It Was All A Dream 2 - Another Anthology of Bad Horror Tropes Done Right
I picked this up for two reasons - the premise is very fun, and Joe Koch has a story in it that plays with the conventions of torture porn.
This was a fun read overall, but it suffers from the problem of many anthologies of its kind in that it's simply far too big. There are 29 stories in here, and I think I would have much preferred it if there were half that amount, because while there's some really good stuff in here there is also - inevitably - a lot of filler.
Here's a short rundown of the stories I enjoyed most:
- Joe Koch's 'Untitled, With Demon' is very good and definitely evokes films like Martyrs. This was the main reason I picked the book up, so I'm very pleased I enjoyed this one.
- D. Matthew Urban's 'We Are Words' is almost too ridiculous, but it takes the trope of the Cursed Book Bound In Human Skin and simply allows it to play out to it's silliest conclusion. I liked it a lot.
- 'An Otherwise Ordinary Night' by Steve Loiaconi tackles crytpids and specifically the Mothman, in a nasty little slice of forest road horror with a nice twist that I didn't see coming.
- 'The Unburied' by Cynthia Gómez takes one of the oldest, most played-out tropes in horror - the Native American burial ground - and does something really fun with it. The story itself is a very good, very effective horror tale that seems to be playing the trope straight, but the ending was the only thing in the book that made me laugh out loud. Short horror fiction is often at its best when it functions like a joke, and this is an example of that. This isn't the first of Gómez's stories I've really liked this year - I was a big fan of 'Lips Like Sugar' from Luna Station Quarterly, which I read when it was nominated for the Ignyte Awards - so I'm definitely going to be seeking out more of her fiction after this.
- 'Mary Mary, Quite Contrary' by Angela Sylvaine manages to make the Bloody Mary story actually good, which is really quite a feat.
- 'Be Kind, Please Rewind' by Gwendolyn Kiste is the final story in the anthology and I think probably my favourite, too. It definitely takes the book out on a high note, doing something really interesting with slasher films, final girls, and the trope of the killer always rising from the dead, and elevating it into something really poignant and meaningful. I loved this one.
All in all I enjoyed this, and the highlights made up for the stories that I didn't really care for even if the latter category was about half of the book. I love the concept, though, and I'm interested to check out the first volume and see which tropes were tackled there. I also found a couple of writers I'm definitely going to explore a little more, too, and that's ultimately what I go to anthologies for, so in that regard I count this as a success.