I received an e-ARC from netgalley in exchange for a review.

I was quite excited to check out this horror short story collection, but unfortunately I found myself bored or underwhelmed by most of these short stories and wasn't able to find anything particularly intruiging in most of them. Most of the stories tend to follow pretty obvious horror tropes (lovecraftian cult, hungry haunted house, crazy cannibal killer), featuring women getting assaulted (and in general nearly always as victims), men being horrible (or sad), obvious and predictable twists and concepts that just weren't explored as deeply (or as darkly) as they could have been and thus a lot less horrifying. The only story I actually enjoyed in here was "A letter to my future corpse", a haunting story about recovering from abuse and trauma, a short story that was gross and sweet at the same time and included really fascinating descriptions of art. In general I feel like this short story collection suffered from trying to explore dark themes in it, without daring to actually dive into them. This is particularly true for "To taste her Flesh", a short story which features a haunting that attempts to tempt the MC into doing some truly despicable things (

Spoiler

such as sexually assaulting the husband of his unrequired crush who recently died

), but didn't dive deeply enough into the horror of such an act for the perpetrator, which cheapened it considerably to me. I also felt the same way about "In the Labyrinth", which also features

Spoiler

a weird tentacle (which read as non-consensual to me) sex scene and the ritualistic murder of the MC's wife

, but doesn't truly dive into the why, which could have added to this short story.
All in all unfortunately this was not a horror collection I enjoyed.
I took some notes on each short story and included trigger warnings as I was reading, which you can read here. Spoilers ahead:

Spoiler

Jealousy - a relatively disjointed story, jumping around in time repeatedly, the twist was preeetty obvious and to me it felt all in all rather boring, i did like the idea of a haunted bathtub and the fear of the drain was an interesting concept, but unfortunately that did not play as much as a role as I hoped it would, 2/5 tw murder, cheating

A letter to my future corpse - about recovering from abuse and trauma, cool art descriptions, gross and fucky and sweet, 4/5

I have swallowed sin - a haunting of a mentally ill person, not sure if the writing style wanted to give the impression of a child or a person with intellectual disabilities (mc was at least 16 years old), but it didnt sit right with me, the horror did not work for me either as it was just too vague and underexplored, 1/5 tw murder, ableism

In the labyrinth - weird lovecraftian erotic horror devoid of any real eroticism (featuring hot women w big tits getting fucked by our clueless stupid mc & the eldritch horrors) & his wife dies for manpain of our MC, really quite bad & not at all innovative, felt very 80s horror in its everything and so just wasn't at all interesting to me, 1/5 tw abduction, murder, rape (potentially, maybe just fucked up monster sex)

Cornelia - a man is kidnapped by a crazy cannibal killer and his wife, features women as victims and sex objects, misery but waaaay worse, 2/5

The incident at shore run road - a hungry house and the family it devours, okay, creepy if nothing special, 3/5, tw murder, suicide

To taste her flesh - a man grieving the loss of the woman he had a unrequited crush on confronts her surviving husband spurred on by a ghost, could have been fun if the author delved into the darkness instead of just hinting at it and hiding, tbh if you include an attempted rape from the rapists pov it has to make sense from a character perspective and here it absolutely did not, 2/5 stars, tw suicide, rape