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Award winning author, Priya Sharma, brings together a collection of some of the most amazing short stories I have ever read. Each one is a perfect vignette – conjuring up such vivid imagery I am amazed filmmakers aren’t beating her door down to sign her up. She successfully combines the fantastic and mythological with fairytale, legend and folklore. Humans, birds and animals transform into more than they were at first. Even the most challenged of the ‘fabulous beasts’ she creates have the abilit...
I was worried that all of the stories would be the same, since the first three followed the same format but in different settings (oppression, symbolic sad sex, punishment). However, from the fourth story on they were unique. As with most story collections, they were hit, super hit, miss, and super miss. The best story was the title piece, Fabulous Beasts. I'd like to see a full novel by this author.
Dark and macabre story collection by a very strong writer. Very grounded in social justice, reproductive justice and feminism, which is to say there is a *lot* of abuse of women including on-page rapes (not graphic, but there), so heads up if that's a dealbreaker. It's not gratuitous: this is what horror is *about*, mostly from the perspective of women and in one case a trans man. Some of the reproductive horror is going to keep me awake at night, not because it's ghastly splatter on the page (i...
Contents:009 - "The Crow Palace"033 - "Rag and Bone"055 - "The Anatomist’s Mnemonic…"067 - "Egg"081 - "The Sunflower Seed Man"093 - "The Ballad of Boomtown"111 - "The Show"123 - "Pearls"137 - "The Absent Shade"157 - "Small Town Stories"175 - "Fish Skins"187 - "The Rising Tide"205 - "The Englishman"213 - "The Nature of Bees"229 - "A Son of The Sea"255 - "Fabulous Beasts"285 - Acknowledgements287 - About the Author
I couldn't finish it, and the stories that I did manage to read I just didn't enjoy.
Book Club Read. This is not my usual read. I do not read horror / macabre, it is not to my taste, I prefer to be entertained and to be frank some of the stories in this collection made me feel both physically and emotionally sick. I have to confess there came a point where I could read no more. Whilst the content may not have been for me there is no doubt that the quality of the writing is to be admired. The stories were tightly written with superb use of language and there was no unnecessary pa...
This Christmas, all I want is for Santa or the Holiday Armadillo to bring me this pretty please.
Blown away. I grew up on a steady diet of speculative fiction but never ventured into the sub-genre of horror before—probably because I had stereotypical notions of what it would entail (decapitations, haunted houses, misogynistic violence). This collection, which center on the eerie similarities between birds and humans, has changed all that. The stories feel familiar because they draw on known tropes but end up in places that are unexpected and occasionally horrifying. A story in which the pro...
Read my fall 2019 interview with the author @ More2Read.com, On her Fabulous Beasts, Ormeshadow, and writing.
Some of the stories I really enjoyed, others less so. I think it gets stronger throughout. A few were v creepy!! A few I didn't really understand.Also there were quite a few typos which is always odd? Like who read this before it was published and missed them, but okay.
This is the type of horror you read when you want something unsettling, chilling, and halfway between creepy and comforting. Priya Sharma was able to capture the more horrifying thing that is human nature and weave it with the small hints of the supernatural. Sometimes I couldn’t tell if there was something unnatural happening or if it’s just people being people. Highly recommend. Perfect autumn read, I think.
A lovely macabre little tome that deserves a place on my carefully curated shelf. It may be a dark commentary on humanity and full of horror, but among the sickness, hate, heartbreak and despair there was also love, sacrifice, joy, transformation, acceptance and more. I loved the bits of mythology and philosophy twining through it. Someone else mentioned ontology and while I hadn't thought of it while I was reading, it's certainly quite apt.I don't recall how I came across this author and work a...
The fabulist element--of snake-women and cuckoo children, of seaward compulsions and the effigies of dead husbands--is too often tied up in a plot reveal, and thus is more a gotcha than a complex, fully-realized experience. This emphasis on plot gives too little room to theme, and so the monstrousness of non-normative bodies/identities is insufficiently subverted. There's so much potential: in the rhythmic, stylized language; in stories like "Rag and Bone," which has a engaging interplay of hist...
Will update as I read. Will probably take a while to read all as this is a collection to savor.Update: done! One of my new favourite collections of all time.The Crow Palace - 5* - weird fictionA woman returns to her childhood home. Disquieting, eerie. Concerned with family legacies, human-animal relations.Rag and Bone - 3.5* - alt historical fiction/social horrorSet in an alternative 19th century Liverpool where the rich collect skin, bone, and blood from the poor to heal their various ailments....
There's nothing particularly surprising about a flower unfolding—it's a predictable process, after all—and not everyone has the patience to wait and watch while it happens... but its beauty is undeniable.Priya Sharma is both a physician and a poet, and from the very first page of her first short-story collection All the Fabulous Beasts, I was captivated by the beautiful language Sharma unfolds in each of these fascinating and often terrifying tales.Birds are tricksters. Being small necessitates
Priya Sharma's All the Fabulous Beasts is an outstanding collection of short stories, one that serves as a shining example of the very best of contemporary speculative fiction. Not one of the tales feels 'lesser', which is a remarkable feat for a debut collection. Most of the stories originally appeared in high quality publications so there's no surprise about the standard of writing, but it's the breadth of genres represented that keeps this book richly engaging from its first word to the last....
My love for the first story has probably made me up the star rating for this collection. I like that Sharma is not afraid to be dark and twisty, but there were more references to sex than I usually like in my short stories - it features heavily in the majority of them - so that zapped my enjoyment a fair bit. My favourite stories were: 'The Crow Palace' (where a woman goes home after her father's death to discover there's more to her family than she first thought); 'The Anatomist's Mnemonic' (ab...
I’ve been a fan of Priya Sharma’s work since I first read her story “The Sunflower Seed Man”, which appeared in Black Static #37 back in 2013, and so when her debut collection was announced by Michael Kelly at Undertow it instantly rocketed to the top of my ‘must read’ list. Undertow Publications have become somewhat notorious for producing beautiful books, and “All the Fabulous Beasts” is no exception – the accompanying artwork is the perfect complement to Sharma’s darkly beautiful prose, and g...
Priya Sharma writes very dark stories in a very strong, terse style, drawing on horror, weird fiction, and fairy tales as the mood strikes her. Overly flowery prose (particularly overwrought and ineffective similes and metaphors) has really been irking me recently, and this was exactly the palate cleanser that I needed.The oldest story here ("The Englishman") is a relatively straightforward use of horror/weird tropes to examine race and alienation and belonging. These same concerns motivate many...
This is a great short story collection, and I'm not usually one to enjoy short stories. I also feel like I'd have enjoyed it even more had I read it at another time, because right now isn't exactly the best time for dark stories. Each short story in this collection is dark and twisted and mysterious. Sometimes I knew very well what was coming, and sometimes I was especially surprised. Favourites were definitely the Medusa retelling and the Selkie(ish) story, as well as the titular one, Fabulous