Strangely Enough (ed by Gillian Hagenus, MidnightSun)

Strangely Enough is a slim collection of very short fiction that leans towards the peculiar and slightly unsettling. It’s also very much on point with the current zeitgeist. Short, twisty stories are quite popular at the moment, and this is a nice entry point. Among the 21 stories edited by Gillian Hagenus, there is a woman who finds a strange creature’s egg in her henhouse but sadly can’t share the wonderful magic of the moment with anyone else; two runaway children who stumble into a haunted house that tries to hold their bodies but cannot hold their hearts; an unhappy man who starts a strange but ultimately doomed friendship with a group of surfers the size of action figures; and a nun-aspirant who rejects heaven for the voices of the good dark earth. While there are grim overtones to some stories, none are gruesome (unlike other popular collections), making this a great short read for folks who want something odd but not too nasty; however, it is worth providing a content warning for the story ‘Marrying the Ropemaker’s Daughter’, which deals with suicide and regret. The temptation would be to stick this in your horror or supernatural section, but you should definitely shelve this with your contemporary lit. Wild and with uncomfortably relevant themes including social media obsession and state censorship and control, this is a wonderful chocolate box of stories with varied and unexpected flavours that will have you eagerly snacking away until you discover that you’ve impulsively consumed the whole thing.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Stefen Brazulaitis has been a bookseller with a special interest in science fiction and fantasy for thirty years and is the owner of Stefen's Books in Perth WA. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

Books+Publishing pre-publication reviews are supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.

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