Tiny Nightmares

Starred review from June 15, 2020
In this masterful anthology, Nieto and Michel bring together 42 chilling works of flash fiction that capture terrors both supernatural and mundane. In Samantha Hunt’s “Rearview,” a single mother attempts to distance herself from her former drug abuse, even as her past self comes back to haunt her. Hilary Leichter’s “Doggy-Dog World” offers an unsettling portrait of a witch working a spell on an unassuming yuppie couple. “Lone” by Jac Jemc is a realistic and hair-raising exploration of a woman’s anxieties while camping alone. The choose-your-own-adventure-style “Marriage Variations” by Monique Laban spins scares from marital discontents. Helen McClory’s “Gabriel Metsu, Man Writing a Letter c. 1664–66” follows an eerie encounter between an art gallery docent and the “presence” within a 17th-century painting. “Downpour” by Joseph Salvatore is a truly terrifying tale about a rat on the New York City Subway, made all the more disturbing for its very real possibility. In fewer than 1,500 words, each of these vivid, visceral tales engages with horrors with striking immediacy. This carefully crafted and genuinely scary collection is sure to impress.

August 15, 2020
Forty works of flash fiction guaranteed to inspire nightmares. Michel and Nieto collaborated previously on the story collection Tiny Crimes (2018), and here they apply the same basic guidelines--stripping stories down to about 1,500 words--and transpose them to the horror genre to fantastic effect. These are achingly brief but exquisitely crafted fragments of horror, some real, some imagined, and some incomplete. Divided into four sections--heads, hearts, limbs, and viscera--the book is delightfully unpredictable. In an elegant introduction, the editors observe, "Fear is also, for better or (more often) worse, the dark force that shapes society. Whether it's politicians spreading hatred to scare up votes or the passive fear that keeps so many of us from risking change in our lives, our communities, and our world." The opener, Meg Elison's "Guess," features a protagonist who knows how everyone will die. In "Jane Death Theory #13," Rion Amilcar Scott tackles the horrifying history of people of color who have died from gunshot wounds while arrested, cuffed, and secured in the back of a police car--annotated with real-life examples. There are a plethora of creepy creatures, such as the inhuman thing in "We've Been in Enough Places To Know" by Corey Farrenkopf; the demon that lives in the art exhibition in "The Blue Room" by Lena Valencia; or the puppy that morphs into a human baby in Hilary Leichter's "Doggy-Dog World." Other horrors are psychological: In "Lone," by Jac Jemc, a woman who fears men makes a horrifying discovery while camping alone while in Kevin Nguyen's "The Unhaunting," a man desperate to be visited by his dead wife is told by an amateur ghostbuster that she doesn't want to see him. There are plenty of iconic frights here, among them vampires and werewolves, but it's surprising how very different all of these stories are, especially given their limits. Iv�n Parra Garcia's "The Resplendence of Disappearing" is translated from the original Spanish by Allana C. Noyes into spare, brittle English that recalls Cormac McCarthy. "Candy Boii" by Sam J. Miller delves into the dangers of social media, with graceful passages like "The real danger is how we open ourselves up. What we let in, when we believe ourselves to be safe." There's quite a lot of body horror, too, so squeamish readers are forewarned, but fans of innovative horror films like Get Out and Us will have a blast. Sick and twisted and troubling: Reading it is like stumbling on an old horror movie on TV in the middle of the night.

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October 1, 2020

Michel and Nieto present 42 fascinating, compelling, and entertaining horror stories told with 1,500 words or fewer that lack for nothing in the anxiety and dread department. Each tale balances word count and terror with the accuracy of a marksman, creating characters and situations that reel readers in, hoping this next one will turn out better, and yet knowing all along that, of course, it cannot. Broken into sections vividly titled "Heads," "Hearts," "Limbs," and "Viscera," the collection features both established authors like Jac Jemc and Stephen Graham Jones and lesser known voices such as Rachel Heng, whose "Fingers" was among the volume's best, this anthology is an evil delight. VERDICT A better entry into the world of horror as it stands today would be hard to find. The short, but never sweet, tales surprise as they unsettle and terrify. Readers will seek out more titles by the authors they discover here, or direct fans of the format to Tiny Crimes: Very Short Tales of Mystery and Murder.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 1, 2020
In 1500 words or less, 42 authors of both horror and literary fiction surprise, scare, and confound in this outstanding anthology. Grouped into four parts (Heads, Hearts, Limbs, and Viscera), these flash fiction stories should be read during the day lest they lead to tiny nightmares for the readers. While some of the scares are supernatural ( Pincer and Tongue by Stephen Graham Jones), the scariest stories are centered in the horrors of our world: racism ( Jane Death Theory #13 by Rion Amilcar Scott), sexism, online dating ("Candy Boii" by Sam J. Miller), and climate change ("The Story and the Seed" by Amber Sparks and Meg Elison's Guess ). Some have a Twilight Zone feel to them. Unbeknownst by Matthew Vollmer tells the story of a man who gets his wish for one more minute of sleep, but not in the way he hoped. Jac Jemc's Lone, about a woman camping alone and the horror that stalks her, is a creepy standout in an excellent collection. While some of the stories will leave readers wanting more of the world the author created, most are perfectly suited to this short form. Highly recommended for all fiction collections.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)