What's Next (12): Becky

What's Next is a weekly feature started by Hafsah at IceyBooks. Basically, we need your help deciding what to read next! So check out the books below & vote on what YOU think should be our next read!

In keeping with our monthly theme, I'll be picking from some dark books. Horror is, in its simplest definition, dark fantasy.  Where better to look for it than fairytales?  These are not specifically of the horror genre, but they all have dark, frightening themes.

Strange Things are happening on the remote and snowbound archipelago of St. Hauda’s Land. Magical winged creatures flit around the icy bogland, albino animals hide themselves in the snow-glazed woods, and Ida Maclaird is slowly turning into glass. Ida is an outsider in these parts who has only visited the islands once before. Yet during that one fateful visit the glass transformation began to take hold, and now she has returned in search of a cure.

This anthology of fantasy showcases such stories as "The Rose in Twelve Petals," "The Rapid Advance of Sorrow," "Lily, With Clouds," "In the Forest of Forgetting," "Sleeping With Bears" and many more, with an introduction by Terri Windling and cover by Virginia Lee.

 

Tender Morsels is a dark and vivid story, set in two worlds and worrying at the border between them. Liga lives modestly in her own personal heaven, a world given to her in exchange for her earthly life. Her two daughters grow up in this soft place, protected from the violence that once harmed their mother. But the real world cannot be denied forever—magicked men and wild bears break down the borders of Liga’s refuge. Now, having known Heaven, how will these three women survive in a world where beauty and brutality lie side by side? 

From familiar fairy tales and legends - Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss-in-Boots, Beauty and the Beast, vampires, werewolves - Angela Carter has created an absorbing collection of dark, sensual, fantastic stories