Spooky Shangrila 2015 - Slasher Girls & Monster Boys

The season of fear is here, and all this month, I'll be putting up some spine-tingling Halloween-themed posts to set the stage for the 31st...

Happy Halloween everyone! If you're anything like me, you're spending the night handing out candy to trick-or-treaters, watching old slasher movies, and curling up with a spooky book. For those who want a faceful of young adult horror, look no further than "Slasher Girls & Monster Boys":



It's an anthology of horror short stories edited by April Genevieve Tucholke ("Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea").  The 14 tales mostly feature young female protagonists, and they're all explicitly inspired by other works. The story "In the Forest Dark and Deep," for example, is an unsettling take on Lewis Carroll's March Hare, while the dark exploration of the costs of fame in "Verse Chorus Verse" comes from a Nirvana song.

This is a pretty good collection - there really isn't a clunker in the bunch, and some of the best stories are impressively moody.  My personal favorite is probably "Hide-and-Seek" by Megan Shepherd, which crosses the Rube Goldberg personification of Death from "Final Destination" with the white-knuckle Appalachian survival mindset of "The Hunger Games."