Paula Guran chooses
Mexican Gothic has all the right ingredients: the romantic, fairytale-loving victim-bride; an uber-creepy cursed family with a malevolent mansion whose mysteries grow more bizarre by the page; isolated geography that obscures and ensnares; a cemetery of buried secrets; an unlikely hero; a village wise woman; foul fungi, and much more.”
You can read Paula’s full review, as well as Ian Mond’s, online or in the June 2020 issue of
Stephen Graham Jones, in his introduction to
Children of the Fang and Other Genealogies, briefly sums John Langan’s work up, as well as anyone can, as “both delivering us some compelling horror but at the same time interrogating the basic form of horror.” In his appealing story notes, Langan acknowledges the writers who inspired/influenced each story. The title story, a novella, is a prime example of Lovecraftian (albeit fairly obscure – the reptilian race of the Nameless City) inspiration and an old trope (discovery of family secrets locked away in the basement) reinvented as modern horror. “Into the Darkness, Fearlessly” is a found-manuscript story (with some wry pokes at horror writers and editors) of revenge. “With Max Berry in the Nearer Precincts”, written for an afterlife-themed anthology, offers a detailed and disturbing look at life after death. Stephen King is the muse for stories like “Inundation” (a breach between worlds floods everyday life),