![]() There’s something weird-darkly funny?-about a masked ghost in a backpack, but the poor ghost is too pathetic to be funny and too sad to be scary. In trying to determine what the ghost wants, she carries it around in a backpack and hides its face with a mask. In the opening story, the narrator is followed by the decaying ghost of her great aunt who died as an infant. Several left me queasy or unable to sleep. They’re ordered such that each story pushes a new boundary and produces ratcheting tension. The horror in these twelve stories comes from different angles: supernatural sources, jealous people, physical ailments, and so on. Mariana Enriquez’s The Dangers of Smoking in Bed does not fall into this trap. When stories are read back-to-back, common themes are soon spotted and ideas that would have been individually brilliant are made to feel repetitive or predictable. ![]() Groff’s Florida, Ferris’s The Dinner Party, and even Dahl’s “best of” collection are first to mind. Sometimes I like short story collections less when I read them too quickly. ![]()
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