It Calls From The Doors joins four others in its "It Calls From" series. There's It Calls From The Sky, It Calls From The Sea (You can read my review 
here) and It Calls From The Forest (Vol 1. and 2). You would think that doors are such an innocuous thing. How could they possibly be scary? They aren't a destination; Merely a threshold. What happens when those doors open to places we aren't expecting? Or worse, what if they open exactly where we are expecting? That's what this anthology from Eerie River Publishing and its authors attempt to define.  


Featuring nineteen tales from nineteen different authors, this assemblage of door related horrors will have something for every horror lover. There are cosmic horrors, creature features, stories about death, and killers all fitting the door theme. As a horror fan, I love seeing how a single prompt can inspire so many different versions. 


A few of my favorites:


"Homesick" by Chris Hewitt was an interesting story about a fixer upper with a door to an eldritch horror. Not only would that be horrifying in itself, this story contained thousands and thousands of doors with things behind too terrible to truly comprehend. What's worse is that somewhere within those myriad doors are her daughters. 


"Who's That Trip Trappin'" by Ally Wilkes was another creepy story. This one involving an escalator. We've all had the thought—however brief—about being sucked down in the cracks of the escalator but I bet you never thought that an escalator could be as terrifying as this story.


"The Black Room" by Mason Gallaway was short but surprisingly sweet. A child goes back to the house she grew up in to face her fears as an adult. The darkness is still there waiting for her, but this time she's not alone...and that makes all the difference. 


There were stories that didn't work so well for me but that's what you are going to find in every anthology—and the reasons why anthologies are so much fun. The variety almost guarantees you to find a few authors to follow. Eerie River continues to put out delightfully hair-raising anthologies with new authors to discover. 


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I absolutely adore folktales and fairytales, whether they are variations of the original stories, simply influenced by the classic tales or completely brand new imaginings. I didn't hesitate to say yes to Once Upon a Winter. What's even more exciting is that Once Upon a Winter is the first of four planned seasonal anthologies from Macfarlane Lantern Publishing. Obviously, this one starts with the colder season of the year and all the stories within containing the cold bite of winter's wind and snow.


As with all anthologies, there are stories that will resound more with the reader over others, which is the beauty of an anthology. While there were a couple of the stories that didn't work so well for me, the vast majority did. The atmosphere of the stories varies from sweet and romantic like "The Snowdrop" by H. L. Macfarlane, in which a boy meets an unexpected faerie friend, to the humorous "The Snow Trolls" by S. Markem where the edict is "Don't eat the yellow snow" and then there are those much, much darker, which are always going to be my personal favorites. 


That's not to say I still didn't enjoy the other stories. "A Pea Ever After" by Adie Hart is a feminist tale that is on the lighter side of the retellings in the anthology but I loved this take on The Princess and the Pea by Hans Christian Andersen. A fairy godmother has gathered four princesses together to compete for the hand of the prince. It was welcome to see smart, capable princesses that had no need of rescuing. In fact, the princesses had no interest in marrying the prince at all. Not that he's not perfectly handsome or refreshingly educated or even remarkably kind and funny because he is, they just aren't interested or have better things to do with their lives. 


Once again on the darker side of things is "Silverfoot's Edge" by Ella Holmes. In this tale, a trickster freezes a woman's love in a small pool and tasks her with finding one special snowflake in the midst of so many. This story starts in winter but spans the following months as well. It's everything that I love about fairytales. There's the peril of her loved one, the riddle to solve, a clearly defined baddie, and a determined and cunning heroine.  Not to mention that the little-folk creatures sent with her to "weigh" the snowflakes—the only way she'll know she's found the correct one—are adorable. My favorite passage of the entire anthology is here: 

       

        My mother once said to me love is an edge you will fall over, and she was right. 


        I think about it often as I walk the woods. She is dead and shrouded in the earth, and I feel her with every bare-footed step throughout the dirt. 

Landing among my favorites as well were two others in the collection: "The Best Girl this Side of Winter" with its undead, poisoned claws, and an impossible quest and Katherine Shaw's "Lord of the Forest" which introduced me to the Leshii, a Slavic forest protector spirit. Don't let the fluffy bunnies on the cover fool you, there are wolves within these pages. 


If you love the stories by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Charles Perrault, and Hans Christian Andersen, there's a story here for you. Unlike the aforementioned authors, this anthology sees a more diverse authorship being primarily comprised of female and LGBTQ+ authors from various countries. Grab yourself a copy and a blanket and expect a little magic for those long dark winter evenings.

This haunted house story focuses on a family moving into a new home that doesn't exactly have the Home-Sweet-Home vibe they were looking for. Right from the beginning, this novella had me laughing out loud as the family is getting their first glimpse of the house. Mom, Sabrina, turns to the kids in the backseat and immediately delivers an internal soliloquy about her 10-year-old Damien who had "eaten his own twin in the womb" and her ensuing nightmares of him pickaxing his way out of her with his dead brother's bones. Weird? Yes. Hilarious? Also yes but I'm twisted that way. It's just the start of the dark humor that you can expect from this novella, especially where Damien— who really, really likes to mess with his mom by living up to the name and freaking her out on purpose— is concerned.

Don't think it's all fun and games. When the haunting starts with a giant man jovially carrying a box to the basement and then climbing into the tiny crawlspace to disappear, it's creepy. Only Sabrina sees what is happening and as it gets weirder, everyone thinks she's losing it. While the haunting is at first benign, it's no less perplexing and overwhelming for poor Sabrina. The more answers she gets, the more questions she has.

I love when stories manage to bring something fresh into a typical trope and boy, this novella crushes it. It takes a lot to throw me but I didn't see this one coming at all. It's wonderfully weird. It's irreverently funny. Man, Fuck This House. Come for the title, stay for the exceptional twist on the haunted house story.


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Centered around La Llorona, the gothic fairytale is a feminist treat. If you are not acquainted with the story of La Llorona, the most common version is of a woman who marries a rich rancher. After bearing his children, she witnesses him with another woman and in a fit of jealous rage, drowns their children in the river. Unable to live with the grief, she spends eternity pacing the shores of the river, weeping and wailing. Weep, Woman, Weep takes this story and bestows upon it a fresh face and name. 


Mercy's life has never been easy. Generations of sorrow have tormented Sueño, New Mexico and La Llorona waits by the riverbank to drag the next generation down. The town and its people are well depicted but even here, bigotry is nevertheless alive and well. Ever present is the shade of La Llorona as the girls of Sueño are taught to conceal their sorrows and never, ever walk by the river at night. Mercy and her best friend, Sherry, have bigger dreams of leaving this little small-minded town but one day Sherry is touched by La Llorona and nothing is ever the same again. Mercy is determined that she will not lose her own vitality to the watery depths. She's been marked but won't give in.


Even with the heavy burden of grief on her shoulders, she finds quiet rebellion in her day-to-day life on the farm. She's jaded and wary but strength comes from within and Mercy has it in spades. She avoids the river, even standing the standing water of baths, and secretes her tears in jars so they will not be used to cause pain. Through it all, she perseveres.  The addition of a new neighbor leads Mercydown a path to another way of thinking. Mercy takes her roots that could entangle her, waters them with her tears, and lets them flourish into something beautiful. 


Choosing to have Mercy speak from the pages makes Weep, Woman, Weep more of a confessional than impassive story.  There are times that she stops herself from saying more than she means to say.  The use of first person makes Mercy's tale more intimate and believable. She's cutting and genuine and that's what makes her story all the more heart-wrenching.


Weep, Woman, Weep easily conveys the folklore vibe while still managing to be well-rooted in Mercy's world. At times, it's uncertain if La Llorona is merely in Mercy's head. Is she truly a supernatural spook? Whether or not La Llorona exists or is a convenient excuse for Mercy's stoicism is anyone's guess. One could look at it as a view of the role of women. How we are taught to swallow down our sorrow and put on a brave face to the world. How showing emotion is frequently viewed as negative and how our own hopes and dreams are put on the back burner sacrificially for others. This gothic fairytale is so beautifully written. Its haunting goes far beyond the grasp of La Llorona and weaves a beautiful story of endurance, fortitude, and love. 






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Review featured at Ginger Nuts of Horror

The Graveyard Feeder focuses on Burke Sawyer, who is a groundskeeper at the Juniper Falls Cemetery. Burke is completely unlikeable, incompetent, and honestly an all-around trash person. He doesn't care if he's doing a good job. As a thoroughly amoral anti-hero, he's looking out for number one and doing the absolute bare minimum to get by. When a corpse is found zip-tied to the south gate early one morning with a note pinned to it saying CREMATE, Burke's boss tasks Sawyer with disposing of the body. Of course, the incinerator hasn't functioned for years so what is Sawyer to do? If you guessed screw it all up, congratulations! Burke is the epitome of "You had one job."

From the prologue we know that a man simply called the Old Man has learned that his wife is not who he thought she was. After discovering her in the midst of evil one night, he offs her and determines that it's a fantastic idea to zip-tie her body to the cemetery gate to be disposed of in the crematorium. However, Burke being the screw up that he is, unceremoniously tosses it into an open grave, which sets the whole plot of weird into motion. Unsurprisingly, Burke goes home afterward to get piss-drunk, because of course, that's what Burke does. What is unexpected is that the ghost of his poor dear pappy shows up warning him that the woman Burke tossed in plot 29 is a witch who is now chomping her way through the dead in the graveyard like a demonic Ms. Pac-man. When he wakes up from his alcholic stupor, he realizes the ghost of his daddy wasn't a Jim Beam induced hallucination and is now demanding that he stop the witch from continuing her cadaverous smorgasbord.

It's interesting that Keaton chose the characters he did. Burke is pretty distasteful on his own, but the addition of Burke's boss, Purvis PooKutty, tops even Burke. The cemetery owner is even more unscrupulous and unethical than Burke. Neither of these gents is someone that you expect to like or to ever have a redemption arc. Keaton throws in some of the local police who are just as awful and corrupt. Burke's dear departed daddy is a fun character though. Even though he's incorporeal, he trash-talks Burke and doesn't stop ribbing him throughout. Their banter is where a lot of the snark and humor comes into play. The only character that seem to has a conscience is Shelly Tate, the investigater exploring all the complaints against the nefarious PooKutty and his cemetery. She isn't falling for the crap Burke or PooKutty are desperate to have her believe.

It's not surprising to discover that ​Jack Keaton is the pen name of Rich Robinson, who according to his website is "a professional writer/producer/director of narrative film, television and commercial productions". The Graveyard Feeder is told with wall-to-wall special effects. It reads like a script of the Evil Dead II variety with graves exploding and the witch popping up like a twisted graveyard game of Whac-A-Mole. Gore certainly has its place here intertwined with gallows humor. Black hearts beating in jars. Rotten corpses. Lots and lots of bodily fluids spewing and oozing. It's an extremely visual panorama of over the top gags as it dashes along with a sort of manic flair.

The only possible negative I see is the prologue with the Old Man and his wife, who becomes the titular graveyard feeder. It's written much darker and disturbing than the rest of the novella. There was potential for the novella to go an entirely different way based on the prologue. I wasn't disappointed that it didn't, as I loved the slapstick comedy and gags, but it did make for a brief pause getting into the flow of the rest of the story.

Horror-comedy is a niche genre that few attempt and even fewer excel. It's a fine line between too much and not enough. Too much and you risk it being cheesy. Too little and the jokes are left feeling lame and out of the blue. With its unending parodies and silliness, The Graveyard Feeder melds slapstick gore with plenty of campy goodness.


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