Review: Night of the Living Queers

 

(NetGalley eARC)

I really loved the concept of this book – there’s such a long, complicated history of queerness in horror that an anthology like this absolutely makes sense. Unfortunately, the execution of this one just wasn’t what I wanted. The main thing is that every single one of them needed to be longer. They needed more room to establish characters, lore, relationships, and atmosphere – or they needed to try to do fewer of those things. Most of the stories attempted to cover them all, which is just too much for the length of these stories. In some of the stories the ‘horror’ element felt like little more than a set dressing to set up the story the author really wanted to tell. The really frustrating thing is that every single story had so much potential, and some of them had genuinely creepy endings. But because they were so short and tried to accomplish so much, none of them landed the way I wanted them to. Also, I wanted the tone to be overall a little bit more cohesive, to make this a proper anthology, because the stories were all over the place. Some were pure horror, some were comedy, some were somewhat-concealed-romance, and some were aiming for something more literary. Given how all over the place they were in every other regard too, more genre consistency would have been nice. It’s not that the stories aren’t good or worth reading; there was just a lot of untapped potential I would have liked to see realized.