Of Dread, Decay, and Doom

 Of Dread, Decay, and Doom is the third anthology from Stars and Sabers Publishing, the Los Angeles imprint run by Jendia Gammon (a Nebula and three-time BSFA finalist who also writes as J. Dianne Dotson) and British SF novelist Gareth L. Powell, here joined at the editorial desk by Scarlett R. Algee. The house’s first two outings, Of Shadows, Stars, and Sabers and Of Enchantment, Enigma, and the Infinite, ranged fairly widely across the speculative map. This one narrows the aperture to horror, and the result is a hefty, good-looking book of thirty-seven stories running better than four hundred pages.

The collection is arranged into three movements that echo the title—Dread, Decay, and Doom—and while I wouldn’t lean too hard on the divisions as a strict taxonomy, they do chart a rough tonal descent from the creeping and atmospheric toward the openly apocalyptic. The editors each contribute a short introduction, and Algee’s line about horror being “a monster or a memory, a scream or a whisper” is as good a one-sentence description of the book’s range as I could manage myself. This is not a themed anthology in the narrowest sense. It’s a broad church, and the contributors span several continents and a lot of subgenres.

That range is the anthology’s real selling point. Lee Murray’s “The Cleansing” opens on a woman cleared out of her job, wallowing on the couch with tea and chips, and Murray earns the horror by first getting the ordinary New Zealand domestic misery exactly right. Tim Waggoner’s “The World Has Teeth” mines dread out of that most American of settings, the late-night highway rest stop, and if you’ve ever pulled off the interstate at 2:30 in the morning and not liked the feel of the place, this one will stay with you. Eugen Bacon’s “The Defining Museum of Woomera” is the most formally adventurous piece in the book, an incantatory, Afro-surrealist prose poem of a story that some readers will find hypnotic and others will find hard going. At the other end of the register entirely, Chris Panatier’s “Glamhoppers” plays its horror for pitch-black laughs in a retirement community, and Vincent V. Cava’s “Killbilly Drive-Thru” is exactly the gleeful, fairy-tale-desecrating splatter the title promises.

A few pieces stuck with me for doing something I hadn’t seen done quite that way before. David Quantick’s “The Children of the Light” inverts the vampire story—his monster can only live in daylight and drinks sunlight out of people’s arteries—and Quantick, who has a long career in British comedy behind him, keeps it nasty and very funny at once. Eric Shanower’s “Courage” is the real curveball: an honest-to-goodness Oz story, and since Shanower has spent decades as one of the keepers of that flame, he has every right to send the Cowardly Lion up against a monstrous spider the size of an oak. Nicole Field’s “The Widow and the Raven” runs Mina Harker’s journal straight into Poe’s “The Raven,” a mashup that could have been a gimmick but instead lands its ending well. And Katrina Carruth’s “Telestial” tells a survival story in a frightened child’s clipped, nursery-rhyme cadence—the Scritch Scratchers and the Wail Whackers—that gets under the skin precisely because of how it’s told. I’ll also flag Patrick Barb’s “Did You Hear the One About the Girl with the Spider in Her Brain?” for having both the best title in the book and the body horror to back it up.

It would be dishonest, though, not to say what anyone who reads a lot of anthologies already knows: a book with three dozen stories in it is going to be a mixed bag, and this one is no exception. A handful of the middle entries struck me as competent without being especially memorable, the sort of thing that reads fine in the moment and evaporates by the next story. That’s the nature of the form, and it’s not really a knock—no anthology this size is all peaks—but readers who prefer a tightly curated dozen stories over a generous spread should know what they’re getting. What you’re getting here is quantity and quality, weighted toward the latter, with enough variety that almost everyone will find several new favorites and nobody will love all of it.

For my money, that’s a good trade. Of Dread, Decay, and Doom is a well-made, ambitious horror anthology with a genuinely international bench and a refreshing willingness to let its writers be strange. If you like your horror served in a wide variety of flavors—literary and pulpy, funny and bleak, cosmic and domestic—this is an easy one to recommend. I’ll be keeping an eye on what Stars and Sabers does next.

Permuted
Marge Simon
Crossroad Press (May 12. 2026)
Reviewed by Carson Buckingham

Permuted, written by Marge Simon, the much honored and awarded poet extraordinaire of the horror world, is a most remarkable book. She gives voice to the human experience, captures complex emotions in a few, elegantly placed words, and preserves the very essence of time. She is a cultural guardian, emotional truth-teller, and a true master of language. The poems in this book moved me to tears, made me laugh, and chilled me to the bone.

See if you don’t agree. There are 50 poems in this superb collection, so I’ll just touch on the ones that resonated with me the most, though they are all excellent.

Here’s what you get:

“April Moon” – a paean to strong women who find a way to rise above abuse and retaliate.

“Mother Eve” – A study in human hubris when a captured alien is put on display.

“Paradise Redux” – An apocalyptic poem of utopia attempted and failed.

“Rock On” – About how the reality that we live in and virtual reality lose their borders in the minds of young people and the horrific consequences of same.

“The Museum of Genetic Art” – The Earth is repurposed as a genetic freak show.

“I’ve Been Told of Fourth Street” – This poem reminds one of how our youth is becoming completely electronically oriented and dehumanized in the process. Ms. Simon cleverly makes the point with a world taken over by androids. Exceptional.

“Beguiled” – A little boy, his father, and a big cat at the zoo. Secrets revealed, secrets kept.

“Tomorrow Woman” – This one is about the drive to be unique and interesting in a society of the jaded, bored, and above-it-all.

“Tamsin X” – a heartbreaking poem of an android serving a human man with Alzheimer’s.

“Carnival of Specters” – A surreal poem about life, death, and the limbo of the carnival.

“The Lycanthrope Next Door” — …and the real dangers of calling, “Wolf!”

“Raft of the Medusa” – A ghostly mariner visits a painting in a museum.

“General Sherman’s Ghosts” – There is equity in death.

“Chocolates for Twins” – A poignant poem about Mengele’s experiments on twins at Auschwitz. I was in tears by the end of it.

“Cemetery Dance” – I love the images in this poem! It would make a great Magritte painting.

“Among the Ruins” – It’s hard to be the last ones left—especially for these creatures.

“Vision of Black Ice” – A cold-blooded murderer and the reactions of bored villagers.

“Keeping Time” – A dismissive, time-obsessed husband gets what he deserves.

These poems touch on science fiction and horror, love and pathos with equal flair, and it is easy to see how this poet had taken influences such as Theodore Sturgeon and Harlan Ellison, processed them, and made them her own. Through rhythm, meter, and metaphor, she has pushed the boundaries of language and rescued words from ordinary decay, breathing new life into everyday speech.

John Keats believed that poetry should surprise “by a fine excess” and strike the reader as a wording of their own highest thoughts. And with Permuted, Marge Simon has done exactly that. Brava.

Buy a copy of this book—everyone should.

5 out of 5 stars

Gargoyle Safari

Luciano Marano is a name I should have been paying attention to before now, and if you read the small-press magazines you probably already were—he’s been turning up in Nightscript, PseudoPod, Chthonic Matter Quarterly, and Year’s Best Hardcore Horror for close to a decade, and he has a werewolf novella trilogy (The Ambush Moon Cycle) and a Dickens-by-way-of-Thomas-Harris Christmas novella (Humbug, Crystal Lake) behind him. Gargoyle Safari is his debut collection: fourteen stories, twelve of them reprints running from 2017 to 2024, plus two originals. C.M. Muller, who edited Nightscript and now runs Chthonic Matter, contributes an introduction in which he says Marano’s range is astonishing. He isn’t wrong, exactly, but I want to push on that a little, because I think the interesting thing about this book is the opposite of range.

Here’s what I noticed about a third of the way in. Marano is a photojournalist by trade, and this collection is obsessed with the person holding the camera. The opener, “The Mythologization of Tymber Prescott in Five Selected Photos,” reconstructs a dead influencer entirely out of her own feed. “To Witness” follows a burned-out news photographer who beats the cops to a wreck on the highway and finds something at the scene considerably worse than a wreck. “Hāʻole” is narrated by a Vietnam combat photographer telling his dead friend’s last ghost story because nobody else will. “My Eyes Are Closed to Your Light” is about a graduate student assembling a book out of a vanished horror writer’s final manuscript pages. Four different subgenres, one preoccupation: what it costs to look at a terrible thing on purpose and write it down. That’s not range; that’s a major theme of the collection, and it’s a better one than the blurbs give Marano credit for.

Gargoyle Safari is at its best when that preoccupation is running. “Tymber Prescott” opens with the line “It helps that she’s dead now, because we never thought of her as a real person anyway,” and then proceeds to earn it. “My Eyes Are Closed to Your Light” is the one I’d hand to a fellow traveler first. Its missing author is named Kane Stryker, which is your first clue, and the story ends with a dedication—the one piece in the book with its own—reading “For Karl Edward Wagner: Something special for the Last Wolf, from a thankful fan.” Marano has written a story about a hard-drinking, difficult, controversial master of the genre who vanishes and leaves behind writings that keep arriving, and about the ambitious student who intends to make her career out of him whether he survives or not. If you know what happened to Wagner, the story lands like a punch. If you don’t, it still works as a nasty little piece about literary vampirism.

The title story, one of the two originals in this collection, is an occult-detective noir about a diviner-for-hire summoned back to his hometown because somebody is taking a hammer to the city’s gargoyles and dropping the pieces on joggers. It’s got the best hardboiled voice in the book—”What kind of lunatic goes jogging in that neighborhood?”—and a genuinely good ending in which the narrator, having learned what’s actually coiled around the heart of the city, takes over the public art fund and starts commissioning new monsters. The catch is that this one is plainly a pilot. The dead alchemist, the father lost in the subway tunnels, the Source of All Shadows—none of that gets resolved here, and I assume Marano intends to come back to it. I hope he does; I’d read a novel in that world tomorrow.

Elsewhere: “‘Till the Road Runs Out” is the splatterpunk entry, a queer Bonnie and Clyde running into a cult that worships death, and it’s as mean as advertised. “The Brief, Reluctant Retirement and Shocking Resurrection of Spooky Sophie,” the other original, gives an aging late-night TV horror hostess a Halloween confrontation with a fan who’s taken her act too much to heart. And then there’s “Shotgun Sunset,” which is two pages narrated by Ernest Hemingway’s shotgun on the morning in Ketchum, and which is the sort of thing that either makes you put the book down or makes you go tell somebody about it. Now I’m telling you about it.

Now the honest part. Marano has a tic, and in a book this size you can’t miss it: he loves a narrator who opens by explaining the rules of storytelling to you. “Black Dog Blues” starts with “Choosing sides; that’s what you’re doing when you tell a story like this.” “Hāʻole” starts with “Stories like this reveal more about the teller than the subject, in my experience.” “Love Is a Ghost You See With Your Heart” runs a page of lovely quiet prose and then breaks frame with “Pretty good start, right?” Individually these are all good moves. Stacked up across a relatively brief collection, the throat-clearing starts to feel like a default setting, and I’d have liked to break up the pattern by rearranging the running order.

Those are quibbles about a debut that’s stronger than most. What Marano has that a lot of his contemporaries don’t is the reporter’s habit of noticing the specific right thing—the meth lab in the back bedroom of the doublewide, the carpet the color of an unimaginative child’s fingerpainting, the barmaid who was nicer to him four days ago. Gargoyle Safari is hardboiled where it wants to be, quiet where it needs to be, and smarter about its own machinery than it lets on. If you like your horror with ink on its hands, this is an easy recommendation.

CREEPSHOW

CREEPSHOW is James Aquilone’s latest anthology, and this one is reminiscent of the old 1982 movie of the same name. He is a premier anthologist, and with an all-star Table of Contents, this book doesn’t disappoint and follows the spirit of the movie admirably.

Here’s what you get:

“With All the Boards Nailed Just Right” by Jonathan Maberry.  Even if you’re burned out on zombie stories, there’s a great twist at the end that I didn’t see coming at all. Beautifully done.

“The Hide” by Simon Bestwick.  A trio of hunters tracks and kills an unusual quarry.

“Five is the Best Number” by Gwendolyn Kiste.  Beautifully written story of revenge.

“Dead Line” by Dennis Crosby. Once you are on this train, it can take a long, long time to get off. Nice twist at the end.

“Tiny House (of Terror)” by James Aquilone.  A broken couple buys one of those tiny houses that are all the rage these days, in hopes that living closer together will actually make them a closer couple. He loves it; she, not so much. But he finds something in the garden that will ensure they will always fit in that house.

“When the Mask Falls” by Tim Waggoner.  A story about what happens when someone combines blind ambition, no talent, and an unwillingness to follow directions.

“The Great Makeover” by Lisa Morton. The whole world changes—from junk food! Believe it or not, as funny as that premise sounds, this is one frightening story!

“Instant Karma” by Keith R. A. DeCondido. Two karate schools are at odds, “but those who choose to fight have lost before they have begun”—in spades.

“Longings From a Dusty Shelf” by Thomas E. Sniegoski. A man wants to murder his wife with the aid of a supernatural being. Nice twist at the end.

“If You’re  Flapping and You Know It” – by Nick Roberts. Grotesque story about man vs. bats.

“The Predator’s Heart” by David Avallone. A study of predator and prey during World War II.

“Companion Piece” by Nancy A. Collins. Interesting story about hoodoo and the price paid for using it.

“Blood and Tinsel” by Steve Niles. A Christmas murder recalled. This reader is kind of sick of Christmas murders, and there was nothing particularly new under the sun here, and overall, it was an unfortunate way to end the anthology. Usually, anthologists begin and end with the strongest stories, and “Blood and Tinsel” was just too weak to pull off the required exemplary ending to this top-notch anthology.

That being said, there was a three-way tie for my favorite story in the book:  Jonathan Maberry’s “With All the Boards Nailed Just Right,” Lisa Morton’s “The Great Makeover,” and Tim Waggoner’s “When the Mask Falls.”

Christmas is coming fast, and this would be a fabulous book to give as a gift. Superb writing at a low price, so you can buy one for yourself and one for that horror fan you’ve been struggling to come up with a gift for.

James Aquilone has hit it out of the park once again. Bravo.

5 out of 5 stars

The Astronaut Among the Flowers and Other Stories

I ran across P.A. Cornell recently in Of Dread, Decay, and Doom, the Stars and Sabers horror anthology, where she turned in a lake-monster story called “From the Ice and the Darkness” that was one of the better pieces in a crowded book. Her contributor bio there mentioned a debut collection coming in August from the same press. This is it, and having now read it, I’m going to say plainly that the bio undersold her. Cornell is a Chilean-Canadian writer who has been quietly stacking up credentials for about eight years—”Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont” was a finalist for the Nebula, the World Fantasy, and the Aurora in the same year—and this collection is the argument for why you should have been paying attention already. Jonathan Maberry contributes an introduction making essentially that same case, and comparing her to William F. Nolan, which seems apt.

Twenty-one stories, a little over two hundred pages, arranged into four parts: Artificial Minds, Unusual Circumstances, Time Distortions, and Visions of the Future. Nearly all are reprints from between 2018 and 2024—Cossmass Infinities, Galaxy’s Edge, Apex, Fantasy, Nature, several Flame Tree anthologies—with two pieces original to the book, the title story and “Everything That I Am.” The reprint sources tell you something: this is a writer who has been publishing in good venues for years without ever quite getting the book-length attention that gets you noticed by the general reader. That’s the gap this collection exists to close.

The obvious standout is “Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont,” about a Manhattan apartment building where the residents live in different decades and can visit each other under strict rules—chiefly, that you may not tell anyone living in your past what’s coming. Sarah is in our present; Roger is in 1941, reading a newspaper about a war America hasn’t entered yet, and she knows about Pearl Harbor and can’t say a word. That’s a beautiful engine for a love story and Cornell runs it without a wasted move. But I’d also point to “El Bordado,” an epistolary story about a Chilean family emigrating to Mars, which Cornell says in her notes is the most personal thing she’s written and reads like it. The letters home, the customs officials trained not to smile, the embroidery—it’s a small story about immigration wearing a very thin science fiction coat, and I suspect that it will stick with many readers.

Elsewhere: “The Body Remembers” is a genuinely nasty piece about soldiers whose wounds are technologically regrown so they can be fed back into the meat grinder, and it earned its way onto both the Nebula and Stoker recommended lists. “Vinyl Wisdom” gives us an aging punk and his grandson scavenging a post-apocalyptic town for canned food and records. “Into the Frozen Wilds” is a Christmas story in which a plague has torn through Santa’s village by targeting Christmas magic itself, narrated by an elf named Mistletoe tracking something through the snow that is emphatically not a reindeer; it should not work and yet it does, very well. “8 Laws I Wound Up Breaking While Attempting to Restore the Timeline” is a 750-word joke told at exactly the right length. And the title story, one of the two originals, is a lovely closed loop about a girl on a colony world who becomes obsessed with a dead astronaut found in a field of violet flowers, whose suit is both more advanced and older than anything humanity has.

Cornell got a great many of these stories out of her writing group’s flash fiction contests, and she says so in the back matter, and you can feel it in some places. Several pieces—”Tabula Rasa,” “A Fall Backward Through the Hourglass,” “In the Grip of Yesterday”—are still essentially flash, and Part Three in particular goes by so fast that the Oakmont novelette at its end has to carry the whole section. More significantly, Cornell writes what she herself calls “death without darkness.” She circles the same warm territory again and again: parents and children, memory, aging, the consolation of being connected to something that outlasts you. When she’s on, as in “A World Unto Myself”—a decommissioned robot rusting on a bench, deciding that becoming soil for the plants around him is enough—that humanism is exactly what makes her worth reading. But read end to end, twenty-one stories in that register can start to feel of a piece, and readers who came to Stars and Sabers by way of their horror line should know that only three or four stories here have real teeth.

Quibbles aside, this is a strong debut collection from a writer who has been ready for one for some time. If you like your science fiction humane, unshowy, and more interested in people than in hardware—Bradbury by way of Nolan, with a Chilean-Canadian accent and a fixation on clocks—you should pick this up. Start with “The Oakmont” or “El Bordado” and you’ll know within twenty pages whether she’s for you. She was for me. Recommended.