Those Who Make Us

Starred review from November 7, 2016
This all-Canadian anthology of fantastical stories, featuring emerging writers alongside award-winning novelists, poets, and playwrights, is original, elegant, often poetic, sometimes funny, always thought-provoking, and a must for lovers of short fiction. Morris, who edits speculative fiction, and Tremblay, who produced the collaborative interaction fiction anthology Lights Out, Please, have chosen well. Among the 18 stories in this volume are some real standouts. In Michal Wojcik’s “A New Bestiary,” cosmetic surgery is a means for becoming the monsters people always thought they wanted to be. Andrea Bradley’s “This Could Be Yours” may make readers long to get in touch with their inner trolls. Dominik Parisien’s “Where Roots and Rivers Run as Veins” is an epistolary story that unfolds gracefully, with just the right balance between the sinister and the liberating. Corey Redekop’s “The Outside Monster” examines the invisible demons that live outside and those that live within. Delani Valin’s “The Rugaru” looks at the monsters that lurk at the edges of one’s psyche. Each story in the collection is a gift to readers who are open to discovering imaginative vistas.