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octavia_cade 's review for:

Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 3 by Nathan Ballingrud, Luciano Marano, Nathan Robinson
4.0

Okay, it has to be said: one of the stories in here is mine - "The Better Part of Drowning" - and so I am clearly biased, but I do love horror and this anthology is full of it. There's a wide range of horror stories in here too, and range is I think always a bonus in any anthology, as it increases the chance of coming across stories that will really appeal to the individual reader. Personally, I tend to prefer horror that's as much story as gore, tending more to the contemporary than the cosmic, and so I was well-served by a lot of the pieces in here. The stories that particularly appealed to me were the excellent "West of Matamoros, North of Hell" by Brian Hodge, "Burnt" by Luciano Marano, and the beautifully written "So Sings the Siren" by Annie Neugebauer, which is going down as one of my favourite horror stories of all time.