Nasty and Brutish Shorts: Reading & Writing Short Horror Fiction

                                                                                                        Elephant in the room: There's a lot you can say about Tom Monteleone, and a lot of it isn't great. I acknowledge that. So why showcase Borderlands ? Because I don't think the smoke from the bridges he's burned should blot out the frequently incredible accomplishments of the writers who made the Borderlands anthology series one of the most exciting and vital I've ever read. And it was good from the get-go in 1990: Some of the stories here are award-winning classics; others are oddball pieces that deserve more attention than they've gotten.  The Calling by David B. Silva Synops...

                                                                                     I've mostly avoided doing single-author collections on here, which is mainly so I can maximize variety. I love short story collections of every kind, but anthologies provide  which is mainly for variety. Short story collections are a shotgun shell versus the concentrated single rifle bullet of a novel. But even with shotguns, you have choke tubes, which concentrate the shot into a tighter group over a longer range . If a multi-author collection is open choke/cylinder bore (no concentration, with a wider spread), then single-author collections are like a full choke with a tighter pattern....