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chuckroThis is a supernatural horror anthology, another from a Humble Bundle of short story collections. As is befitting obsession, it has a lot of sex, very little romance, and characters meeting terrible ends. I wasn’t that crazy about most of the stories, though.
In addition to pushing a little too hard at the “obsession” angle, which made them both weaker as sexy stories and as horror stories; many of them were walking the fine line between “this character is misogynist” and “this author is misogynist”. When I can’t get a solid read on how much of the monstrousness attributed to a female character is an unreliable misogynist narrator and how much is the author, it tends to put my teeth on edge.
The stories that stood out as particularly noteworthy: “The Hound Lover” by Laura Resnick, which is a bit formulaic as a monster-muse story, but it really works. “An Apiary of White Bees” by Lee Thomas which was helped because, as queer fiction, it had some additional nuance to set it apart. (Though as a warning, the horror aspects of that are particularly gross.) Most of the others revolve around supernaturally-seductive women and the men who are destroyed by them; from one perspective or another.
Overall: This was at best a middling collection; there was nothing that I would call outright terrible, but also certainly nothing new or groundbreaking.
In addition to pushing a little too hard at the “obsession” angle, which made them both weaker as sexy stories and as horror stories; many of them were walking the fine line between “this character is misogynist” and “this author is misogynist”. When I can’t get a solid read on how much of the monstrousness attributed to a female character is an unreliable misogynist narrator and how much is the author, it tends to put my teeth on edge.
The stories that stood out as particularly noteworthy: “The Hound Lover” by Laura Resnick, which is a bit formulaic as a monster-muse story, but it really works. “An Apiary of White Bees” by Lee Thomas which was helped because, as queer fiction, it had some additional nuance to set it apart. (Though as a warning, the horror aspects of that are particularly gross.) Most of the others revolve around supernaturally-seductive women and the men who are destroyed by them; from one perspective or another.
Overall: This was at best a middling collection; there was nothing that I would call outright terrible, but also certainly nothing new or groundbreaking.
