She Walks in Shadows is a collection of short stories inspired by the weird fiction and cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft. This collection was brought together by editors Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles and is unique because all of the short stories were written by women and for the most part, also have a woman as the protagonist or at least the focal point of the story. The forward to the collection points out the common practice of gatekeeping women from Lovecraftian stories and the common misconception that "...women do not like to write in this category, that they can't write in this category."
I admit that while never consciously writing off writers who are women, a large number of the books that I end up reading are written by men. Sure I can say, "But I've read Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Master and Apprentice by Claudia Gray, and The Children of Men by P.D. James, and they're all women" but that excuse would come across similar to "But not all men!" It is true that horror novels are a male-dominated field and you have to make a conscious effort to find authors who are women if you are not already familiar with them. So for me, this collection was a great place to start because it gave me a bit of flavor on each of the authors writing styles and how they might construct additional short stories or longer novels. If I had read a physical copy of this book and not an eBook, I probably would have put post-it notes on stories that I really enjoyed and would want to look up more about the author later, but instead, I just used the highlight option on my Kindle to mark the title of the story and the author.
Now, because this is a collection of 24 short stories and one poem, it would be a bit difficult to write a review of each individual story beyond a sentence or two and I did not really consider doing that when I started. I figured I would read all of the stories and then put down my overall impressions of the stories as a whole and as a collection. When I look over the titles in the table of contents, there are stories that I immediately remember, mostly because I enjoyed them while a few I felt kind of meh about, and others that I struggle to recall anything that happened. Like any collection of stories, not all are going to grab me or speak to me.
The ordering of some of the stories seems pretty obvious. "The Thing on the Cheerleading Squad" by Molly Tanzer and "Body to Body to Body" by Selena Chambers follow because they both deal with characters from Lovecraft's A Shadow Over Innsmouth and while I understood the purpose of having them next to each other, I found that I had to frequently tell myself that the two stories were not connected even though they both had characters named Asenath and Eunice. "When She Quickens" by Mary A. Turzillo and "Queen of a New America" by Wendy N. Wagner both deal with powerful Egyptian women who have the ability to transfer their lifeforce into another body, be it willingly or unwillingly. I was kind of surprised that "Eight Seconds" by Pandora Hope and "Shub-Niggurath's Witnesses" by Valerie Valdes were not closer together (separated by seven stories) because they both dealt with Shub-Niggurath, although they are fairly different in every other way.
One thing that took me a while to get used to, and at times I still found slightly disorienting was the time period in each story. While one story might take place in Egypt 500 BCE and the next takes place in early 2000s New England followed by early 20th century London. I realize that part of this could just have been reading one story after another like it was the next chapter in the same story and maybe I should have put some time between each individual story, but I guess that just means that I was so entertained by "Lavinia's Woods" or "Eight Seconds" that the following respective stories felt a little off, at least at first.
I have been trying to determine if I would recommend this book and that opens up several variables. A lot of the stories either use character or place names from Lovecraft's stories like the aforementioned use of "Asenath" and how immediately, without going into a lot of additional explanation, the writer is imbuing this character with preconceptions that the reader likely knows of this character from A Shadow Over Innsmouth and how their characters are connected. So how much of the story works with the reader either knowing already about the character or is there a lot of lost context from the reader not already knowing about Shub-Niggurath? It is similar to the criticism I have with most Star Wars books, then the author could just say that "The Gamorrean tip-toed down the corridor..." without going into any further description on what a Gamorrean is and why tip-toeing for them would be somewhat out of place and creates an amusing image. But then at the same time, if the story mentions goats early on, in any type of context, you know that Shub-Niggurath is likely to make an appearance, and does coming into the story with that knowledge already in place ruin the reveal? It could really go either way.
I think that I would recommend this book as I enjoyed more than half of the stories, and of those that I liked, I will be looking into a few of the authors a bit more. There were a lot of fun stories that took typical Lovecraftian themes of mortality, blood as lineage, and unknowable cosmic entities and twisted them into ways that I had never read before and in ways that I had never considered. Not all of the stories were memorable, but that just really means that they were not memorable to me. But yes, a good collection of stories from several different writing styles to keep the reader guessing (in a good way) and to prevent one story from feeling identical to the next.
Your Blood in My Veins
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