07/11/2022
An inventive horror anthology spotlighting women in horror and exploring the terror-inducing possibilities of color, Chromophobia showcases the talents of new and veteran writers alike, offering an eclectic mix of fresh horror stories as strange as they are inventive and unsettling. Editor Tantlinger warns in the introduction “Tones that once seemed soothing or safe may morph into unsettling palettes,” and the collection bears that out starting with the first tale, Frances Lu-Pai Ippolito’s vividly rendered “Hei Xian: The Black Thread,” a body horror story of a man who yearns, in the opening passage, to “rip off his sleeve and gnaw at the black mark encircling his left wrist like a handcuff”–and his life only gets worse from there.
This establishes the anthology’s tone, as the bleak atmosphere of Ippolito’s story is threaded throughout these clever stories that push the boundaries of conventional horror. Jo Kaplan’s “Stygian Blue” charts an interdimensional journey as a farmer’s daughter communes with her father’s herd of cows. Sonora Taylor’s sharp, of-the-moment “Eat Your Colors” plays on the toxicity of social media trends when a young woman succumbs to an illness after failing to follow an influencer’s outlandish diet plan.
Many of these chilling tales will unsettle even the most seasoned horror reader. One of the collection’s standout pieces is G.G. Silverman’s captivating “The Gray,” where a group of people, then the town they live in, and then the world itself, all become gradually devoid of color. Weighty themes of loss and mental illness are explored in Ali Seay's "Nesting," in which a woman deals with the loss of her husband in a creepy ritual where she creates a nest out of her own flaxen hair. While the collection’s themes and original ideas may be out of the depths of a newcomer to horror fiction, seasoned horror readers and devotees of weird fiction will find much that delights, surprises, and challenges convention.
Takeaway: These clever, unsettling stories, centered on color, push the boundaries of conventional horror.
Great for fans of: The Women of Weird Tales, My American Nightmare: Women In Horror Anthology.
Production grades Cover: A Design and typography: A Illustrations: N/A Editing: A Marketing copy: A
