Leanne Olson

Dark Stars: New Tales of Darkest Horror, anthology edited by John F.D. Taff
Releasing May 10, 2022 from Tor Nightfire

Dark Stars is a fantastic literary horror anthology, one of the best I’ve read recently.  

Dark Stars themeless but the stories do share a few traits in common: they’re quiet, they’re on the longer side, they’re full of rising dread, gorgeous prose, and characters that feel real.  Each story (even the ones I didn’t love) is confident, deliberate, and extremely well-written.  The anthology is a mix of styles and themes, human monsters and literal monsters.

My personal favourite stories were:

The Attentionist by Caroline Kepnes. I hadn’t read Kepnes’s work before but the first page of this story was so confident and fascinating that I added her to my must-read list immediately. The Attentionist is about two girls, two sisters, who desperately want attention from boys.  The tension in this one had me almost unable to finish reading.  Yikes, in the best way.

A Life in Nightmares by Ramsey Campbell. At first I thought I wasn’t going to like this story.  Three pages in, I was thinking about moving on to the next one. The language was odd and I wasn’t sure it was deliberate.  But something kept me reading.  It got stranger, and stranger.  What an odd, dreamlike, nightmarish tale.

Papa Eye by Priya Sharma. I really like the way Sharma writes — she evokes a sense of place so well. This was a quiet, thoughtful story, with a wonderful wit to the character interactions. And as someone who often resents the pace of our world, I really want to live on Papa Eye. This story had the most relatable, fun characters of the anthology for me.

All the Things He Called Memories by Stephen Graham Jones. Yiiiikes that was terrifying.  A look at childhood fears, a marriage during the pandemic, and the cyclical nature of time.  I read this one at midnight with the lights off which was a very poor idea. This is the story that gave me the biggest scare in the anthology, and I can’t stop thinking about it.

Mrs. Addison’s Nest by Josh Malerman.  I loved the characters in this story, four teen boys who discover something is wrong in their small town.  It brought me back to the best of Stephen King’s coming of age stories.  And it was creepy as heck.  I loved the structure of this story, the way it played with memory and time.

Challawa by Usman T. Malik. This story hit a sweet spot for me, where horror, history, and culture meet.  Malik filled his writing with a perfect combination of dread and fascination. Malik left me horrified by his imagery and also eager to research the history of matchstick girls and phosphorus.  Malik is a new-to-me author and I’m excited to read more of his work.

Enough for Hunger and Enough for Hate by John Langan.  This is a creepy folk horror story with some brutal imagery.  I love Langan’s writing, the way he takes his time, he infuses his horror with history, keeps the pacing slow and lets the terror build.

If you love well-written horror that’s heavy on theme, atmosphere, and character, Dark Stars is an absolute must-read.

Thank you to NetGalley and Tor Nightfire for a review copy of this anthology.