Ginger of Nuts of Horror did a deep dive into Women of the Weird West, my new anthology from Brigids Gate Press. The review perfectly pinpoints the intent and hope I had for this anthology.
Some key excerpts:
“KC Grifant has arranged the collection so that the dread never settles into a single register. You finish a quiet, grief-soaked prose poem and turn the page into a vampire siege. You leave a Chinese funeral parlour crawling with faceless yaoguai and land on a smoothie bar on a planet called Alpha V, where the gunfight is settled by a haiku. The book refuses to let you brace for the next thing.
That refusal is the point. The old western promised a kind of safety, the lone gunslinger who always rides off into the sunset. These stories strip that promise away early and never give it back.
…
What unites the craft is restraint about gore. There’s blood here, plenty of it. But the writers trust suggestion. The scariest images are the small ones. A maggot in the eye socket. Purple drool curving into a smile. A husband who comes home violent after the whiskey. The book earns one genuinely visceral gut-punch precisely because it doesn’t reach for that gear on every page.
Underneath the monsters, this is a book about who gets remembered.”
I cannot speak more highly of these fascinating stories and poems in this anthology. I hope you’ll check it out!
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