Strange Girls: Women in Horror Anthology by Azzurra Nox- ARC Review

You know them. Those girls that aren’t quite like everyone else. Those girls who stand out in the crowd. Those girls that dare to be different. Those girls are dangerous.

In Strange Girls, twenty-one authors dare to tackle what makes the girls in this collection different. Vampires, selkies, murderous mermaids, succubus, and possessed dolls take center stage in these short stories that are sure to invoke feelings of quiet terror and uneasiness in the reader. Following the successful debut of Women in Horror anthology with My American Nightmare, Strange Girls is the sophomore effort to showcase these talented women in a genre that is often dominated by the male gaze.

Dare to take a walk on the dark side. (taken from Amazon)

                                 Thank you to Netgalley for providing me with this book in exchange for my honest opinion. This will be available on February 18th.

There’s a reason I’m posting this review so far ahead of the book’s release date: it is really, really bad. I hate posting a negative review right before a release date, so I’m posting this earlier. My final feeling on this anthology is: YUCK.

I went into this book with excitement, looking forward to horror stories where women are the major focus. That’s a cool idea, and I stand by that. However, what was included in this book is not something I would ever knowingly choose to read.

One story had an incredibly nasty person who had a penchant for necrophilia. Another repeated the phrase “You didn’t say no” multiple times. What you infer from that is unfortunately correct. I don’t read these things in books. It bothers me enough that I mention it in my blog review policy. I will give a shout out to yet another story involving these problems: this one at least included a trigger warning at the beginning. I chose to skip that story.

Okay, you might be thinking, that’s just a few examples though, and you’re right. Other stories felt unfinished (and not in a good way). That doesn’t mean that these authors are bad: in fact, I’m sure some of them are very talented. It might have very well been a choice to leave these particular stories with an unfinished feeling, but it didn’t work for me.

I can’t choose a favorite story among the ones in this anthology because so many of them left a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach and not the fun sense of eeriness that I was hoping for. My takeaway from this anthology was disappointment. Hopefully, the next book I read will be more enjoyable.