I adored Thistlefoot when I read it last year, and I actively adore GennaRose Nethercott, so this short story collection may have been one of my most anticipated reads of the season. Not every story knocked it out of the park, but I cannot stop thinking about a few of them in particular:

- The titular story (Fifty Beasts) was just as weird and wonderful as I was hoping—a narrative within a narrative is always one of my favorite devices.
- The imagery in The Thread Boy was honestly *gorgeous*, and offered such a resonant message that I almost want to go back and reread it already.
- The Diviner’s Abecedarian was such a creepy take on the high school mean girl thing that it reminded me a bit of Mona Awad's Bunny for a pre-teen scene.

I also think this would be a good fit for readers who like Bora Chung or Ling Ma, but would like a little less dystopia and a little more cottage-y feeling creepiness (maybe Neil Gaiman would be a better reference?). Whatever it is, GRN has a style all her own and I can't wait for more.

Thank you to Vintage Anchor for the opportunity to read and review!

In this, the author makes up her own fairy tales. Some are modern, like the first where the girls are working at a roadside attraction. Others are told like they are ancient stories. In one, a group of characters are writing a compendium of beasts and their group interactions bleed through the text. It is all very clever. I appreciate this type of story collection, though I often finish while still wanting more.

Recommended to anyone that likes unusual fairy tales or fantasy short story collections.

If you enjoy short stories, especially ones that are: a little twisted, a little dark, quite beautiful and might make you question your own beliefs, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart may just be the perfect addition to your shelf.

Full of little snippets of beautiful horror, not a single story was out of place. Each one twisted and poetic, many with a lesson in their own dark way.

The Thread Boy has tugged at my soul in a most unusual way. The Diviner’s Abecedarian has me second guessing all my social interactions. The collection of creatures in Fifty Beasts has me reminiscing to my youth of devouring Shel Silverstein…but make it darker.
The War Of Fog was deep and dark and sad, it made me long for happy days full of sunshine and adventure. And don’t even get me started on Homebody and all the THINGS it made me want to shout.

I adore GennaRose Nethercott and her unique way of telling a tale. Thistlefoot is one of my most prized books and Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart will soon take its place on the shelf next to it.

I don't read a ton of horror fantasy, which is strange, because every time I do, I love it. Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart is an exciting collection of horror/fantasy short stories. While there were a couple I didn't love, most of them were really engaging. As much as I love a good, weird setting and classic horror tropes, my favourite short stories in the collection were the ones that were more grounded, and served as metaphors and/or parables, such as A Diviner's Abecedarian and The Thread Boy.

The description of this book, in my opinion, is not a good description of what I actually read. It starts out with stories that don’t make sense, then a whole section of weirdly named beasts and what they look like and a whole description of them, then back to stories. The stories are beyond weird and when they end if left me with an open mouth and the thought of “what?” I tried to make some sense of the nonsense I read. I really liked her first book, Thistlefoot and was excited to read this by what the description was. I am disappointed in both a sad and sorry way.

A big thanks to Netgalley and Vintage Anchor for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart by GennaRose Nethercott is a fantasy collection of dark fairy tale short stories. The stories in Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart are about the abomination that resides within us all. That churning, clawing, ravenous yearning: the hunger to be held, and seen, and known. And the terror, too: to be loved too well, or not enough, or for long enough. To be laid bare before your sweetheart, to their horror. To be recognized as the monstrous thing you are. Two teenage girls working at a sinister roadside attraction called the Eternal Staircase explore its secrets—and their own doomed summer love. A zombie rooster plays detective in a missing persons case. A woman moves into a new house with her acclaimed artist boyfriend—and finds her body slowly shifting into something specially constructed to accommodate his needs and whims. A pack of middle schoolers turn to the occult to rid themselves of a hated new classmate. And a pair of outcasts, a vampire and a goat woman, find solace in each other, even as the world's lack of understanding might bring about its own end. In these lush, strange, beautifully written stories, GennaRose Nethercott explores human longing in all its diamond-dark facets to create a collection that will redefine what you see as a beast, and make you beg to have your heart broken.

I feel like I'm never the biggest fan of short story collections, mainly due to how incongruous they can read from leaping story to story. But I felt like this was one of the better ones I've read to date. Though some of the stories were a bit too abstract for my taste.

Each and every one of these stories captures the absolutely intangible weirdness that is a fairy tale - does anything make sense? No. Is the story beautiful? A resounding yes. Several of these I will want to read again and again while others I will gladly never lay eyes on, as should be the case with a collection of weird tales meant to make you feel more than understand. I have a feeling each time I read this I'll get some new insight into the story or the characters. This is a true masterclass in writing fables!

**Thank you NetGalley and Vintage Anchor for the eARC**

For the most part, I found the stories to be enjoyable. They are the kind of creepy/unnerving that I like reading. The short stories are unsettling in a way that makes for good reading (for instance- it doesn’t feel like these things would ever actually happen, but it would be really weird if they did. They allow for the right amount of “but what if….”). My favorite was “A Lily is a Lily” because the underlying theme was a little sad, but also carried a message of loving what is real and not what is a fantasy. My least favorite was “Homebody” because it was just so awkward - the telling of a woman turning into a house and the man she loves (or did she really love him?) drifting away from her.

I liked Fifty Beasts to Break your Heart. Stories that are strange, gruesome and just plain weird. I liked most of them but some were hard to understand. All and all an interesting read.

These short stories were abstract fairytales, so reading it within that context, I had a good time. If you expect to have these be happy, traditional, Disney-style fairytales, you picked the wrong book.

What a whimsical, heartbreakingly beautiful collection of stories.

Nethercott's brain is so full of wonder I have no idea how one person could have this many worlds and creatures inside.

Even though several quotes left me clutching at my heart, none of the stories really stuck with me in the end.

Thank you netgalley for an advanced copy of this in exchange for my thoughts!

This is the first time I've read a short story collection and it was definitely a very interesting experience. These are very creative and strange stories, which is also something that I don't read often. This combination did make it difficult for me to rate because I do feel a bit out of my depth and I have very little to compare it to. However, I did have a good time overall and I will do my best to explain some of my thoughts!

Truthfully, there were a lot of stories that I didn't understand. In fact, I would say that I probably didn't understand about 75% of the collection overall! However, I think I can divide some of them into ones that were intentionally unclear versus ones where the storytelling didn't click for me. Some stories, like The Fox Jaw, completely lost me and I have no idea what I was supposed to take from it. However, even in the stories that I did rate lower, I was constantly astonished by the author's creativity.

And then, of course, there were some stories that I loved. A Haunted Calendar and the The Plums at the End of the World were really unique and had bits that stood out to me. Dear Henrietta was one of the most intriguing and twisty so I had a lot of fun with it. Drowning Lesson was definitely the most emotionally impactful and it really stuck with me.

My absolute favorite story was none other than Fifty Beasts. Not only did I thoroughly enjoy the description of the beasts, and probably would have given that alone a 5 star rating, but the additional story weaving through each entry of the creatures definitely added something special to it and I was completely engrossed in it.

This author's writing is absolutely incredibly. The creativity she exhibits in this collection is like nothing I've read before and I am very eager to look into more of her work.

My average rating for all the stories in this collection came out to 3.5 stars

<i>I received an ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.</i>

I absolutely loved this weird and wonderful collection of stories!

These definitely won't be for everyone, but I think I'm the target audience. GennaRose Nethercott's fantastical yet dark tales gripped me and didn't let me go.

I loved how each of these stories felt slightly spooky and extremely whimsical. I loved how poetic they were and how varied the styles were. I loved the air of magic they all had while still being rooted in realism. I just loved them so much.

Personal favorites were: The Thread Boy, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart, Dear Henrietta, and Homebody

I had very mixed feelings about this book. Some stories I just felt like I needed to get through to the next one. Other stories I really enjoyed. So individual stories ranged from 1 star to 4 stars. Overall, the book was okay.

I received an ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart and Other Stories is a collection of dark fantasy tales like strange and unsettling urban legends and folklore for modern times. Two favorites of mine were the story about the Eternal Staircase--like one of those roadside attractions one might have found while driving on Route 66, and the story of preteens using the occult to get rid of a hated classmate.

If you are looking for something dark and unsettling, a mix of the weird and fantastical, Nethercott has brought a collection of prose that might just be the fairy tales that reflect our modern times.

"What is a monster if not someone, some thing, caught between?”

GennaRose Nethercott has proven to be a master of dark fairytales. I loved Thistlefoot so I jumped on the chance to read her new collection of short stories.

These are all unique and horror filled twists on the fairytales we all know. The one that really stuck out to me and still lingers is Homebody but they were all good.

I definitely recommend this to anyone who enjoys dark fairytales.

Thank you Vintage Anchor for giving me an advanced review copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

A while back, I read, and loved, Gennarose Nethercott's Thistlefoot, about a brother and sister who inherit the chicken-footed house of Baba Yaga lore. It isn't often I've liked one book enough to immediately add the author's next work to my list, but that was the case with her new release, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart, a collection of short stories.

From pre-teens navigating adolescence with obscure magic to a boy whose sister has drowned thirty-seven times to a trans-Atlantic love so strong that a ghost is accidentally born from the longing, the fourteen stories in this slim volume run the gamut. Nethercott's miniature worlds are strange, sometimes eerie things, and many are wrapped in a kind of haze like you just woke up and can't quite remember what's real and what was a dream. The familiar and the fantastic are knotted so tightly it's hard to tell where one stops and the other begins, but this doesn't feel like urban fantasy or your typical magical realism; somehow, these stories feel organic, like they were already growing in the odd cracks in everyday life and were simply scraped out for the purpose of this collection.

Story collections are fascinating tours of a writer's toolbox. In two stories, Nethercott uses encyclopedia entry-like forms to tell a story; in another, a calendar is repurposed as a narrative tool. Tenses and points of view are played with, skewed. Though many of the stories verge on the dark or twisty side of things, there really is a strong sense of playfulness throughout. It's like watching shadow children frolic, or sprites dance, things that are having fun but can also devour you whole. At turns, Nethercott's stories reminded me of one of my favorite story collections, Rafael Bob-Waksberg's Someone Who Will Love You In All Of Your Damaged Glory. I was reminded, too, of Brian Evenson's also-excellent Song For the Unraveling of the World. I think this collection, like those other two, will be one I return to time and time again.

In her acknowledgements, Nethercott writes that she wrote the stories in this collection while on tour for her first book, The Lumberjack's Dove. Over those eight months, she traveled the country, met loads of new people, crashed on couches, and slept in her car next to dive bars. I'd imagine the experience was thrilling yet displacing at the same time, and it does seem like a lot of the stories in Fifty Beasts do feel untethered. But they also feel thoughtful and open, arms open in an embrace that carries with it as many roses as thorns.

I love bizarre queer fiction!!! Nethercott beautifully weaves stories of grief, loss, obsession, love and self-love.

It’s not usual for me to love every single story in a collection, but this is the exception. Highly recommend this book to anyone who loves dark fairytales, house books, abstract metaphor-like stories, and queer stories.

Thoroughly enjoyed!

Thank you to NetGalley and Vintage for the ARC!

"Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart" by GennaRose Nethercott is a mesmerizing collection that delves deep into the shadowy crevices of love, revealing its power to both heal and harm. Nethercott masterfully crafts a series of dark fairytales and fractured folklore that not only captivate with their eerie beauty but also probe the complexities of human desires and fears. This anthology is a testament to the author's ability to transform the grotesque and the fantastical into profound reflections on love's many forms and follies. Highly recommended for those who are drawn to the beautifully bizarre and the unsettlingly romantic.

I enjoyed a good handful of these stories but some of them were a little too odd for my tastes. However I know that there are going to be people out here who can read these and appreciate them much more because this is their specific genre they really enjoy. This was my introduction to Gennarose's writing and I have to say she has me hooked. I really loved her prose and thought her writing was beautiful. The stories that I liked, the symbolism was easy for me to see but others I personally just didn't get. Now the stories range from eerie and morose to just plain odd. I'll definitely be picking up her other works to get more acquainted with her style.