The Monstrous

Had this book been titled Ellen Datlow’s Big Book of Monsters, there is little chance I would have picked it up. Not that I don’t love monsters. I am, in fact, a monster kid.

When I was five years old, previews for I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, The Blob, Attack of the Killer Shrews and their ilk flowed through the boxy, black-and-white television sets in dens and family rooms across the United States. Each of these creations looked potentially more marvelous that the one promoted the week before; and, once my parents made it clear that under no circumstances would I be allowed to attend these films, my fate was sealed. To this day, I will program the DVR to record almost any unfamiliar offering from the SyFy Channel or Chiller Network and watch it just long enough to see whatever ridiculous creature will be wreaking unconvincing CGI’d mayhem for the remainder of the two-hour time slot. Because really what I care about is that moment when the monster is revealed. I want to see the experiment gone wrong that’s kept chained in the cellar; the alien that emerges from the wrecked spacecraft; or, Godzilla’s latest sparring partner. After that first reveal, I have slowly learned over the decades to expect things to go downhill. But my enthusiasm for that first look has never waned.

My monster addiction is a visual thing. I have never cared much for monster stories. Verbal descriptions of the hideous tend to be anti-climactic and take too long. By the time I was twelve I quit expecting any of this stuff to be scary, but I want either an impressive crudeness or elegance to the creature, and I want to take it in at a glance. (And I will forestall some criticism here by saying that Clive Barker writes excellent monsters, China Mielville creates admirably alien aliens, and The Babadook recently scared the bejezzus out of me.)

By titling her new anthology The Monstrous, Ellen Datlow drew me in. She seemed to be promising “essence of the monster” rather than just the doings of the things themselves. And after editing what, something like 800 anthologies, I know that she knows her stuff. These are twenty-one stories that, while they will not duplicate the thrill of witnessing Ray Harryhausen’s Kraken lift its third arm out of the sea, can still satisfy the monster kid in all of us – and I know you are out there.

In her introduction, Datlow says she was looking for unusual monster stories, but she has not avoided such familiar creatures as vampires, serial killers, and ancient evils haunting tombs best left unopened. For the most part, her authors don’t depict creatures that depend on detailed description of their hideousness for effect. Adam-Troy Castro’s “The Totals,” features the widest array of nightmarish creatures, each tailor-made to terrify and inflict painful death on innocent victims. But his story is played for laughs. We meet them in an all-night diner where they gather to collect their weekly bonus pay. The comedy here stands out in three hundred pages of grimmer, sadder, bleaker stuff.

Datlow frontloads the anthology with literary firepower. Jeffrey Ford’s “A Natural History of Autumn” incorporates Japanese folklore into the high-stakes, globalized corporate world. Peter Straub offers a brilliant retelling of “Ashputtle,” the Grimm’s brothers version of the Cinderella story with the prince, the ball, and the happy ending replaced with a contemporary tale of life-long revenge carried out by an obese, homicidal kindergarten teacher. Caitlín Kiernan’s “The Beginning of the Year Without Summer” is a beautifully written, evocative tale, but – and I have had this experience before with Caitlín Kiernan – I am not quite sure what it’s about.

In any group of monster stories, curses will abound. In Gemma Files’ “A Wish from a Bone,” a group of archeologists who are also interested in careers on reality TV, open an ancient tomb to spectacularly dire results. One of the first of the crew to be possessed sprouts wings and spends the rest of the story flapping about overhead with her lungs dangling from her shattered chest cavity. Now that’s a cinematic image worthy of Eli Roth. The philosophical but ruthless vampire in Jack Dann’s and Gordner Dozios’ “Down Among the Dead Men” can be killed but his infection cannot. Stephen Graham Jones turns in a typically visceral tale set on a western-bound wagon train with a creature so foul that even his bleached bones pass on his monstrosity.

I have a couple of favorites: Sofia Samatar’s “How I Met the Ghoul” and John Langan’s “Corpsemouth.” In Samatar five-age vignette an understandably nervous reporter interviews an ancient, dangerous creature in an airport coffee shop. Both the reporter and the monster are in their way engaging characters. Langan’s first person narrative takes a leisurely, novelistic approach and describes a family trip to visit the Scottish relatives of a young man’s recently deceased father. (Anyone who watches movies on the Chiller channel would know this is not a good idea.) The visit is a pleasant round of aunts, uncles, and cousins from several generations, all of whom offer dinners, single malt scotch, and sightseeing. One elderly great-uncle also tells the story of Corpsemouth, a creature from the days of King Arthur. It’s an ancient tale that will prove to have contemporary implications that tie the narrator to familial duties he has never imagined. This is a kind of curse, but on another level it a monster kid’s dream come true.

This review is based on a ebook provided by Net Galley. It also appears as a blog posting on Worlds Without End https://www.worldswithoutend.com/inde...

The Monstrous is one of the best collections of stories I’ve read in recent years. Every story in this collection shines. On each page I encountered a host of monsters, some human, some non-human and plenty somewhere in between. I’ve not enjoyed a collection of stories this much in years. The authors have taken the idea of monsters and created twenty-five original, striking and wide-ranging tales. Every anthology of stories usually has one or two clunkers. This isn’t the case for this collection. Every story in The Monstrous is excellent. I have a few favourites. I’ve read Asputtle by Peter Straub in his collection, Magic Terror. There is something unsettling and chilling in this story, in what’s not openly stated. The Beginning of the Year without summer by Livia Llewelyn is brilliant one of the most unsettling stories I’ve ever read. Catching Flies by Carole Johnstone gave me icy chills right down my spine. Jenny Come to Play by Terry Dowling blew my mind. The Last, Clean, Bright Summer by Livia Llewelyn is both brilliant and terrible. The Monstrous is highly recommended.

The Monstrous, edited by Ellen Datlow, is a diverse and fascinating collection of horror short fiction. The stories cover a wide range of themes --- from humorous to Lovecroftian to human monster and all the variations within and outside. An extensive and entertaining group of stories, all with some type of monster theme.

I really enjoyed reading this anthology. The diversity of the stories is a real plus. Vampires, werewolves and zombies can becoming boring after a while and this collection provides a much needed change from those particular horror tropes. The reader has the opportunity to see the different points of view about what is monstrous, which is a nice way of engaging the thinking process and learning something from fiction. To quote Ms. Datlow, "Never forget that monstrosity is in the eye of the beholder."

A very enjoyable and entertaining anthology.

I reviewed this excellent anthology on Adventures in Scifi Publishing.

It’s always difficult for me to review short story collections, which is why there are so very few such reviews on this blog. I don’t like to write bad reviews so short stories are a hard sell for me. With most anthologies, it seems inevitable that you’ll find 20 – 30% of the stories are good or even great stories and the rest are mediocre at best and shallow filler at worst. Then there are those few, extremely rare editors who seem incapable of curating a bad story. Ellen Datlow is such an editor. THE MONSTROUS is a newly reprinted addition to a resume that could fill a novel length manuscript. It’s also another home run for Datlow.

Pardon me while I wax star-struck for a moment here. Over the course of the last three decades–plus a little, maybe–It’s quite likely that I’ve read every anthology Ellen Datlow has produced. I’ve watched her grow and I’ve seen her change directions as either opportunity or desire presented itself. But what I’ve never seen her do is curate a bad story. Ellen is a rock star editor with an eye for the best stories and the best talent in the business. That quality has been consistent across everything she’s published and it remains so with THE MONSTROUS.

When she put out the call for THE MONSTROUS, Ellen Datlow said she was “…looking for unusual monster stories. Not your usual monster kills/destroys everything.” The authors who responded to the call did so admirably. The result is a collection of monster stories completely unlike any you’ve read before, written by such authors as Peter Straub, Gemma Files, Stephen Graham Jones, and many others. And the anthology is as diverse and well written as it is star-studded. The stories gathered here range from the visceral to the psychological, making pit stops at all points in between and never falling into the “normal”, somewhat tired tropes of vampires, werewolves, zombies and such. That’s not saying there aren’t one or two traditional type monsters, and even some human ones in here. I’m just saying that where they exist, they’re written with an unusual, unique flare or twist.

There are no bad stories, no filler in THE MONSTROUS. Every story is written with mastery and the kind of originality and attention to detail that gets you into a Datlow anthology in the first place. If I had to name a favorite, I would be hard pressed to do so and I’m not going to attempt that here. Suffice it to say, THE MONSTROUS was one of the best two themed anthologies of 2015 in my opinion and another example of why it’s always safe to take a chance on Ellen Datlow.

I love Ellen Datlow anthologies because in them you can always find new voices mixed with well-known writers. The Monstrous has very different kind of stories but I think is an amazing collection. I rreally recommend it.