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A review by ridgewaygirl
A Darker Shade of Noir: New Stories of Body Horror by Women Writers by Joyce Carol Oates
4.0
This is the second anthology I've read that was edited by Joyce Carol Oates, and let me just say that she knows how to pick a good story. Or maybe, when JCO calls and asks an author to write a short story for a collection she's putting together, the author brings their A game instead of hammering out something the night before it's due. The second scenario is the more likely one, don't you agree?
This anthology collects works from a wide variety of women writers, from Margaret Atwood (a truly imaginative story called Metempsychosis, or The Journey of the Soul about a snail whose soul is transmogrified into the body of a young woman), to Tananarive Due (Dancing, in which a woman can no longer control her feet), to Elizabeth Hand (with a riff on the story of Bluebeard's wife called The Seventh Bride, or Female Curiosity]). The quality of the stories is high, and the variety is impressive. I've discovered a few new authors to look for and I got to enjoy new work by favorites.
This anthology collects works from a wide variety of women writers, from Margaret Atwood (a truly imaginative story called Metempsychosis, or The Journey of the Soul about a snail whose soul is transmogrified into the body of a young woman), to Tananarive Due (Dancing, in which a woman can no longer control her feet), to Elizabeth Hand (with a riff on the story of Bluebeard's wife called The Seventh Bride, or Female Curiosity]). The quality of the stories is high, and the variety is impressive. I've discovered a few new authors to look for and I got to enjoy new work by favorites.