Roots of My Fears edited by Gemma Amor
I would like to thank Titan for an advance copy of this anthology in exchange for a fair and honest review
Publisher – Titan
Published – Out Now
Price – £9.99 paperback £6.99 eBook
British Fantasy and Bram Stoker-nominated author Gemma Amor brings together a unique line-up of 14 authors to explore heritage and horror, featuring stories from Gabino Iglesias, Erika T. Wurth and many more
It’s a bedtime story, ancient family lore, a secret passed down from generation to generation. Stories that have deep dark roots, ever-growing, ever-creeping.
This anthology explores stories of heritage and horror. The tales we grew up on, hometown rumours and legends.
The things we pass down through our bloodlines.
We are all the products of our pasts. What we learn growing up infleucnes how we behave, our ambitions and also our fears. This can be how our parents have taught us to be, what our local area expects of us (or not) and even our wider history and culture all get thrown into this mix of experiences shaping for good or worse. Our past is often where what scares us the most is first formed. Now in the excellent horror anthology Roots of My Fears expertly edited by Gemma Amor a stellar selection of authors has created a very impressive collection of tales using this theme in innovative ways but also providing a more global perspective as we explore different locations and cultures showing both the differences and the commonality of our fears.
We start with the fantastic “Lamb Had A Little Mary” by Elena Sichrovsky Where we meet Lamb and Mary. A tale told with very little context as we have these two characters one a child and one an adult. Its written very much as a series of events which we as the reader have to decode the context and actual relationship between these two figures which means we are the ones processing the horrors going on helplessly. The arrival of a third character Tiny arrives further shapes the relationship. There is no warmth in this tale its incidents and rage and what scares us is how the vulnerable characters are not fully aware of the danger they’re in but then even in the end we sense that the cruelties experiences are about to leave their mark one final devastating time.
A very different feel is then experiences with ‘The House That Gabriel Built’ by Nuzo Onoh. This very cleverly shows how the past can corrupt. We meet Gabriel who we initially know as the only son of a constant line of only sons which is felt to be a curse. He’s very morose and we initially find its because his family has been cursed by its enemies. What I really liked about this tale though is Onoh then shows the ways Gabriel decides to react to this revelation. A tale of demonic bargains and ghostly encounters turns very dark as Garbriel’s price to strike revenge which we may initially side with has horrible repercussions for those around him that will spread for years to come. Violence and a desire for revenge rarely stops with one act and generations may suffer onwards back and forth. The horror builds and builds to make this quite disturbing.
We get an interesting historical horror tale with ‘The Faces At Pine Dunes’ by Ramsay Campbell where we visit a caravan site in what appears to be the 1960s North West. A young man wants to push the boundaries with life with finding work and a girlfriend but increasingly his father seems to want to control his life. Its sneakily morphs into cosmic horror but I did find the pacing on this perhaps needed to be a little tighter.
There is a tragic ghost story with ‘In Silence, In Dying, In Dark’ by Caleb Weinhardt. We are told our main character is wearing his best suit to be buried in. We watch the ghost begin proceedings and then there is an immediate cessation of the burial. What follows are the aftermath that affects his wife and slowly reveal to us the life our lead character has so desperately wanted to live his own way and how society has decided to in death completely disrespect this. We like our main character just have to bear witness to this and then watch how ghost faced as they are wiped from memory of the living world. A powerful tale about a community’s intolerance and really lands its punches.
With ‘One of Those Girls’ written by Premee Mohamed we have a story set-in modern-day Canada where Benny a young student discovers she is pregnant and wishes to carry out an abortion without her parent’s knowledge. Initially the feel is very much about Benny’s torment especially as we find her parents from a fairly conservative immigrant family. Mohamed explores the tensions of generational secrets but also the power of the myths that follow them. As we find the real reason for Benny’s situation the supernatural elements increase and then we have an impressive finale which we aren’t too sure as which way the story will go. Really lovely character work makes this story feel very real.
There is a powerful short sharp shock of a horror tale in ‘Juracan’ by Gabino Iglesias as we head to Puerto Rico and Manuel talking to his father Octavio as a hurricane approaches. There is a family secret about how Manuel’s mother vanished in a previous storm and now we are about to find the truth about what really happened. Iglesias really makes the tale told here quite hypnotic and then we find that this tale itself is a warning, and more disaster is to very soon come. Brilliantly lean storytelling that really makes its mark.
The relationship between mother and daughter is examined in ‘The Saint In The Mountain’ by Nadia El-Fassi which has a very impressive nightmarish quality. Our main character has a very uneasy relationship with her mother who seems barely tolerant of her daughter but upon discovery of her daughter’s set period takes her to the mountains to meet her own family. This tale which I think is set in the United Arab Emirates goes from a tense family setting to a more dangerous feeling as this road trip commences and then we find out the family secret about to start its next generation and this for me was really successful cosmic horror.
What really impressed me about ‘Crepuscular’ by Hailey Piper is how here we have a short story distilling what could easily have been an epic horror novel length tale into just a few pages. Piper tells us the story of two mothers taking their desperately ill daughter to a remote pacific island for a potential cure. But we find this strange illness is creating both startling physical transformations on the child and her mental powers can have dangerous repercussions for those around them. Piper knows how to just give the reader the key facts of the story and yet gives it the emotional intensity a short tale requires to help us fill in the backstory and the relationships between the characters. We get quickly invested with child and both parents in danger and then we move to a very unusual finale where it’s about the need to know when to let go.
One of the most beautiful and yet equally horrifying tales is ‘Laal Andhu’ by Usman T Malik. In Pakistan of 2008, our narrator has a strange encounter on the road that nearly ends in death but who he sees brings back the turning point of his life in the 1980s when he and his friends were in the wrong place and the wrong time. Malik skilfully sets the scene of this period of violence, danger and yet also family life with a very lyrical tale of teenagers deciding to tell each other ghost stories in dangerous places. The last place they chose was the home of particularly vicious murder and its very much watching people having their world completely shattered by something outside of their knowledge. Really well told, immersive and tragically gorgeous to read its one of my favourites in the collection.
We have something more eerie and mysterious in ‘The Woods’ by Erika T Wurth a couple travelling through Tennessee at night stop at an unexpected hotel named The Woods. It’s a strange place the staff look very similar, and the walls seem to be occasionally moving pants. As well as this strange location Wurth unpeels the issues within this couple’s life as arguments simmer and we have a tale of people holding tragedies within themselves which this hotel seems to be bringing back to the surface in all sorts of ways. Its unsettling and leaves the final outcome to the reader as to whether the final scenes are reassuring or terrifying which I really liked.
There is a hauntingly beautiful tale of generational trauma in ‘Unsewn’ by Ai Jinag where we watch a young girl constantly making her daughter feel unloved because she is a girl and not a boy. But then we watch our main character be given to a family to become a wife and the cycle begins again as with each child she can only deliver a girl. The way here we have a society that only values male heirs and how people blame the mother for this is powerfully told and Jiang smartly uses a switch from third person into second person narrative to make us feel how such daily horrors could make someone step outside of their own life making horrible decisions and ultimately Jiang seeds this tale as to where another myth itself may have come from. The final lines are heartbreaking in many ways. Another excellent story.
There is some fascinating misdirection in ‘To Forget And be Forgotten’ by Adam Nevill as the initial section of the story focus on our narrator who has decided he really must remove himself from other people who he really cannot stand. There is dark comedy as our character explains his distaste for everyone and initially, we feel he is very likely going to be the horror in the story but Nevill then smartly shifts into our character getting his idea of a dream job being the nightwatchman in a barely lived in building of luxury apartments. His brief moment of happiness though is soon wrecked by meeting the few residents and here Nevill creates a gallery of the grotesque with strange elderly characters with too long limbs and uncanny speed just out of sight. There is a powerful sense of someone entering a nightmare but one you can’t quite resist looking at and it goes full on grand finale with a scene of strangeness that is still hugely unsettling.
With ‘The Veteran’ by V Castro we get a great tale of a homeless man very close to suicide who suddenly finds himself with company. Castro soon makes us realise that we are in a post-apocalyptic world with strange dangers all around and I loved our main character’s arc to find himself, it’s a tale I think readers should go in cold to best experience the way this tale really opens up. That mix of good horror and character work really make this story work and feels just the start of a whole new adventure. It also has a powerful final coda.
Finally, with ‘Chalk Bones’ by Sarah Deacon we have a story powerfully linking these threads of the theme together. Our narrator is a young child fascinated by a strange mound on a hill in her family farm. One that has many scary tales about it often about missing children. Deacon makes us watch the passages of time as roads claim the countryside, protestors watch houses being torn down and there is a sense of a great pain to the land that will require a price. Deacon makes us wonder who is paying the price especially as our narrator makes fiends with a very young child in the local protest group but then the final scenes of sacrifice bring it all to a close as the cost of the future is explained in a truly claustrophobic set of lines. Another favourite.
Every now and then we get an anthology that really knows how to use its theme and provides an amazing group of current authors producing some of their best work. These are stories to bring us unsettling moments but also to see the world differently and gain some empathy with people around the world and realise that we are not perhaps as alone in our fears as we think. I think Roots of My Fears is going to be one of those collections people will want to talk about and read for many years to come. Very strongly recommended!
