Datlow’s newest anthology, Fears: Tales of Psychological Horror, considers the aspect of dread and its influence on our mental state as we experience the world around us.

The novel is the best I’ve read in some time, marrying the strongest elements of Ramsey Campbell’s and Shirley Jackson’s respective styles together in what is very nearly a perfect horror novel. It is one of those novels where you become very conscious of the dwindling number of pages remaining, and when the story ends, you spend hours mulling over the mysteries that remain.

…this is the finest piece of literature to ever come out of the state of Alabama. Backwaters: 12 Murky Tales is a gloriously tumescent chimera of Southern Gothic hallmarks, obsessively-described body horror, and bizarro-absurdist humor which despite its myriad components, comes out exceptionally coherent and expertly paced.

‘For me, I AM AI was less about the nefarious creep of technology and potential negative impacts of generative artificial intelligence than it was about a very realized, widespread hardship that is already well-proliferated today: the near-inescapable compulsion to sacrifice our innate desires and personal ambitions in the name of financial prosperity or security.’

‘Langan marries the promise and potential of Lovecraft with the discomforting incertitude of Poe before drawing both into the modern era and signing his own name at the bottom.’

‘Jiang has done something truly masterful here in that she leaves just enough blank space on the pages, and just enough secrets in the novella, for the curious reader to seek layers of meaning which may have not been intended or expected. This is a line only the best authors can walk, and it imbues their fiction with a timelessness and sense of resonance that many readers will find affecting, and the right reader might just call perfect.’

Ward understands the human relationships that underlie each passage, and seeds in her characters very real shortcomings that in time bear terrible fruit. The horror here is not fanged and leering, but that which lies at the heart of every person: the capacity to be horrendously cruel for a taste of crude power. It is a book where no one shines, and all victories are hard-won and bloody.