Not for me

Excellent anthology from Ash-Tree Press about the sin best served cold. [a:Ellen Datlow|46138|Ellen Datlow|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1309669102p2/46138.jpg] does a good job of picking some submissions by authors you don't see in themed horror anthologies usually, and for once the others didn't just phone it in. Although there are some supernatural and fantasy stories, this is NOT really a horror anthology; it is about revenge, pure and simple. The "justice" runs the gamut from the sublime to the spectacular. I think the best story, although it is hard to pick one, was by [a:Michael Marshall Smith|12339|Michael Marshall Smith|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1331399592p2/12339.jpg], an outstanding longer story, not dull for a second.

These stories were originally issued in 1996 but Ash-Tree reissued it because at the time the book was not very widely available. ( )

** Warmer - A. R. Morlan
Third-rate model is called to the office of a notoriously sleazy record producer. She's understandably nervous about the meeting, but it turns out that his proposal is something different that she expected.
I wasn't won over by this story. The dialogue between the two characters didn't feel authentic, and the 'horror' aspect of of the story was all jammed up into the very end, feeling unnecessarily rushed and glossed-over.

*** Anamorphosis - Caitlín R. Kiernan
Hard-boiled noir morphs into something weirder and more strange. Deacon is a psychic, reluctantly helping the police with crime scene investigations. His ambivalence is well-depicted, as he's caught between a sincere desire to help victims, and the horrors and pain the job forces him to confront. Here, the case involves a missing little girl, known to have been abducted by the worst kind of abusers.

55 • A Grub Street Tale - Thomas Tessier
67 • Back in the Dunes - Terry Lamsley
95 • Leave Me Alone God Damn You - Joyce Carol Oates
109 • Butcher's Logic - Roberta Lannes
123 • A Lie for A Lie - Pat Cadigan
143 • Keeping Alice - Simon Ings
179 • A Punch in the Doughnut - David J. Schow
191 • Unforgotten - Christopher Fowler
213 • O, Rare and Most Exquisite - Douglas Clegg
229 • Martyr and Pesty - Jonathan Lethem
237 • Foreign Bodies - Michael Marshall Smith
283 • Ships - Michael Swanwick and Jack Dann
303 • The Dreadful Day of Judgment - Ruth Rendell
317 • A Flock of Lawn Flamingos - Pat Murphy
335 • Touch Me Everyplace - Michael Cadnum
343 • The Screaming Man - Richard Christian Matheson
349 • Rare Promise - Mike O'Driscoll [as by M. M. O'Driscoll ]

Full disclosure... when I requested this book, I thought it was a new publication (it's not) and I thought it was vampire stories (also not). That's what happens when you just see the name "Ellen Datlow" and stop right there and hit "request." Nevertheless... !

Older collection of fantasy/horror revenge stories. Michael Marshall Smith’s “Foreign Bodies” was probably the reason I bought it, and delivered his usual dose of human inhumanity with the story of a man who fears and distrusts women, and whose best friend starts dating a woman who seems stalkery but also oddly familiar. One of the stories, Pat Murphy’s A Flock of Lawn Flamingos, http://www.brazenhussies.net/murphy/Flamingos.html was a property lawyer’s delight: a story of revenge taken by careful manipulation of homeowners’ association rules. ( )