: An Anthology of Beastly Tales" features short stories from leading figures in the young adult genre. It is, itself, a strange beast: in parts luminous, in others revolting. Some tales in this volume feel slapdash; others are brutal, callously deploying sexual assault, self-harm and murder as mere plot points. But there are wonderful stories, too, by Holly Black, Cassandra Clare and Dylan Horrocks. There is the dystopian powerhouse "The Mercurials," by G. Carl Purcell, in which the dialogue crackles with the fierce stupidity and earnestness of real people. Nalo Hopkinson's "Left Foot, Right" and Alice Sola Kim's "Mothers, Lock Up Your Daughters Because They Are Terrifying" are both potent, expressionistic horror stories. Hopkinson, deploying Caribbean myth and dialect, makes the aftermath of unspeakable trauma first monstrous, then survivable. In Kim's tale, three adopted Korean-American girls attempt to summon their biological mothers through a dark ritual. Kim writes with visceral urgency and distills the complex emotions of an adopted child into events of real horror. M.T. Anderson's "Quick Hill" takes place in a forlorn Middle America, haunted by the losses of World War II, and also by something worse, closer to home. Anderson balances the large and the small masterfully, and he makes magic realism the most bittersweet thing in the world. His sentences all end one word before you want them to, leaving your heart dangling, exposed. "Quick Hill" is a tour de force of contemporary short fiction. It does, as well as anything I've read recently, what scary stories are supposed to do: It says what we feel, but cannot say. ADAM GIDWITZ is the author of "A Tale Dark and Grimm," "In a Glass Grimmly" and "The Grimm Conclusion." He was a teacher for eight years.