The Crawling Moon: Queer Tales of Inescapable Dread

This entertaining anthology of 27 queer horror shorts emphasizing “depravity and perversion” from Ring (editor of Unfettered Hexes) is a mixed bag of standouts and disappointments, though the scale is tipped definitively toward the former. The pieces that fall flat frustrate in their vagueness, among them the head-scratching opening poem, “A Consecration, Left Wanting,” by Jess Cho. The gems deal in specifics, unearthing new realms of horror, such as Tina Zhu’s “Portrait of a Woman in a Red Qipao,” a spin on The Picture of Dorian Gray in which a famed artist steals the essences of the young Asian women she fetishizes in her paintings. The satisfyingly vengeful “Blood Claim” by Winifred Burton is a fresh take on the vampire story in which the vampires are a group of Black women using their supernatural wiles to reclaim Southern plantations. What almost all of these stories have in common is the triumph of the queer hero, whether that comes in the form of embracing the monsters they themselves are becoming or saving themselves and loved ones from external monstrous forces. The result is an unusually uplifting horror anthology that brings both chills and tender moments. (Aug.)