McSweeney’s 71: The Monstrous and the Terrible
Brian Evenson, ed.
Hardcover
ISBN: 9781952119644
McSweeney’s, October 17, 2023, 336 pgs

Full disclosure: I’ve never read McSweeney’s (properly: Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern). But I’ve long seen them as a probably interesting source of fiction—if you read a lot of speculative fiction anthologies and collections, you will see their name pop up from time to time in copyright pages. For quite a while now I’ve had the impression of a literary journal which dabbles in the speculative, thinking they probably pick up pieces which hit whatever marks the editor feels the word “literary” requires. Having looked at this installment, I am even more curious about the series than I was before.

This gets tricky because The Monstrous and the Terrible is guest edited by Brian Evenson, who is very well known in speculative (especially horror) circles; and it has a special focus—in fact, it’s their “first-ever issue-length foray into horror . . .” So, I wonder, is it really representative of what they generally do? Does having a great time reading this one mean you might also have a great time with other issues? I glanced at a few random but recent installments, quickly looking over tables of contents, just to see if any “speculative” names stood out. I spotted Yohanca Delgado (Issue 69), whose story “Plink” I enjoyed in Infinite Constellations. Issue 63 has a story by Deep As the Sky, Red As the Sea author Rita Chang-Eppig. 53 has Laura van den Berg, Kate Folk, a letter from Alexander Chee, and more. So, yeah, it’s fair to say that if your reading habits are a bit broader, if your reading habits occasionally go beyond speculative works, and if you see a number of authors whose writing speaks to you, there’s a good chance you might like what McSweeney’s is all about. If this particular installment works for you, it might be worth giving some of the other McSweeney’s numbers a glance.

Well, let’s talk about this installment!

Evenson sets up his mission statement in his introduction. For him, this book is all about building bridges; or, another way to look at it might be that it’s about dispelling the myth of a separation between “genre” and “literary.” Evenson says, “I hope this issue will open up for you ways of thinking about contemporary horror that weren’t open before, will break down those walls you might have erected without being fully aware you were doing so.” A lot about the way these divisions work comes down to assumptions, many of them very wrong, according to Evenson: “If we’re signaled that a piece is literary, we look at it a certain way; if we’re signaled that it’s genre, we look at it another way. That generic pre-positioning limits our ability to see the full strengths of a story.” You know how sometimes you have your group of friends from one place—say, college, or some club, or heck, if you’re reading this, maybe even from conventions—and then you have your friends from work . . . or your friends you met at bars . . . or your friends from gaming night  . . . and you know how it goes if and when you decide, “Hey, wouldn’t be cool if my two groups of friends could hang out with each other?” Or: maybe it’s that person you’re dating, and you decide it’s time to introduce your person to your friends? Well, this project is also kind of like that.

Evenson says, “My hope . . . is that if you’re a regular McSweeney’s Quarterly reader but don’t know much about horror . . . you’ll find things here that surprise you, as well as a few things that feel just familiar enough to keep you reading. If you’re someone familiar with contemporary horror, this issue will still expose you to some horror writers who have been hiding in plain sight in the literary landscape, and to some new writers you either haven’t heard of or didn’t think of as horror writers. I think there’ll be surprises no matter which side of the genre line you think you stand on as a reader—or even if, like me, you’ve come to feel there’s not really a line there at all, that the best work on both sides of the so-called genre line has a great deal in common.” Following this, Evenson offers a set of sixteen original short stories and seven letters (in looking through the aforementioned tables of contents, I found the “letters” are a thing McSweeney’s features. They read like something between personal essays and straight out anecdotes—they are clearly written to a theme, and most likely by invite, but lean into personal experiences and perspectives). I’ll go over a few of the fiction pieces, but this is a seriously strong issue, so there’s even more for you to discover.

“Heartwood” by Kristine Ong Muslim is a brief exploration of a near-future where nature fights back. It’s mostly an idea piece, but rendered vividly, and Muslim expertly works drama and conflict and human flaws into the story. It helps that the idea is cool, and folks who like horror will enjoy the darker elements, including the overall mood.

Gabino Iglesias gives us “Don’t Go Into The Woods Alone”—there’s something remarkable about the way Iglesias establishes character and narrative voice right at the outset. What looks like a standard story opening is actually rich in nuance, created by specificity, and by the way he quickly establishes relationships, revealing a lot about the main character and more in a few quick strokes. As the story progresses Iglesias pulls you in by developing people that seem unique, interesting, and real all at once. He also establishes a moment which feels resonant and important. Despite the repeated phrase “don’t go into the woods alone,” which is a fairly classic (but still effective) horror refrain, Marta goes into the woods because it’s where she feels a sense of connection with a grandmother who died. In less skillful hands this setup would read as both cliché and forced but here it feels believable, and if I hadn’t been reading to review (having to stop to take notes and so on), I’d have eagerly continued reading through, driven by narrative voice. When the perhaps inevitable encounter with the strange happens, Iglesias demonstrates mastery via the conflict between vibes: perfectly pleasant versus underlying suspicion. Since you know this is a collection of horror stories, as a reader, you have certain advantages, expectations, and there are certain things you might guess about where it’s all going. And yet, with this one, you want to keep reading, you need to know how this is all going to play out. Don’t worry: Iglesias has a sharp, brutal turn in store.

“A Plague of Frogs” by Brandon Hobson dunks the reader into pure misery from the beginning. It’s an effective and suffocating opening, the lines strung together into an irrevocable experience, blending a terrible environment with being loathed and oppressed, being abused while trapped in some kind of captivity. The point of view is “we,” and although it reads as if a singular voice is relating the tale, events are expressed as a collective experience, something I don’t see often (I’m not even sure if I’ve really seen it before) but which works very well here. As a matter of survival they (“we”) turn to imagination, delving into an elaborate fantasy, with seemingly no other options available, since fully, consciously, and continuously dealing with reality being too much to bear. What follows is something which is both fugue and surrealism while also in some sense being literal: imagination, the fantastic, and terror all intertwined. Familiar elements, such as certain specific behaviors and the kinds of things certain types of aggressive men tend to say (“food stamps for the lazy” for example) grounds the reader in the real, making the experience of continual abuse a visceral one. The story seems to deliberately leave room for reader interpretation along several important points, which may leave some folks unsatisfied. For me, this creates an even more thought-provoking narrative. There is, in my interpretation, a relationship drawn between people and nature, and the focus of the story is on survival as resistance. Even in this structure, in these choices, my thinking is that the style itself is a type of resistance, standing against the constraints of prescriptive and formulaic story requirements, and succeeding massively in what it sets out to do.

Senaa Ahmad’s “The Wolves” is a less common take on wolf transformation, one where glorious, merciless wolves become ordinary people for four days out of each month. Luckily for anyone who reads it, Ahmad delivers this take via beautiful writing. For example: “They came out of the winter night. Slipping out of holes in the iceslicked steppes and thorn forests where they bided their time, gargling saliva sour with hunger. Their eyes cut from the sharp swords of old stars.” Ahmad’s sentences urge you to keep reading. The story is related by an older woman to a boy, as she tells him about her escape from the attack of Genghis Khan and his wolves. It’s a story of fleeing, of brutality, and of survival; and it’s as horrific as it is gorgeous. It’s also incredibly fascinating, as strangers (in the sense of people you see around town but don’t really know) are thrown together, because the strangers and their circumstances are rendered in intriguing detail. Ultimately it becomes an engrossing, multilayered examination of complex relationships, human nature, self-reflection, storytelling itself, and more. Seriously wonderful work.

Mariana Enríquez has “The Refrigerator Cemetery” in this issue, translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell. What makes this piece initially really chilling, and frankly, for me, more chilling than the rest, is the sheer realness of the nonspeculative narrative elements. In this sense it reminded me of “Lords of the Matinee” by Stephen Graham Jones, wherein a father-in-law is slowly, painfully killing his wife by deliberately letting metal shavings from a slightly faulty can opener drop into her food (in the anthology Final Cuts, which I reviewed in the June 2020 issue of Lightspeed). In “The Refrigerator Cemetery,” the voice is convincing, and anyone who has read a few headlines or even had a few less-than-totally-safe adventures can see similar tragic possibilities in their own lives, histories, and decisions. “Tragic events kept secret” has become something of a horror trope, arguably popularized by movies like I Know What You Did Last Summer. In this story, the tragic event involves a group of young kids playing around a field of abandoned refrigerators, and it’s easy to envision something similar with our own neighbors, or kids around town. It is perhaps even easy to wonder if you might have narrowly escaped something in your own childhood, your own play sessions. Moreover, to wonder, if tragedy had happened, if you had been among the survivors, what decisions you might have made as a kid. What you would do to stay out of trouble. What you might think you can get away with. We see the terrible decisions many kids make these days, enough of them ending up as horrific events in the news. The power of this piece, at least for me, lives in the potential relatability, in the possibilities of play sessions gone wrong, and the probability of some kids covering it up in lies. In this sense, “Cemeteries” is immediately about our own capacity for bad decisions, even reprehensible decisions—as well as the vulnerability of kids, the ease with which we lose control of their safety—in a setting which (while being evocative and really cool) also perhaps supplies commentary on the way the decisions of people in power directly and indirectly affect everyone else. There is a subtle parallel being drawn by the narrative: the self-serving children who don’t want to get in trouble and the self-serving adults who are likely driven by greed and the lust for power. This all underscores self-interest, and perhaps even the way we normalize it, the way it has become ubiquitous. The first few paragraphs alone are striking, compelling, noteworthy, and the story just . . . drags you under from there, forces you to stare at the darkness. Some folks, perhaps especially genre readers who may be carefully eyeing the speculative elements, might feel that there aren’t any surprises in the read. But the point of the story isn’t necessarily innovation; rather, it’s all about our multi-faceted and too often dark human nature, or perhaps human culture. Arguably, the perspective itself, the approach, and the voice are where innovation lives. Like some of the other pieces in this book, it’s seriously unsettling.

Evenson says in his introduction, “these are stories that try to provide the satisfactions of horror fiction and of ghost stories, while at the same time expanding the notion of what horror is and what it can do.” I definitely think he’s accomplished what he set out to do. I’m glad he introduced me to his other friends (I think we may have even hung out before?) and I hope they liked hanging out with me. If you like well-written tales which lean dark, I wholeheartedly recommend you spend some time with these pages.