5 Collections/Anthologies of Short Stories I Loved in 2022

 

I think it’s true: we really do live in a “golden age” of short stories. Here are five collections/anthologies of short stories that I read and loved in 2022 (yes, I know this is late!)

Never Have I Ever by Isabel Yap

I’ve long followed Yap’s writing in online outlets, and was thrilled to see her first collection finally come out. Never Have I Ever collects some of my favorite stories and offers new ones as well. There’s delicate magic, longing, and sorrow in “A Cup of Salt Tears,” wherein a woman grieving the upcoming death of her ill husband encounters a kappa—a type of Japanese water spirit—at a spa. There’s delicious horror in “Have You Heard the One About Anamaria Marquez?” which looks at the various legends told of a ghost girl on the grounds of a junior high school in the Philippines. There’s a squad of weary superheroes just trying to have an uninterrupted night on the town in “Hurricane Heels (We Go Down Dancing)” and a lush, epic fairy tale of a moon-eating dragon and two girls in love in “How to Swallow the Moon.” The two new original novelettes are among the strongest pieces: “A Spell for Foolish Hearts” is a warm, cozy tale of love and magic in a San Francisco Bay area tech company, while “A Canticle for Lost Girls” tells of a friendship group of teenage girls which has fallen apart, but must come together to defeat a hidden evil at their school. These are stories of  friendship, love, horror, and hope, told with a sure hand and in evocative prose, and lit with pure magic.

 

Sometimes We’re Cruel by J.A.W. McCarthy

A Shirley Jackson Award-nominated debut collection of short stories from a fiercely talented new writer. A collection burning with dark desires—with envy, want, and obsession. A collection of body horror, of doppelgangers, of characters desperately craving others’ lives and even (literally) others’ bodies. In the title story, people unpredictably disappear from a small town, only to return days or even years later cruelly changed. In “With You as My Anchor,” two teen girls play a dangerous game which leaves one lost and adrift when her best friend drowns. The surviving friend’s grief, and the solution to her grief, are both harrowing. In “Those Who Made Us,” a mother and daughter hunt down humans for the body parts the daughter needs to survive. Other stories are told from the perspective of the hunted, of humans whose body parts are taken, who are slowly consumed. In one such story, “You Do What You’re Told, “ there is a final quiet and satisfying sense of empowerment when a woman turns the tables on a man who has been stalking her, who has been sending strange women at night to take from her bits of her body—hair, skin, flesh—who has been trying to create his own image of her, or of who he thinks she is. But in other stories, like “Exactly As We Are Meant to Be,” the consumption is complete, as the victim is taken and her identity completely consumed. This is a set of stories about both hunters and hunted, predators and prey. It’s about terrible desires, about shame and guilt and greed and longing. About identity, and intense friendships and relationships that take a dark turn. “Sometimes We Are Cruel” is a darkly spellbinding collection, deeply disturbing, a portal into a strange, surreal landscape where the strange and shocking is nevertheless rooted in very real human emotions. (Content warnings for graphic gore, violence, body horror, and self-harm).

 

The Anchored World by Jasmine Sawers

A marvelous collection of tiny stories, dancing from hard realism to magical fantasy and all points in between. A queen gives birth to a golden conch shell. A little girl fears that her mother is actually a yak (a type of Thai giant/demon). A narrator ponders the results of their dog’s DNA test and their own human genetic background. There are riffs on fairy tales from both the West and East, stories inspired by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, as well as stories drawing from Thai folklore (e.g. the aforementioned golden conch story.). There are tales that are delicate (such as the story, “Delicate,” in which the prince reflects on the princess who could feel a pea through 20 mattresses), and stories that are sensuously, earthily erotic, as in Sawyer’s retelling of Rapunzel in “A Woman’s Glory.” A kaleidoscope of wonders: aching, poignant, strange, and sharp, sharp, sharp.

 

Into the Forest: Tales of the Baba Yaga, edited by Lindy Ryan

Baba Yaga, that famous figure of Slavic folklore, is a multi-faceted woman. She is crone, witch, trickster, villain, and (sometimes) a savior. She’s known to eat children, but if she takes a liking to you, she just might help you out. This anthology brings together 23 stories by women horror writers that showcase Baba Yaga in all her shifting, mercurial glory. In this book, Baba Yaga is a beautiful, glamourous seductress. She’s an ugly crone. She saves lost children in the woods, and she eats them, too. She lures bored suburban housewives into the forest wild. She’ll grant seekers’ wishes, but only at a terrible price. She’d kind and giving, and she’s ruthlessly, horrifically cruel. In one of my favorite stories, Carina Bissett’s “Water Like Broken Glass,” Baba Yaga is a fierce Russian resistance fighter in World War II who has a love affair with another figure of Slavic legend—a rusalka, or water spirit. In “The Space Between the Trees” by Jo Kaplan, Baba Yaga is a fiercely protective mother who will do anything to keep her daughter safe. She rescues a princess in the delightful “Of Moonlight and Moss” by Sara Tantlinger, and she extracts a terrible price from an erstwhile apprentice in the horrific “A Trail of Feathers, A Trail of Blood,” by Stephanie M. Wytovich. There is horror, too (and not all of it Baba Yaga’s doing), in “Stork Bites” by Ev Knight, in which two women and best friends together navigate a post-Roe America where abortion is no longer available anywhere. And one of my favorite pieces in this book is the deliciously strange “The Story of a House” by Yi Izzy Yu, which is told from the viewpoint of the chicken fated to become Baba Yaga’s House.

 

Here we have Baba Yaga as cruel and kind, generous and merciless, mother and mentor and murderer. We have stories that are wry, funny, fierce, warming, sinister, surreal, and utterly soaked in blood and horror. These are all stories of women—women stumbling upon Baba Yaga, seeking her out, learning from her, and fleeing from her. In all these tales, Baba Yaga makes her own choices; she plays by no man’s rules. She is the wildness in the forest, alluring, terrifying, and untamable; she is, as editor Lindy Ryan says in her preface, “wild and fierce and feminine.”

 

Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, translated from Korean by Anton Hur

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize after it was first published in the UK, this English translation of Bora Chung’s work contains stories that are shocking, gross, bizarre, heartbreaking, and darkly, deeply enthralling. In the first story, “The Head,” a woman encounters a head in a toilet that is made from her own human wastes—a head that starts stalking her and calling her “Mother.” In the second, “The Embodiment,” a single young woman becomes mysteriously pregnant from taking too many birth control pills, and is told sternly by her doctor that she must find a father for the fatherless baby or something terrible will happen. These surreal opening tales feel like strange parables about the status of women in contemporary Korean society. Other stories feel more like (relatively) straightforward ghost stories with a twist at the end. “The Frozen Finger” is a deliciously disorienting, creepy tale about the aftermath of a car accident, which has the feel of an urban legend. One of my favorite stories, “The Snare,” mixes elements of fairy tales and traditional ghost stories into a shockingly cruel tale of a man’s exploitation of first a fox, and then his entire family. “Scars” is a story in epic fantasy fairy tale mode, about a boy chained in a cave with a monster, who eventually breaks free but then must contend with the cruelty of the wider world. “Ruler of the Winds and Sands” is another fairy tale fantasy about a curse, a sorcerer who flies above the desert in an airship, and a princess’s quest. This is a book of stories that mixes and samples genres, that shifts fluidly between magical realism, horror, fantasy, and science fiction. An exploration of human cruelty is a common thread throughout this book. Yet somehow this spotlighting of cruelty felt not so much depressing to me as it felt brave, fearless, and necessary. There is deserved retribution, catharsis, and moments of tenderness in this collection, too. And characters coming to hard-won wisdom and awareness. The freshest, most mind-bending work of fiction that I read in 2022.