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verkisto's review
3.0
Like any collection of short stories, Metahorror was a mixed bag of stories for me. Dennis Etchison is well respected as an editor, and he has a different recognition of horror than other editors (he seems to avoid the splatterpunk for the more disturbing), but he's still not going to hit the 100% mark with me. The good stories here were good enough for me to give the anthology an overall positive rating, though.
Of particular interest to me were Joyce Carol Oates' "Martyrdom", Kim Antieau's "Briar Rose", and Lisa Tuttle's "Replacements", as their angle of horror came from relationships between men and women. Oates looked at toxic masculinity, Antieau examined women's strength through experience, and "Replacements" showed us the dangers of dependency. Not all women write stories where the horror comes through feminism, and not all men write stories that don't, but it's an interesting angle that I'm seeing more and more, at least in this era of horror writing. Male writers seem to be more fixated on brutality and excess, while female writers are more interested in subtlety and theme.
That being said, I also liked "End of the Line" by Ramsey Campbell (it's an elegant and effective look at insanity), as well as "The Ghost Village" by Peter Straub (even if it is a part of the Tim Underhill series, which I have yet to read), and neither writer focused on the aforementioned brutality and excess. They were more about the damage of internal struggles based on external events.
The rest of the stories felt forgettable, enough so that I wonder if this was a re-read for me. I don't remember anything from these stories, but I have it noted as a book I read before. That doesn't mean much (there have been several books I know I read, and didn't remember anything on my re-reads), but it doesn't do much to make me want to read many other anthologies. The good news is this is the last anthology in the Abyss line, so I should be done with them for a while.
Abyss Read Progress: 17
Of particular interest to me were Joyce Carol Oates' "Martyrdom", Kim Antieau's "Briar Rose", and Lisa Tuttle's "Replacements", as their angle of horror came from relationships between men and women. Oates looked at toxic masculinity, Antieau examined women's strength through experience, and "Replacements" showed us the dangers of dependency. Not all women write stories where the horror comes through feminism, and not all men write stories that don't, but it's an interesting angle that I'm seeing more and more, at least in this era of horror writing. Male writers seem to be more fixated on brutality and excess, while female writers are more interested in subtlety and theme.
That being said, I also liked "End of the Line" by Ramsey Campbell (it's an elegant and effective look at insanity), as well as "The Ghost Village" by Peter Straub (even if it is a part of the Tim Underhill series, which I have yet to read), and neither writer focused on the aforementioned brutality and excess. They were more about the damage of internal struggles based on external events.
The rest of the stories felt forgettable, enough so that I wonder if this was a re-read for me. I don't remember anything from these stories, but I have it noted as a book I read before. That doesn't mean much (there have been several books I know I read, and didn't remember anything on my re-reads), but it doesn't do much to make me want to read many other anthologies. The good news is this is the last anthology in the Abyss line, so I should be done with them for a while.
Abyss Read Progress: 17
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