Vroege RecensentenValerie Martin

Featuring new stories by: Margaret Atwood, Tananarive Due, Joyce Carol Oates, Megan Abbott, Aimee Bender, Cassandra Khaw, Lisa Lim, Elizabeth Hand, Valerie Martin, Raven Leilani, Sheila Kohler, Joanna Margaret, Lisa Tuttle, Aimee LaBrie, and Yumi Dineen Shiroma.

While the common belief is that "body horror" as a subgenre of horror fiction dates back to the 1970s, Joyce Carol Oates suggests that Medusa, the snake-haired gorgon in Greek mythology, is the "quintessential emblem of female body horror." In A Darker Shade of Noir: New Stories of Body Horror by Women Writers, Oates has assembled a spectacular cast to explore this subgenre focusing on distortions to the human body in the most fascinating of ways.

"Should we know nothing of the female monsters of antiquity," Oates writes in her introduction to the volume, "still we would know that body horror in its myriad manifestations speaks most powerfully to women and girls. To be female is to inhabit a body that is by nature vulnerable to forcible invasion, susceptible to impregnation and repeated pregnancies, condemned to suffer childbirth, often in the past early deaths in childbirth and in the aftermath of childbirth."

New Orleans' tremendous literary tradition shines bright in this outstanding collection of stories from some of the best writers in American history. Julie Smith has masterfully curated this volume with stories published as early as 1843 and as recently as 2012. Classic reprints from: James Lee Burke, Armand Lanusse, Grace King, Kate Chopin, O. Henry, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Shirley Ann Grau, John William Corrington, Tom Dent, Ellen Gilchrist, Valerie Martin, O'Neil De Noux, John Biguenet, Poppy Z. Brite, Nevada Barr, Ace Atkins, and Maurice Carlos Ruffin. From the introduction by Julie Smith: "A glittering constellation of writers have passed through New Orleans--including Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson, O. Henry, even Walt Whitman, to name some of the not-so-usual suspects. Then there are the ones whose sojourns here are better known, the ones on whom we pride ourselves: Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Ellen Gilchrist, James Lee Burke. It was an anthologer's feast--just about everybody who came to New Orleans wrote about it. But there were surprises... If you're from New Orleans, the neighborhood theme resonates like Tibetan temple bells. And yet, surely every city has similar 'hoods, similar behavior patterns, similar travails--and has had them forever. 'Indeed,' wrote Voltaire, 'history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.'"