OTHER TERRORS ed. by Vince A. Liaguno and Rena Mason

Paul, Gauguin. At first Noa Noa and the surrounding village of Lazeaux, with its close-knit, creative group of villagers and its jazz festival, seem charming. In fact, by the end of the week she’s supposed to spend there, Frances is torn about whether to proceed to her next assignment. By then, she’s sleeping with Paul, who fits perfectly into the hole left by A.B. Sometimes astrology really nails it—as Paul’s brother the astrologer will explain, Frances’ Venus is in her 12th house. “Alors, immobilizing passivity; tendency to idealize others and swallow down feelings to please them, to play dumb or shut down completely to avoid conflict; difficulty in making decisions and/ or identifying own needs—.” Hel-lo Frances! No wonder Paul rushes in to shut him up. Lafarge succeeds in creating the sunny, drowsy, sensual atmosphere of Southern France, the precariousness of the plans of young backpackers and ride-sharers, and the claustrophobic psychology of a predatory relationship.

A cautionary tale with warning lights flashing.

OTHER TERRORS An Inconclusive Anthology

Ed. by Liaguno, Vince A. & Rena Mason Morrow/HarperCollins (368 pp.) $16.99 paper | July 19, 2022 978-0-358-65889-4

Horror writers representing varied cultures, genders, and sexual orientations contribute stories cataloging anxieties of, and toward, “the other”—whatever that

“other” may be.

The subtitle, An Inclusive Anthology, hammers home what Bram Stoker Award winners Liaguno and Mason have assembled: a trailblazing anthology in which LGBTQ+ characters and people of color are both feared and preyed upon in jolting, haunting, sometimes funny, and/or graphically violent tales. Dramatizing fears, anxieties, and phobias held by and against those perceived as socially marginal can be a delicate, even dicey process. But the stories here are mostly tough-minded and emphatic in such provocative variations on this theme as Jennifer McMahon’s tautly woven, wickedly ingenious “Idiot Girls,” about teen lesbian lovers whose secret trysts pit them against the immigrant groundskeeper of their apartment complex—and put them in the path of a serial killer. Then there’s “Night Shopper,” Michael H. Hanson’s revenge fantasy in which a Muslim trans woman with a penchant for Wittgenstein’s aphorisms finds unlikely salvation from hate crime in the shut-ins to whom she delivers groceries. Similar if subtler gratifications are available in Usman T. Malik’s “Mud Flappers,” which reaches further afield to an island off the Karachi coast whose residents have sustained an effective—and grisly—way of resisting would-be exploiters. A different, if no less bizarre, act of retribution is submitted for our approval by the crime writer S.A. Cosby in “What Blood Hath Wrought,” in which a Black history professor calls upon otherworldly powers to seek out from among a motley collection of Pancake Shack diners the homicidal descendant of a sadistic slaveholder. The terrorism of anti-Asian racism aroused by Covid-19 swells into more widespread and profoundly transfiguring scientific phenomena in Denise Dumars’ “Scrape,” while in Hailey Piper’s “The Turning,” adolescent girls are swept up by a plague that transforms them into prehistoric mammals, thus creating newer, scarier forms of “the other” that frighten the grown-ups—and resist any efforts to change back to whatever they were before. One could go on and on citing stories by such writers as Alma Katsu, Gabino Iglesias, Nathan Carson, and others.

The face of horror fiction continues to be enhanced, both in representation and in relevance.