200 pp. July 8, 2025, Meerkat Press. SF/Dark Fantasy anthology.
This is an exceptional collection from Carla E. Dash. It’s also pretty grim (the author describes it as dark fantasy). The first story, A Puzzle by the Name of L is about bereavement, and has suicide themes. Monsters is from the POV of a woman whose husband was murdered “while neighbors carried on with their baseball games and their skiing and the mundanities of their undisturbed lives”; it considers who the real monsters are, and it’s not the children who ‘burst’ from her to eat first a man who calls her an ugly name, and then those same neighbours.
Lizzie in Somewhere Far From Here dreams of a fairytale release from a life of abuse. The protagonist of What was Meant to be Buried starts their story with “I dreamed of dismantling him.” The delightful and completely spooksome The Thing in the Water is also both shattering and terrifying. And although there undoubtedly short stories or novellas out there from the POV of a video game character, I’ll bet Hack n’ Slash #999 will be among the best.
The characters in these stories and in the rest of the collection struggle with violence, bereavement, mental illness, agency. But this is also a collection that delights in genre, embracing tropes and deploying them in new ways. There’s an elegance to Dash’s writing, a kind of quiet lyricism that makes her work a pleasure to read even as she tackles horrific themes. Mostly I just sat and fangirled at Dash’s facility with language and conveying meaning.
Full marks to this wonderful collection; highly recommended. Many thanks to Edelweiss and Meerkat Press for early DRC access.
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Harare Review of Books 
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