Review featured in Unnerving Magazine #15

Enmeshing horror with dark fantasy, Piper's collection of eighteen new and previously printed tales stretches across a diverse universe of styles and characters. Witches, monsters, elder gods, secret societies, and cosmic realities all find a new face under her tutelage. While often collections can be haphazard—an accumulation of bobs and bits that often aren't cohesive—it's Piper's characters that unify this collection. In each of these carefully molded stories, her characters are put in situations to experienced things distressingly poignant and ultimately metamorphic. They all share the underlying theme of becoming something not wholly unexpected, something that has been there all along waiting oh, so patiently to say "I exist".

Piper has been on my horror radar since the publication of The Possession of Natalie Glasgow and she continues to deliver narratives that have snapping jaws and a fiery soul at their core. Her writing is often lyrical, wrapping itself around you as you stop to ponder the greater meaning hidden inside each piece. A few favorites from the collection: "Feast for Small Pieces" brings about poetic undoing in that the parts could be greater than the whole; "We All Scream", where the quandary of which restroom to use becomes much more terrifying set to the tune of "Pop Goes the Weasel"; and "The Burning of Blueberries", the very core of Unfortunate Elements of My Anatomy, which must be experienced.