CRY YOUR WAY HOME: STORIES by Damien Angelica Walters

Damien Angelica Walters is an author that's been on my radar for a while. She's a Bram Stoker Award nominee, a constant presence in the dark fiction community with her consistent short stories popping up in almost every dark literary magazine, and I really wanted too jump into her work. This collection, her latest release, is my introduction to her. Similar to Gwendolyn Kiste's fantastic And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe from last year, Walters collects a bunch of great dark fantasy stories and twisted fairytales. Aside from a few of the stories (including one narrated by a circus elephant), most of these are tales focusing on young girls and/or their parents dealing with some sort of transformation or transition. What I enjoyed about this book, and what makes this more than just a bunch of cool scary stories is Walters's focus on tackling a variety of real-life emotional issues but through the lens of the weird and the supernatural.

Through tears, she glares at the boxes piled in the corner—a sandcastle built by sorrow's hands.

She touches on topics like dealing with the death of a child ("Falling Under, Through the Dark"), sibling jealousy ("Deep Within the Marrow, Hidden in My Smile"), postpartum depression ("Little Girl Blue, Come Cry Your Way Home"), as well as bullying ("On the Other Side of the Door, Everything Changes"and my favorite, "Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice"), and skillfully uses fantasy and horror to parallel the emotional turmoil of her characters. And to the reader's who avoid short stories because of the constant story reset? Fear not, because Walters's prose grabs you quickly and holds you and she knows just when to end each tale, making for a smooth read from story to story. If you want your horror to be about more than just ghosts and goblins, if you enjoy it when dark fiction provides us with a way of confronting real-life horrors, then make sure to pick this collection up!

Is this magic or madness or something undefinable? Perhaps a bit of all three.

GRADE: A-