by Maria Haskins, Sr. Columnist
It’s March, AKA Women in Horror Month, and as always, my main recommendation for Women in Horror month is to read horror by women all year round. Really, how could you avoid it when so much kick-ass and beautifully dark fiction is written by women?
The list of Nebula Award finalists came out recently, and one of my favorites on that list is “Five Views of the Planet Tartarus” by Rachael K. Jones. It’s a chilling, devastating flash fiction story where prisoners are brought by spaceship to the Orpheus Factory: “All traitors to the Sibyllines go to Tartarus to receive the only punishment for rebellion: eternal life.” Jones needs only 549 words to tell a story you will not soon forget.
There’s more must-read dark fiction on the list, including Premee Mohamed’s glorious and nightmare-tinged horror/fantasy novella The Butcher of the Forest, and Eugenia Triantafyllou’s haunting novelette “Joanna’s Bodies” from Psychopomp, a story about possession, resurrection, guilt, and grief.
(To see the full list of finalists, head over to the SFWA website.)
Beyond the awards lists, there is a wealth of newer stories to put in your eyeballs, too. “The Ecstasy of the Saints” by J.A.W. McCarthy in PseudoPod (narrated by Dani Daly) is the kind of slippery, dark, and disturbing horror I love to read and listen to. There’s a hole in the narrator’s mouth, a “silky swollen hole between my tongue and molar”, and when she pushes her finger in there, something happens. There’s the pleasure of it, the pain of it, the darkness that covers everything, and then, sometimes, people turn to ash. McCarthy twines together religion, body horror, inexplicable magic, and a very particular kind of sensual, carnal, energy in this story and it makes for one hell of a tale.
There are more body horror shenanigans with a science fiction twist in “In Our Skin” by Kelsea Yu in Nightmare. Two sisters, both dead, are brought back to life by science in one proxy body. They take turns occupying the artificial body as their mother switches the body’s consciousness between the two mindmaps that hold the memories and personalities of each dead child. The horror in the story comes from the very idea of reanimating a dead child this way, but it also comes from the toxic family dynamics at play between the mother and her children, especially her younger child, and the close, but fraught, relationship between the two sisters.
Last year I read and loved The Night Guest by Icelandic writer Hildur Knútsdóttir, and she is back with a brand-new short story at Reactor. “The Shape of Stones” is set in Iceland and deals with the ancient practice of human sacrifice. A young researcher is looking for the particular stone where “the settlers of Iceland slaughtered men and broke their backs on stones.” Once she finds the stone, something seems to stir beneath the ground. Her dreams become vivid and strange, the earth moves, a volcano rumbles. It’s a fabulous story and that slipping sense of reality where the seam between dreams and the real world is thin and wavering, is reminiscent of everything I loved about The Night Guest.
There’s a surreal, nightmarish vibe to “Halogen Sky” by Wendy N. Wagner in Apex Magazine (originally published in Vastarien) too. The story primarily plays out in a very strange hotel off the highway where nothing seems to be quite where or what it seems. I’m a sucker for this kind of story where reality bends and folds and eventually drops away completely.
In “The Water Doesn’t Want You” by Rebecca Bennett in Augur Magazine the sea is claiming the land, the living, and even invading the taste of ice cream: “The closer they are to the beach, the more Jay’s ice cream tastes of salt.” Jay and Cait are trying to make ice cream flavors that will still be edible in spite of the ocean’s insistence on changing them to salt, rot, and decay. As it turns out, the ocean doesn’t just claim flavors, and it has taken much more than that from Jay.
Medical horrors are at the center of “You Will Be You Again” by Angela Liu in IZ Digital, a profoundly unsettling science fiction story about a facility that treats neurological disorders in a completely new way: “Nurses apply neural massages as they chant, You are special. You are loved. You will be you again. You will be happy. You don’t need to be anything for anybody. Just you, you just need to be you.” But what’s left of the patient, as they once were, if the treatment is successful?
Bourbon Penn has become one of my favorite publications over the last few years. They consistently publish strange, dark, beautiful fiction that often has an odd, off-kilter edge.
“The Louder I Call, the Faster It Runs” by E. Catherine Tobler, published in Bourbon Penn and also included in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year Volume 16, is set in a small community near a lake. When the story begins, the police are out on the water looking for a body. Someone’s disappeared, and it’s likely the lake has claimed them. Annie, who lives in the RV park near the lake and who works boat charters on the lake, is called out to help because she knows the lake better than anyone else.
“Usually people wanted to know where the fish were: rainbow trout, sockeye salmon. A man was many times larger than a fish, but the lake was larger still. Sometimes the lake won.”
As Tobler lets the story unfold, we realize that Annie isn’t quite what she seems, and that her knowledge of the lake and its deep waters, is more extensive than anyone can guess. It’s a beautifully crafted horror story where the darkness and its monsters move beneath the surface of the world like a strong, hidden undercurrent.
Another one of my favorite BP stories is “There Are Only Two Chairs, and the Skin is Draped Over the Other” by Alexia Antoniou. Two girls find a human skin in the creek, and yeah, that’s just the start of it: “the stream is bubbling through the hole that is the skin’s mouth, opening it and closing it again and again and again so that it looks like it is saying something.”
Finally, for this Women in Horror special, I recommend the horror novel Sundown in San Ojuela by M.M. Olivas. that I am shouting about to anyone who will listen recently. On Bluesky, Olivas herself describes the book best: “A queer and chicana story full of aztec vampires and trickster Gods all avoiding ICE/cops in an increasingly policed Southern California”. I’m reading it right now and it is absolutely mesmerizing.
