Giallo Fantastique: Tales of Crime & Terror

This slim anthology, compiled by the capable Lockhart (The Children of Old Leech), brings together very short, gem-quality stories filled with blood, guts, sex, and especially death. Lockhart translates giallo fantastique as weird crime, and each story, while very different in style and tone, melds crime and supernatural horror with panache and verve. Fembots display a tendency toward sexual dalliance in M.P. Johnson’s “The Strange Vice of ZLA-313.” Scarabs have psychotropic properties in Anya Martin’s “Sensoria.” Ennis Drake’s “We Can Only Become Monsters” takes a journalistic look at a fictional pedophilic movie director who has connections to Charles Manson. The stories’ conclusions are never definitive, leaving the reader with a delicious sense of lingering unease. Lockhart has done a magnificent job of discovering and delivering a baker’s dozen of wonderfully creative, macabre vignettes. (May)