Book Review: "Monstrous Futures" ed. by Alex Woodroe

Almost a year ago now, I published a review of the Dark Matter Presents anthology Human Monsters. Honestly, it was awesome. Give it a look below:

I always thought I would read the others in the series and I don't think I ever got around to it. It was actually pretty random that I picked up Monstrous Futures therefore and seriously, I was not disappointed. These books are definitely amongst my favourite horror anthologies because of how inventive the writers get with the genre. From a woman who applies a skin-suit in order to appeal to the male gaze to a woman who's mother's brain is turned into a piece of profit-making machinery after she dies, this anthology definitely gives Black Mirror a run for its money. I hope Charlie Brooker finds out about this book and soon...

The Least I Can Do by Koji A. Dae is a story about a woman who sells her body to men with some disposable income but, is made aware that she is not as desirable as other women in the same line of work. Instead of dropping her and losing her a client, her client ends up buying her a very expensive skin suit in order to make her look better. This new technology works like a reverse fat-suit in that it squeezes the fat of the customer's body down and recreates their body to suit a type. This was at first, meant to be a 'here and there' thing to wear and then, it became this client asking her to go around with him to events as a type of trophy. After a while it also became her wearing it because it makes her feel better about herself. Now she's completely ignoring the instructions and warnings on the labels on this suit. But at least her friends are commenting on her as looking incredible! Right? Well, you're not supposed to wear the suit for more than a couple of days. Our protagonist has been wearing it for a week. And it gets so much worse as her stomach and organs are pressed continuously into an unnatural shape. This writer doesn't give us tons of gore and nightmarish splatter horror, instead they give us creeping and disgusting dread. It feels wrong. Honestly, it was one of my favourite stories in the book.

I Promise I'll Visit Ma by Kanishk Tantia is one of those stories which doesn't feel entirely like a horror story but it is. This is conceptual horror and I was surprised I enjoyed it as much as I did. It is about a woman whose mother dies and so her brain is uploaded to a machine that helps to build new buildings. It makes us question what parts of us are really our own and what parts of us are just pieces of a machine, are experiences just little electrical charges going on and off? Is death not really an ending of a story or just a winding down and a switch being flicked off? There's thousands of questions just in there. But then, the woman telling the story continues to visit her 'mother' at her new site, standing around to look at her 'work' and begs for a job from the owner of the company where her 'mother' is working. (Notice: I'm trying not to give too much away here). Continuously, we ask the question of what we are really but we also ask the question of who, if anyone, is going to exploit this. You can only imagine what happens once the profits that the machines make starts coming down. This was a very intriguing story.

Other stories I enjoyed included one where a machine tries to keep everything as 'normal' as possible even if it is a detriment to the person using the machine - the story is called Normalcy Protocol by Kevin M. Folliard. There was also one where a woman, wanting to be able to network more, undergoes an experiment to fix her speech in social situations. One of the things the machine does is fix her speech because it is apparently 'too ethnic' (in lack of a better term) and not normal enough. The story Fully Comprehensive Code-Switch by MH Ayinde has a fascinating ending that you probably want to focus on. Yes, there's machines but then there's stuff like aliens and autopsies. In For Those Not Yet Lost by Kaitlin Tremblay, we see the atmosphere shift into something completely different. I don't want to say too much about it, but there's something extremely slow, gory and atmospheric about it.

I found this anthology absolutely brilliant and perfect for any horror fan.