Dark Matter Presents: Monster Lairs

by Anna Madden (Editor), Fatima Abdullahi, J.W. Allen

31 BRAND NEW DARK FANTASY HORROR STORIES

Bloody corridors of ancient rock. A castle surrounded by poisonous thorns. A lost temple of traps and corpses. A subaqueous cave at the bottom of a cursed lake. These are the places where secrets are buried, where ancient evils are summoned, where beasts are imprisoned, where the insane lay in wait. These are tombs of darkness and nightmare, where if you stare into the abyss, the abyss will stare back. These are monster lairs. Edited by Anna Madden. Cover art by Olly Jeavons.

STORIES BY

Fatima Abdullahi
The Last Guardian

J. W. Allen
Goodbye Gutleech

R. F. Anding
Witchroot

Michael Boulerice
In Pursuit of the Black Chuck Wagon

Kevin M. Casin
To Guard a Garden

Kaitlin Caul
Patch Job

Lyndsey Croal
To Gut a Fish, First Gather its Bones

Marie Croke
To Meld Flesh with Gown and Gown to Flesh

Koji A. Dae
Karakondzhul in Love

Oleander Dudek
Who Gets to Eat the Sun

Victor Forna
Has Someone Ever Dared to Scream?

L. P. Hernandez
Offerings to an Old God

Jordan Hirsch
Sister to the Sea

Andrew Leon Hudson
Dead East

Vanessa Jae
Her Rotten Tongue

Ai Jiang
Your Ballad From Within His Gourd

Wailana Kalama
God Stalker

Alex Langer
The Right Side

Rajiv Moté
Moloch's Children

Leah Ning
The Hunger, the Monster, and the Things That Could Have Been

Damilola Oyedotun
A Journal of Strange Creatures and Beasts from Africa

Zachary Rosenberg
A Matter of Grace

Abhijeet Sathe
Paladin

Jean Strickland
Story Eater

Kanishk Tantia
Wick, Wax, and Tallow

Gretchen Tessmer
Old Bog Bones

V. F. Thompson
Said the Spider to the Fly

D. Matthew Urban
Exuviae

Emily Ruth Verona
Moonshine (אוֹר הַיָרֵחַ)

Carson Winter
Stories Between the Ribs of the Great Monster Tyron

Lucy Zhang
Withering

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Fiction

300 pages, Paperback

Published October 17, 2023

About the author

Anna Madden is a Rhysling Award nominated poet. Her fiction has appeared in Apex,
Haven Spec, Small Wonders, and elsewhere.

Reviews

[The Smoog · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’ll preface this by saying that there are a lot of good ideas here, and some of the stories I really wanted to like. Another reviewer has speculated on the reasons for choosing these authors, and I think that’s unfair.

Having said that, overall I wasn’t impressed by the quality of content. Many of them I found to be poorly structured, seemed half-finished, or were just plain baffling. There were a handful I really enjoyed (one in particular about a spider-person cult whose title and author I can’t remember, sorry, and another about a guardian for a candlemaker, same as before), but mostly they just became audio background. I also feel like a lot of these authors went to the same writing class (so many of them use the line "it was, until it wasn’t.")

I listened on Audible, and the narration was great. I don’t think I’d have kept listening if it been done by an inferior reader, but for me, the sum total didn’t hit the mark.

[Kevin Buck · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed every story in this anthology. Most were written by authors I had never read before.

[Grep · Rating 1 out of 5]

for the audiobook.

Authors and stories were selected for diversity of names and race, not for talent. Narrator was decent.