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A review by senchastories
Strange Girls: Women in Horror Anthology by Azzurra Nox
3.0
The average of my ratings for these stories came out to a 2.8, which I rounded up to 3 just because it came so close.
With any anthology there’s always going to be some hits and some misses, however I found many of these stories fell in the “just okay” range for me, which made it hard to want to press through to get to the few stories that truly stood out. Many of these stories play off common horror/monster tropes and just don’t put enough of an original twist on it. I could guess the plot of at least half of this anthology within the first couple pages of a story.
That said, I want to call out Leda and the Fly for being the most original and engaging story of the bunch, and also my favorite of them. I’m a sucker for horror stories that put a creepy twist on something otherwise mundane (in this case a blank wall). Also queer girls! There’s a handful of stories in this with queer people, and thankfully this is one of them.
On that note. I try not to comment on grammatical errors in ARCs because I understand that they’re unfinished copies, but the story Personal Demons features a nonbinary main character who is referred to twice with the wrong pronoun. Not by another character within the story, but by the actual narration. I understand that it may not have gone through any copy editing yet, but it was still uncomfortable to read.
With any anthology there’s always going to be some hits and some misses, however I found many of these stories fell in the “just okay” range for me, which made it hard to want to press through to get to the few stories that truly stood out. Many of these stories play off common horror/monster tropes and just don’t put enough of an original twist on it. I could guess the plot of at least half of this anthology within the first couple pages of a story.
That said, I want to call out Leda and the Fly for being the most original and engaging story of the bunch, and also my favorite of them. I’m a sucker for horror stories that put a creepy twist on something otherwise mundane (in this case a blank wall). Also queer girls! There’s a handful of stories in this with queer people, and thankfully this is one of them.
On that note. I try not to comment on grammatical errors in ARCs because I understand that they’re unfinished copies, but the story Personal Demons features a nonbinary main character who is referred to twice with the wrong pronoun. Not by another character within the story, but by the actual narration. I understand that it may not have gone through any copy editing yet, but it was still uncomfortable to read.