Hell hath no fury….like a woman who writes
Reviewing two awesome collections by two awesome writers
This past week - entirely by coincidence, it wasn’t intentional - I’ve found myself reading three, all very awesome, horror collections written solely and entirely by women. First up, of course, there was Gemma Amor’s short story collection that I reviewed in my last post, but then I stumbled across this - the debut short story collection from a new, up and coming writer.
On Darkened Wings is a sheer delight from beginning to end, from start to finish - opening with the very poignant and touching title story, before moving on to more and more terrifying tales that will send more than one shiver down your spine.
From The Clean Room, through to Vegetarian Chilli (a personal favourite), and from there to The grass is lava, each story offers up something different, something highly unique - never once pulling any punches.
There was only one story I was less keen on, Anonymous, but even that I didn’t hate, I just didn’t entirely get it or understand what the writer was trying to convey, but as I said in my last post, it is unusual for me to like every story in a collection and for me, this was the only one, the only one I add, that for me missed the mark.
5 💀💀💀💀💀 / 5
The second book I want to talk about here is Psych Ward Blues by Judith Sonnet. Like Gemma Amor, I’ve connected with and seen Judith posting on Bluesky and so decided to check out her work and again, I’m so glad I did.
Psych Ward Blues is a collection of chilling stories, that all come to a head and end with the title novella - all about one patient’s experiences of The Rapture as viewed from a psych ward as it is happening; a very clever premise, that I enjoyed immensely.
As with the other two short story collections that I’ve read recently, Judith is a highly accomplished writer. She knows just which buttons to push, and how hard, and here, offers up several different types of terror - all designed to strike fear into your heart and make you question the world you think you know.
A couple of the stories end a little abruptly, and feel a little bit like witnessing a short snapshot of other people’s lives without any context, but the author does a good job of explaining why they end the way they do in her afterword and because she, herself, describes this book as probably her most personal, it seems a little unfair to criticise. I just like my stories to have more of a conclusion, and am a big fan of the old school thought that stories should have a beginning, a middle, and an appropriate end.
(That said, I have often been told with a couple of my stories that readers would like to have seen the story expanded, so I get this. Sometimes the story itself dictates where it believes it should end and as authors, sometimes if we ignore that it’s to our detriment.)
Psych Ward Blues, the title story, is particularly good and even within a few short pages, you very quickly soon develop an affinity with the characters - which only makes their individual fates ever more tragic.
With this collection, there is no denying that Judith is a strong writer and if nothing else, it makes me want to read something a bit longer by her if only to see what she is capable of in a much larger sand pit.
One of the big questions I always ask myself when discovering a new writer is ‘would I read anything else by this author?” and with both of these collections, the answer is a resounding yes.
Psych Ward Blues then gets a very strong 4 1/2 ☠️☠️☠️☠️ / 5