Previous SFF Author: Martin L. Shoemaker
House of the Restless Dead and Other Stories by Hugh B. Cave
In my ongoing quest to read every one of the selections spotlighted in Jones & Newman’s excellent overview volume Horror: 100 Best Books, I have come to the realization that some of those books are a lot harder to obtain than others. Oh, sure, with the search tools available on the Interwebs, pretty much any title is easy to find today, but getting it at a decent price … ah, that can be more problematic.
January 9th, 2023. Sandy Ferber´s rating: 4.5 | Hugh B. Cave | Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Mistress of Terror and Other Stories by Wyatt Blassingame
By the time a reader gets to the fourth and final volume in Ramble House’s series of books dedicated to Wyatt Blassingame, he/she will almost inevitably have come to the realization that the Alabama-born author surely was a master of that peculiar horror subgenre known as “weird-menace” fiction. And indeed, those first three volumes – The Tongueless Horror and Other Stories: The Weird Tales of Wyatt Blassingame, Volume One,
December 30th, 2022. Sandy Ferber´s rating: 4 | Wyatt Blassingame | Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The Unholy Goddess and Other Stories by Wyatt Blassingame
It would be hard to imagine anyone who experiences the first two Ramble House collections dedicated to the Alabama-born author Wyatt Blassingame – namely, The Tongueless Horror and Other Stories: The Weird Tales of Wyatt Blassingame, Volume One and Lady of the Yellow Death and Other Stories: The Weird Tales of Wyatt Blassingame, Volume Two – not being hugely impressed and wanting to read more.
December 22nd, 2022. Sandy Ferber´s rating: 4 | Wyatt Blassingame | Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Even Though I Knew the End by C.L. Polk
Let me start with what I loved about C.L. Polk’s 2022 novella, Even Though I Knew the End. I loved the premise of the magical system at play here, and the story delivered a 1940s Chicago, Illinois, that was both familiar and convincingly strange. The Wink, a lesbian bar that has rolled through several incarnations in its lifetime, is a sheer delight of evocative description.
I liked the fast-moving plot and Polk’s spin on the hard-boiled detective story.
December 19th, 2022. Marion Deeds´s rating: 3.5 | C.L. Polk | Short Fiction, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Lady of the Yellow Death and Other Stories by Wyatt Blassingame
I can’t imagine any reader who, having turned over the final page of the 2010 Ramble House offering entitled The Tongueless Horror and Other Stories: The Weird Tales of Wyatt Blassingame, Volume One, was not compelled to proceed on to Volume Two. That first volume had given us seven tales concerning inbred and homicidal swamp-dwelling junkies, a tongue-slashing serial killer, a swamp-dwelling spider woman, the vengeful ghost of a British seaman, a white slavery racket,
December 13th, 2022. Sandy Ferber´s rating: 4 | Wyatt Blassingame | Horror, Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The Tongueless Horror and Other Stories by Wyatt Blassingame
A little while back, I was very pleased to read my first collection in the genre known as “weird-menace” fiction, which genre mainly dealt, back in the 1930s and early ‘40s, with lurid, violent, supernatural stories that usually turned out to have rather mundane – and often far-fetched – explanations. That collection was Food for the Fungus Lady and Other Stories by Ralston Shields, a 2014 release from the publisher Ramble House. I enjoyed my first weird-menace exposure so well that I determined to seek out some similar fare from Ramble House’s immense catalog,
November 28th, 2022. Sandy Ferber´s rating: 4 | Wyatt Blassingame | Horror, Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 7 comments |
Food for the Fungus Lady and Other Stories by Ralston Shields
Gathering together 10 remarkably grisly tales from the pages of three of the most lurid of the pulp magazines, Food for the Fungus Lady and Other Stories is the first collection of Ralston Shields’ work ever assembled. Released in 2014 by the Dancing Tuatara Press imprint of Ramble House, the book shines a long-overdue spotlight on an author whom John Pelan, in his introduction, calls the greatest writer of “weird-menace” fiction on a story-by-story basis.
November 9th, 2022. Sandy Ferber´s rating: 4 | Ralston Shields | Horror, Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
The Nectar of Nightmares by Craig Laurance Gidney
It’s horror season for me, the time of year where I usually settle in with a cozy haunted house story, but sometimes branch out into the region of the genuinely horrifying or the truly weird. Craig Laurance Gidney’s short story collection The Nectar of Nightmares, published in 2022, fits that bill. As with most collections, I loved several, and a few were misses for me. This is even more likely to happen with a horror collection than,
October 21st, 2022. Marion Deeds´s rating: 4.5 | Craig Laurance Gidney | Horror, Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
The Best of Walter Jon Williams by Walter Jon Williams
The Best of Walter Jon Williams (2021) is a 663-page tome containing, as its name implies, twelve of Walter Jon Williams’ best stories spanning four decades of his writing career. Fans will appreciate Subterranean Press’s beautiful hardcover edition of this collection (there’s also an audio edition). And for readers who aren’t familiar with this prolific writer, The Best of Walter Jon Williams is a good place to start getting to know him.
May 16th, 2022. Kat Hooper´s rating: 4.5 | Walter Jon Williams | Audio, Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Mestiza Blood by V. Castro
2022’s Mestiza Blood is a horror story collection by V. Castro. As the title tells us, all of the protagonists of these dreamlike, horrifying tales are Latina women, grappling with horrors that are futuristic, mythic or just plain everyday.
A disclaimer: This book is filled with body horror, splatter horror, graphic violence and graphic sex. The women in these stories are filled with rage and fear as they battle appalling horrors with nothing but their strength,
February 18th, 2022. Marion Deeds´s rating: 4.5 | V. Castro | Horror, Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
Previous SFF Author: Martin L. Shoemaker
Andi, you win again. If you live in the USA, you win a copy of UNTETHERED SKY Please contact me…
Convergence Problems by Wole Talabi A brilliant and varied collection of mostly-SF stories, many of which focus on the interactions…
Childhood's End- Arthur C. Clarke
The only genre book I read last month was The Ghost Book, a 1926 anthology compiled by Lady Cynthia Asquith,…
Best fiction I read in April was Ian C. Esslemont's new Malazan book, Forge of the High Mage. Best non-fiction…