I really enjoyed this McSweeney’s installment dedicated to horror, and the creative, untraditional ways its various authors went with this theme. As editor Brian Evenson explained in the introduction, the issue took inspiration from McSweeney’s issue #45, Hitchcock and Bradbury Fistfight in Heaven from 2013, which is among the ones I’ve liked the most over the years.

Favorite stories in this collection:
- The Refrigerator Cemetery, by Mariana Enríquez
- Here and Now and Then and Forever, by Attila Veres
- Berceuse, by M.T. Anderson
- Containing Portals to Other Worlds, by Erika T. Wurth
- A Hundred Nights of Nothing, by Jeffrey Ford
- The Haunting of the Wilsons by Me and That Bitch Todd, by Sydney Emerson

The last four of those are in a remarkable string in the middle of the book, and the last two really set themselves apart with their originality and playfulness. As Jeffrey Ford is 67 and had quite a career writing fantasy/science-fiction tales, and Sydney Emerson just graduated from Allegheny College in 2023, I like how this represents yet another way McSweeney’s presents us with diversity.

Some other good ones:
- The Noble Rot, by Nick Atosca
- The Pond God, by Lincoln Michel
- A Plague of Frogs, by Brandon Hobson, which included some beautiful artwork from the author, though he seemed to want to flaunt his vocabulary
- Lover’s Lane, by Stephen Graham Jones

That’s a total of 10 of the 16 stories, which is a pretty good hit rate. Definitely worth checking out, and well-timed for the season. ( )

McSweeney's continues its mission of promoting what many consider genre writing as literature with this extremely entertaining collection of sixteen new horror stories chosen by award-winning horror writer Brian Evenson. Most provide thrills and chills but the ones I'll likely remember are Nick Antosca's "Noble Rot," about a troubled family's vacation at recently deceased Grandpa's vineyard estate; and Sydney Emerson's "The Haunting of the Wilsons by Me and That Bitch Todd," essentially "Beetlejuice" except the dead married couple doing the haunting and bound together for eternity absolutely despise each other.
The physical issue is a lovely faux-leather volume surrounded by three slipcovers, the outer illustrated with a monsters skin, the middle its exposed flesh, and the innermost it's skeleton. The volume has ominous endpaper graphics and each story has its own title page and drop caps done in a suitably creepy style. I'm extremely pleased with this issue. ( )

A mixed bag, as any collection is, but some of the stories here are phenomenal ( )