Read this if you like: Feminist horror, optimistic post-apocalypses, Aztec mythology and culture

tl;dr summary: Collection of short stories featuring powerful women fucking shit up in various ways and places.

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My first experience reading V. Castro was her novel, Goddess of Filth, which I found an enchanting blend of Aztec mythology with an updated take on the coming of age narrative. Based on how much I loved that work, I knew I had to get my hands on her story collection when I saw it beckoning from Creature Publishing’s table at AWP. Reading its back cover summary only made me more excited. There was obviously a speculative element in Goddess of Filth—it centers on the idea of a teenager being possessed by an Aztec goddess—but the setting was real-world present, the characters by and large human. I was excited to see how Castro’s voice would translate to the more far-flung forms of speculative narrative that were promised in this set of stories.

Out of Aztlan is what I’d call a semi-linked collection. All 8 stories are bound together by the unifying theme described on the opening page. “I wandered for years in and out of different skins, colors of lipsticks, shoes, and beds. But still I could not find the path that led to Aztlan,” this passage starts, going on to conclude that she is Aztlan, “And we all have our own Aztlan. We just need to allow ourselves to be led back.”

Each of the characters featured in this collection are doing this in some way: allowing themselves to be led back to their true path, or their true selves—or, in many cases, exerting their will to reframe their present circumstances and align them with their true purpose. Another unifying thread across the collection is that all of them feature a female protagonist, predominantly in a first-person voice, though with a few instances of third-person scattered throughout. In some cases, she has a male love interest who also has his own arc, but even when this is the case the woman’s perspective is clearly the focal point, and there are several stories with almost entirely female casts—something that I found to be refreshing, not just for the fact that this is rare to find in a speculative fiction collection, but also because it felt completely natural, so much so I didn’t consciously notice until I was thinking back through the stories in preparation to write the review.

Despite these similarities in regards to theme, character, and POV, the stories in Out of Aztlan don’t ever feel repetitive. Castro accomplishes this by offsetting the similarities with variety in regards to setting and plot. Interestingly, the stories that are closest to existing in reality are the first and the last, book-ending the more fantastical works in between. The first story, “Templo Mayor”, is set in a speculative near-future that is an exaggeration of the post-Covid world. In this reality, the quarantine lasted longer, for five years, and was accompanied by blackouts and other catastrophes that left people feeling even more isolation. The unnamed protagonist travels to Mexico City as the last stop on an adventure of rediscovery, ending up alone with a supposed guide who promises to lead her into a previously unexplored chamber of the Templo Mayor. He turns out to have more sinister motives, leading into a satisfying “hunter becomes the hunted” kind of narrative that ends with the discovery of a living goddess, Coyolxauhqui.

The theme of a woman reclaiming her power through violence is central to the anchor story, “Palm Beach Poison”, as well. In this one, though, the protagonist is a maternal figure, turning to violence not in defense of her own life but in vengeance for wrongs done on her daughter and other exploited young women. This is the only story that feels like it could take place in reality, with no speculative elements, and weirdly was also one of my favorites, I think because of how well the powerful protective urge of protagonist Ms. Dominguez comes through on the page. She feels like a real mother with understandable motivations, and an easy character to root for.

In between these near-reality settings are varying degrees of slant reality. “Dawn of the Box Jelly” is set in a very near future, where the warming waters and ocean pollution have had an unexpected impact on sea life. “Diving for Pearls” gives the reader an alternate history of the indigenous people made to risk their lives to gather pearls for the Spanish conquistadors. “Asylum” is a slightly further post-apocalyptic future that flips a cartel leader from villain to hero. “At the Bottom of my Lake of Blood” seems to be set in a more different near-future apocalypse, though told from the POV of an Aztec death goddess resurreced in the process. “Lobster Trap” has a fun POV, too—a lobster plotting revenge on humans for hunting her kin.

The story that’s the most speculative in terms of setting is “El Alacrán”, which is another post-apocalypse kind of narrative, though set far enough in the future it feels like a secondary world. This is also the longest work, which I appreciated—it was a world I was happy to linger in, with a fun magic swasbucklers kind of vibe. The protagonist is the titular Alacrán, or scorpion, captain of a pirate ship in a post-technological world, who has to team up with her arch rival Ossibus to resist conquest by an invading king. “El Alacrán” might just be my favorite piece in the collection and I especially appreciated its structure—the details of the characters and world are used very effectively to help build tension and add stakes, and it’s got a page-turning pacing that I appreciate in a story of this length.

My only major critique of Out of Atzlan is less one of writing than editing. There were aspects of it that made it feel a bit rushed—enough small typos and other proofreading errors for me to notice, for one thing, but there were also places the writing itself felt like it could be tightened. That said, it was never enough to pull me out of the story, and when it comes to core elements like worldbuilding and character development, it’s well-crafted. The stories in this collection blend genres in a very fun and fresh way, and they’re full of characters who are easy to root for.

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Read this if you like: Philip K. Dick, high-tech dystopias, creature horror

tl;dr summary: Woman on far-future fungus-infested Earth gets leeches for arms, uses them to save humanity.

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If you’re reading reviews to decide whether you should read this book, let me save you some time: yes. This book is as infectious as the fungus wastelands it inhabits. If giant tardigrades, humanoid cyborgs with TV heads, or a heroine whose superpower is having parasitic leeches for arms pique you’re interest, then you’re going to get a kick out of Leech Girl Lives (and if those things don’t pique your interest, I think you’re on the wrong blog).

Allow me to set the scene a bit more fully. Leech Girl Lives opens on Margo Chicago as she's being transformed into the titular leech girl. Margo is from the domed-in Bublinaplex, and has no memory of how she ended up in the wilderness outside the dome or how to get back inside. For the next 150 or so pages, the narrative alternates between “Earlier” sections that show Margo's life as an Art Safety Inspector in the days leading up to the opening scene, and “Later” sections that continue the thread of Margo's efforts to get back to that life. 

Surrounding all of this is an impeccably built world. The Bublinaplex is on a far-future earth where humans done fucked things up so badly that nothing but fungus can survive except in the controlled environment under the dome. Just about the only recognizable lifeform that survives are tardigrades, but they've been so mutated by radiation that they now grow to the size of buildings. The parasitic leeches that latch onto Margo's arms in the first scene are actually among the more beneficial of the new wildlife. They consume the limb they're on and sustain themselves on the victim's blood, but they also give their mealticket strength and a heightened will to live.

What I love most about this device is that it becomes both Margo's superpower and her Achilles heel. The leeches let her do things she couldn't before, like climb sheer surfaces or take down massive predators with her bare tentacles. But they're still other beings with minds of their own. They don't like heights, or cold, and won't do anything that they think would cause them or her harm. Sometimes the leeches act on instinct and cause some serious problems for Margo in the process. It's one of those devices that just adds so much—sometimes humor, sometimes tension, sometimes plot movement, depending on what the story needs in the moment. 

And, despite the leech arms, Margo still feels like an everyman. She's nothing special before she gets the leeches. She works a boring white collar job and spends her free time crocheting. Her emotional arc is familiar, too: grieving the loss of her partner, Jasper. All of this gives Margo a relatability that serves as a very effective anchor as the reader learns about the Bublinaplex's world, a world that grows richer and more layered the deeper you get into the book. 

That layering and gradual expansion of the world is maybe the most valuable takeaway from Leech Girl Lives, from a craft standpoint. Claypool is adept at choosing the exact right details to reveal to the reader at each stage of the narrative. Each new revelation twists the lens slightly, shifting the reader's view. This is a richly build world, complex and detailed from the flora and fauna down to the rules of society, but none of the details the reader gets about any of it feel extraneous. Anyone who writes these kinds of big-scope worlds for their stories I think can benefit from studying how Claypool uses worldbuilding to drive the plot by being selective about which details are revealed when. 

 Tonally, Leech Girl Lives occupies a delightfully genre-blurring space. There's a Pulp-ish-ness to the humor and language but with more of a literary realism from the characters and deeper themes that weave through it. I would still enjoy this book if it were just a fun story, but I appreciate that it pushes beyond that boundary. It's fairly rare to find a book that has something to say and is still this entertaining to read.

Some of the things I most want to gush about I also don't want to bring up because there are surprises in this book I don't want to spoil for the reader. I'll just wrap things up by saying Leech Girl Lives starts strong and only gets better, and it's a strong recommend whether you're looking for a bizarre dystopian world to escape into or a writer looking to study an impeccably built world. 

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tl;dr summary: Genre-spanning and blurring collection that is a study in crafting voice and balancing realism against absurdity.

Read this if you like: Juan Villoro, David Foster Wallace, literary horror

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This collection hooked me from the very first line. In fact, that’s a universal statement I’ll make about the stories in The Last Vanishing Man. All of them have very tight, enticing openings that hook the reader in right away. This is true whether the story is barely past a page long or over 20—all of them hit right from the beginning. I’d definitely recommend this collection for any short fiction writers who are looking to improve their story beginnings, especially those who write longer short stories. I think sometimes there’s a misconception that the opening isn’t as critical in a longer story since it’s a smaller percentage of the total, but in my opinion the opposite is true. The first page is what tells the reader whether it’s worth reading the next 20, and the opening of every story in this collection makes that case convincingly.

Some of my favorite opening sentences:

“I have tried to tell her story for over a decade now, but she slips between the lines.” (After the End of the End of the World)

“I met Jack at the end of my first year of college, a year that began in misery and ended in something else, though even now I’m not sure what to call it.” (Killing Fairies)

“It was only a few weeks after my mother’s funeral when my father told me never to come home again.” (Hunger)

“The brief obituary for Wendell Hamilton that appeared in the September 20, 2015 issue of the Coös County Democrat was not entirely inaccurate, but it was far from complete.” (Mass)

“Jimmy started smoking when he was eight.” (The Ballad of Jimmy and Myra)

….what all of these do masterfully is entice curiosity. There is some kind of tension either directly stated or implied in each of these first sentences, and that gives them all energy that pushes the reader into the story at a run, already eager to learn more. 

And what follows those killer openings doesn’t disappoint. I love how unexpected the stories in this collection were, both in terms of where he took the plot and characters and the way he used time, voice, and POV. Even the way the stories were arranged surprised me—ending on a flash felt like a nose-thumb at the old convention to anchor a collection with its longest work.

It enhances the surprise that Matthew Cheney deftly blurs and blends genres. It gives the reader the feeling that every story is truly a blank slate where anything could happen. I love stories that dance on the edge of genre. “Killing Fairies” does that beautifully. It gestures at fantasy even in the title, but the speculative element is secondary—at its core, it’s a love story. There are also some that hit a genre head on, like the slow-building horror in “Hunger” and “A Suicide Gun”.

One detail the horror fan in me loved was Cheney’s artful use of the viscerally grotesque. There are moments in “Hunger” that give that skin-tingling creepy vibe, deployed at just the right moment in the story arc. It’s wielded differently in “A Liberation”—at first it’s frightening, but as the story goes along it begins to celebrate the grotesque. The story is set in a far northern town that is slowly sinking, where death is omnipresent but becomes increasingly visible on the page as the story goes along. 

A brief side note: I find it interesting that the two dystopian/post-apocalyptic stories are back-to-back (“Patrimony” and “On the Government of the Living”). They do feel like they’re in conversation with each other. Both center on the idea of legacy, though approached in dramatically different ways.

Even stories that are technically literary realism often have a surreal feel. Something Cheney does exceptionally well: the plots and characters are sometimes absurd, but they never feel contrived, or like things are strange for the sake of being strange. The plot of “Winnipesaukee Darling”, for instance, sounds a bit ridiculous: a couple rents a vacation home, gets drunk and stumbles to the neighbor’s house, where he invites them in for a lovely evening. Yet in the context of the story all of these steps feel natural and logical, thanks to the cadence and confidence of the voice and the way he’s built the characters. Everything feels like something these characters would do, and that makes it all believable, even if it’s strange behavior for the average person.

The opening story (“After the End of the End of the World”) is an excellent example of this. Its plot synopsis sounds literary: the daughter of a suicide bomber has to cope with the consequences and emotions of being related to such a hated, infamous figure. It’s twisted into a surreal space because the daughter character, Jane, is never singularly defined. Instead, the different possible iterations of Jane are shown prism-like in parallel narratives. 

This fracturing also segues nicely into something else I appreciated about this collection: Cheney’s artful use of time and POV. The second story (“The Last Vanishing Man”) is maybe the best example to cite. It tells a contiguous story from three different first-person narrators from different generations. Each voice adds a new layer to the narrative, filling in different details that changes the way readers interpret things from earlier sections.

Maybe the most impressive use of time in this collection, though, is in “At the Edge of the Forest”. It’s a very smooth non-chronological narrative, for one thing. It also takes full advantage of the fractured narrative to place scenes exactly where they’ll make the most impact, which I think is an important detail a lot of writers neglect when they first start writing non-linear stories. Just because they’re out of order doesn’t mean they should be random—there still needs to be an arc that builds and resolves. The structure of “At the Edge of the Forest” feels very intentionally built and effortless at the same time. One little detail that I think helps with this—he uses a similar weaving-in technique as he does with the scene shifts in “The Last Vanishing Man”. Something that was said or done in the previous scene is used as the jumping off point for the next. This gives the reader a tether to hold on to while they jump backwards in time, or from one narrator to another, so they’re not jarred out of the story.

And then there’s “The Ballad of Jimmy and Myra”, which I think it’s fair to call a romp. There’s something pulp-ish about it, almost cartoonish. The humor balances what is otherwise an incredibly dark story, and I would argue it’s the most entertaining story in the collection. 

It’s probably pretty clear from the overall tone of this review that I very much enjoyed reading The Last Vanishing Man. Strong recommend for people who enjoy reading and/or writing dark fiction across genres. It’s also an excellent craft study for how to smoothly integrate non-traditional structures and forms, or for writers of longer short stories working on their pacing or use of time.

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One thing that sets ghosts apart from other fantastic creatures is that they’re one of the supernatural elements most likely to feature in literary fiction. From Hamlet’s father to Sethe’s daughter in Beloved, there are ample examples of hauntings across the literary canon. I see two potential reasons for this: 

1. A lot of people don’t think of ghosts as speculative. In a 2021 survey, 41% of respondents said they believe ghosts exist, a similar percentage to those who believe in demons. That’s lower than the percentage who believe aliens exist (57%) but much higher than belief in bigfoot (13%), vampires (8%), or werewolves (9%).

2. Ghosts and haunting are easy ready-made metaphors for emotions like grief, regret, loss, and nostalgia. This is reflected in our euphemistic language for these feelings—you might say someone is “haunted by the past” or that a place is “a ghost of what it once was.” Ghosts are reminders of what used to be, unchanging intrusions of the past on the present.

3. Their ephemeral nature makes it easier to insert them into a narrative. The “suspension of disbelief” factor is lower with a ghost than something corporeal because the reader has less of an expectation that it would leave physical signs and evidence. This also allows for more play between what’s real and what’s imagined by the narrator, especially in first-person narratives.

Honestly, it makes sense that ghosts cross genre borders because crossing borders is kind of their whole deal. They exist in the liminal space between life and death, and this charges them with a lot of energy at the same time it makes them very versatile tools for storytellers. 

This liminality and versatility can also make them tricky to define. The line between ghosts and other spirits varies from culture to culture, as do the ways they interact with the living and the extent to which they can influence and engage with the living world.

What exactly is a ghost?

Modern American lingo tends to frame ghosts and spirits and synonyms, but that isn’t universally the case. In most traditions, this is more of a square/rectangle situation—ghosts are a type of spirit, but not all spirits are ghosts. 

The term “spirit” can be broadly applied to any intangible being, typically one viewed as having intelligence and agency. Spirits can be connected to a place or object, though this isn’t a required defining trait. Similarly, while they can be linked to a now-deceased person, they don’t have to be—many cultures believe in nature spirits or similar forces that were never embodied in a living individual.

While the exact traits that define a ghost from other spirits vary depending on who you’re talking to, a good rough definition is a spirit that:

• Was once a living being and retains at least some memories of their life
• Is frozen in its appearance or mannerisms to the time period in which it lived
• Is unable to move between planes voluntarily, and is normally bound to a location or object that is either connected to their death or was of great importance to them in life

There are several other similar types of spectral being that overlap with spirits and ghosts in a wishy-washy and convoluted way that, again, depends greatly on who you’re talking to and what tradition they come from (which, to be fair, is fitting considering we’re talking about something that is, by definition, nebulous and formless). These include terms like: 

• Ghoul – A specifically evil spirit, often one that consumes human flesh. Ghouls may be intanigble or corporeal, and overlap as much with demons and similar creatures like goblins as they do with ghosts.
• Phantasm – An apparition that is explicitly a creation of the imagination or a hallucination of a form that isn’t there.
• Poltergeist – Roughly translating as “noisy ghosts”, these are spirits that make noise, move objects, or otherwise make themselves known to the living.
• Revenant – Any being that returns after death, either in spirit or corporeal form. This can include ghosts but also reanimated corpses like zombies.
• Shade – The spirit of a dead person that lives in the underworld.
• Wraith – A likeness of a living person seen as a faint, pale, or transparent image, often just before or after their death. Their main distinction from ghosts is that they’re sometimes not seen as entities with their own identity, but may simply be apparitions or projections of the individual’s spirit. Their appearance is also tied more to timing (around the time of a death) than to location.

…and there are other synonyms like wight, specter, and spook that generally mean the same thing as ghost, but can also have different definitions depending on the context. And this is just in English. Just about every culture in the world has some kind of ghost variant in its myths or folklore, often with its own accompanying set of lingo to refer to them. Which does lead to another question… 

Why are ghost stories so common?

If you believe in ghosts, the answer to this likely seems obvious: because they’re real and people tell stories about times they’ve encountered them. But, then again, there are a lot of real things that don’t get talked about very often. Whether they’re made up or factual, there’s no denying that ghosts capture the collective imagination more than other ideas. 

I mentioned the variety of metaphoric uses of ghosts earlier, and that definitely also contributes to their popularity in a storytelling context. Beyond this, though, a ghost can function as the physical embodiment of something from the past, allowing for characters in the story’s present to interact directly with history. Often, that history is a violent and tragic one—after all, if there’s a ghost that means somebody died, and usually not peacefully in their sleep. Ghosts give a voice to victims of violence who otherwise can’t share their story. Sometimes this is their primary purpose for existing; it’s a common trope for a ghost to haunt the place of their murder until their killer is caught, at which point they can move on to the other side.

I also see ghosts as representing a kind of community memory. In this sense, ghosts in local legends can serve a few different functions:

• To memorialize real people. Often these are people who were tragically killed, but in some cases they’re important figures from the place’s past who are now said to protect the land or the people who live there.
• To warn of danger. Ghost stories that take place on highways are often examples of this. Dangerous curves or intersections are frequently haunted by drivers who lost their life there, serving as a warning to others that they should take caution. The warning could also be more about the behavior than the place—a ghost story about a teen driving drunk, for instance.
• To acknowledge dark periods of a place’s past. An example of this would be ghosts of slaves said to haunt plantations in the South, or prisons and mental hospitals haunted by inmates. The actual people said to haunt the place may or may not have existed, but serve to keep the memory of whatever horrible treatment people endured there in the collective consciousness.

…which ties into another potential function of ghosts for fiction writers, which is that they can serve as a kind of avatar for the place they haunt. There are other ways to make a place feel like a character, too, but by giving it a ghost or two a place can gain a voice, a representative that can speak about its history and what it used to be. 

One last reason I’ll highlight for why humans find ghosts so appealing has more to do with our desire to go on after death. We want to think that we’ll continue to influence the world even after we’ve passed on. Becoming a ghost is a kind of immortality—not the one most people would choose, probably, but maybe better than nothing.

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Read this if you like: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Carmen Maria Machado, character-driven apocalyptic horror

tl;dr summary: Three people survive together during a quiet apocalypse

See the book on The Cupboard’s website

I’m going through a mild obsession with small books. Combined with my ongoing fascination with all things apocalypse, this made Waiting for the Miracle kind of the perfect pickup from AWP, and now that I’ve read it I’m glad I put it toward the top of my stack.

With a book this short, there isn’t much space to build a world or backstory, and the way Waiting for the Miracle tackles that challenge is the first thing I love about it. The very first sentence does a lot of heavy lifting:

“We have been told for a long time that everything was going to end—that the world and everything alive on it would kill itself—but we’re still here.”

…and that isn’t just a turn of phrase. That’s really the way this apocalypse is happening: mass global suicide, of other animals as well as people. The mechanism and reason for this isn’t really explained. Nor is the reader given any reason why the characters in the story are still alive—something they themselves wonder multiple times, which proves an effective way to deflect needing to answer the question. The uncertainty is the point, in a sense. The characters are stuck in a kind of living limbo, isolated from the world they knew, suspecting that each day will be their last and never sure why it isn’t, or what to do with all the empty time they find themselves with.

The isolation of the characters works well for the story’s length because it keeps the scope small and focused. There are just two characters at first, the narrator and Daisy, who have been living on their own in the woods since meeting in the hospital just after the official announcement that the world was ending about a year prior. Soon after the story starts they’re joined by the genderfluid child Roberta. Few details are given about any of their lives before the end, just like there is little discussion of the broader world. There are brief incursions—a visit to a nearby church, the arrival of a lone stranger, a break-in by unseen thieves who make it clear there are other people still out there, somewhere. For the most part, though, the story stays focused on the present of these three people who find each other by chance and become a kind of family unit over the course of the story.

From a craft standpoint, the thing that impressed me most about Waiting for the Miracle is its economy of space. All three characters feel like real people and the reader becomes invested in their survival pretty quickly, despite knowing almost nothing about them. Even the few details given are largely sprinkled in later; for the first half of the story, all the reader knows is who Daisy, Roberta, and the narrator are in the present. They are on the back end of a big-picture “before and after” that has fractured their world so cleanly that what happened before doesn’t even really matter anymore. All of this is conveyed within the first few pages, in a very nuanced way that pulls the reader instantly into the world.

This story is also densely packed from a meaning and theme standpoint. The idea of death comes up a lot, naturally, but there is also a recurring theme of warnings. They’d been told for a long time that things were going to end but still can’t figure out when that ending is supposed to start. There are clear parallels there to be drawn to our current predicament as a society, but I see this as a thematic thread in a broader sense, too. There are other moments they seek meaning and contact but can’t find it—in the radio they find, for instance, or their repeated watching of Friends. This even comes through in the strange crackling sound that’s pervasive in the background of the world now, a new detail that they’re sure means something but can’t figure out exactly what until it’s far too late to do anything about it.

I like that the rabbit is used as the cover image, too, because that’s another central image in the story. Without giving any details that feel like spoilers, I will say that the rabbit seems to represent a kind of emotional turning point—it’s a symbol for the moment they tilt fully toward the end and realize that things will never go back to the way they were before. In a sense, it serves as a kind of fuzzy harbinger of doom, making it clear that nobody is going to get out of this alive.

Something else nice about books this size: they’re not a huge commitment. Waiting for the Miracle is definitely short enough to read in an afternoon, and it’s well worth spending the time to sink into such a beautifully desolate little world.

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Tl;dr summary: Eldritch horror meets pop culture meets Blackness meets black humor, all mixed together and with line breaks

Read this if you like: Elwin Cotman, speculative poetry, hip hop culture

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I’m not nearly as well-read in poetry as I am in fiction, or even in creative non-fiction. This was part of the reason I picked up this collection—a poetry chapbook with speculative elements felt like it could be more accessible for my genre fiction sensibilities than the collections I’ve read in the past. I say this, in part, as a caveat: I’m much less confident in my opinions about poetry than when I analyze prose, especially when it comes to elements of craft. 

One thing I do feel confident in saying about Can You Sign My Tentacle?, though, is that it’s a blast to read. On the big-picture level, the juxtaposition of the Cthulhu mythos with pop culture creates a fertile sandbox for imagery that’s at minimum surprising and at times hilarious. And it was unexpected in other ways, too. I was thrown off at first by the way many of the poems seem to drift in and out of narrative but after a few reads I think I’ve decided I like it—it creates a kind of untethered feeling, a dreamy-yet-anxious state that fits with the cosmic horror it’s inspired by.

This surprise carries through to the line level with phrases like “gnawing at / the bark of unsheathed pencils” or “you are just a chalice / for the ritual of melding truths”—arresting moments that made something familiar seem new, or felt like a truth that always existed but had never been put to words in quite that way. Ultimately, I think that was my biggest takeaway from this collection from a craft perspective. O’Brien’s use of surprising language keeps the reader on their toes, and because of that I wanted to keep reading to see where he would take me next.

The references to pop culture peppering this chapbook, to my reading, gave it some much-needed grounding and cohesion. In the poems that play in the Lovecraftian world, I found they would start to lose me a bit in the sections that went more conceptual and got away from that real-world tether—the language was nice, but there were definitely places that made me feel like the poem was too smart for me (which, to be fair, might have been the problem). 

Ironically enough, some of my favorite works were the ones that eschewed these references and instead focused in on the mundane. “time, and time again” is a beautiful and heartbreaking rendering of grief, and the voice in “the lagahoo speaks for itself” builds a distinctive character in a very small space. That poem also sticks the landing with its last line (“picking my teeth with the memory of your name.”). Poems like these feel like just the right amount of different to serve as a kind of palate cleanser while still fitting in with the vibe and flow of the surrounding works.

Of course, leave it to the prose writer to find the only bit of prose in a poetry collection—but the “Author’s Note” in the back is also definitely worth the read. I almost wish that came before the poems instead of after them, because it gives a lot of very useful context for the works and what inspired O’Brien to write them. Then again, it was also cool to have a reason to flip back through and re-read some of the poems through that lens.

In either case, I’d definitely recommend this collection anyone who has an interest in speculative poetry, especially newcomers to the genre. The narrative feel to a lot of the poems, combined with the humor and pop culture nods, make it a very accessible gateway for speculative fiction readers and writers into the poetry side of the genres.

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Tl;dr summary: Teenage girl gets possessed by sin-eating Aztec goddess

Read this if you like: Mesoamerican mythology, folk tales and fairy tales, spiritual horror

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Goddess of Filth is a coming-of-age horror story, and the way it weaves these two genres together is I think the most compelling part of this book. The general gist of the book is that a group of recent high school graduates have a séance and accidentally summon Tlazoltéotl, the titular goddess. One of the friends, Fernanda, is possessed by the goddess. Her best friend who was conducting the séance, Lourdes, takes the lead on helping Fernanda get un-possessed, and serves as the book’s main narrator.

A lot of the themes and tropes that are played with in the course of this plot movements are familiar, but with a twist that makes them surprising and exciting for the reader. Possession is a fairly common horror trope, for instance, but rarely treated quite this way. That it’s an ancient Aztec goddess, for one thing—that’s not a mythology that’s often referenced in a horror context. The relationship between Fernanda and Tlazoltéotl is also approached more from the coming-of-age side. The goddess ends up serving as a kind of mentor figure, helping Fernanda learn her own power and achieve self-acceptance. The expected thing would be that the possessing demon or spirit is the antagonist of the story, but in Goddess of Filth that role is shifted to the creepy priest, Father Moreno, who becomes increasingly disturbing and evil as the characters learn more about Tlazoltéotl, and she shifts from a source of fear to a source of curiosity. 

The reveal of information was very well-controlled throughout this book. I felt like there was just the right amount of detail about the mythology. A part of me was wishing that the reader got to see more of Tlazoltéotl’s story, but on the other hand, omitting the details of that keeps the focus more firmly Lourdes, Fernanda, and the other present-day characters, which ultimately was the right decision for the story. The story maintains high tension and has excellent pacing from beginning to end, and Castro’s restraint with the mythological details that she included helped to build that. I also appreciated the slow build of Father Moreno’s thread, which added a nice little extra twist to ratchet up the tension at the end.  

I wasn’t sure at first how I felt about the use of point-of-view in this book, but I think I’ve decided I like how fluid it is. The third-person perspectives are necessary to tell this story—there are too many moving parts at the end for it to be accomplished with just a first-person viewpoint, and using third-person for Fernanda’s perspective when she’s possessed makes sense. A lot of writers probably would have kept Lourdes’ perspective in a close-third, too, but giving it a first-person closeness does a lot for building Lourdes’ character and voice that would’ve been difficult to achieve otherwise. The reader cares instantly about both Lourdes and Fernanda because we see that initial moment of possession completely through Lourdes’ eyes.

I will admit I was a bit jarred by the switch to third-person at the start of chapter two, or rather by the switch back to 1st-person within the chapter. I think this was primarily because it’s something I’m not used to. Most of the times I’ve seen 1st and 3rd POVs used in the same book they’re more separate and regimented, where in Goddess of Filth the shifts are very fluid. Once I got the feel for what was happening, the transitions felt seamless, and it suits the overall feel of the book.

My only minor quibble with this book is that some of the characters felt a bit peripheral. That initial group of five friends felt like it could have been just 3, or even just Fernanda and Lourdes, without losing anything from the story. There were times that another friend’s name was said and I had to stop and check back to even remember who she was. With a book this short, there just wasn’t any extra pagespace to round them out into full characters, and it left them feeling just kind of...there.

Like I said, though, that’s a very minor critique in what is overall an entertaining and well-constructed book. I’d definitely recommend it for anyone who likes Mesoamerican mythology or character-driven horror, and it’s also worth a study for folks who like exploring unique ways of using point-of-view.

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Using these familiar creatures in your fiction has advantages. Your readers have likely already heard of them, in some form, so they come into the story with some background and details already in mind and you don’t have to provide as much description or explanation in the text.

That pre-knowledge can also be a kind of baggage, though, and could limit your creative freedom to use the beings the way that best suits the story. They can also run the danger of reading as cliché or referential.

And the truth is—these European-derived critters are just the tip of the iceberg. There are tons of other mythical and supernatural beings from all corners of the world and all eras of history.

I’m currently in the beginning stages of a large project that will utilize a smattering of cryptids from across the Americas. Because of this, I’ve spent some time lately sifting through my notes and research on world mythologies, and came across plenty of other creatures that have lots of potential for storytellers. Here are 27 American cryptids to spark speculative fiction writers’ imaginations.

Ahkiyyini

People of origin: Inuit

The Ahkiyyini is the ghost of Alaska, a living skeleton spirit that causes earthquakes and tidal waves by the movements of his arms. He liked to dance and play music when he was alive, and continues that in death by using his arm bone to play his scapula like a drum.

Ahuitzotl

People of origin: Aztec

This creature was described in the Florentine Codex as a guardian of lakes and the fish living in them. It’s like an otter but with dexterous hands and a prehensile tail. Its tricks included crying like a baby to lure victims or making all the fish rise to the surface to lure fishermen out on the water. Once it catches someone, it drags them to their deaths, and their bodies would later be found without their nails, teeth, or eyes.

Ao Ao

People of origin: Guarani

Sometimes described as a carnivorous peccary, the ao ao is named for the sound it makes while it chases its victims. It’s a sheep with giant fangs whose diet consists solely of humans, though it’ll also eat their clothing. It stalks its prey over any distance—the only way to escape it is to climb up a palm tree. They’re said to protect hills and mountains, and are also a spirit of fertility, said to reproduce in great numbers.

Aunyaina

People of origin: Tupari

The Aunyaina is a demon with boar tusks that (continuing the theme) eats people, although in its case, specifically children. The most fun detail about this one is that, when you kill one, lizards run from its corpse.

Bokwus

People of origin: Kwakwaka’waka

This is a forest spirit that lures travelers into rivers, after which they’re never seen again. You know there’s one coming up behind you because you’ll hear the sound of running water.

Camahueto

People of origin: Chilote

El Camahueto is basically a unicorn cow. The single horn on its forehead is its most valuable part, said to cure sexual dysfunctions. It can also be planted to grow new camahuetos. When one’s full-grown, it bursts from the earth and drags itself toward the sea, leaving a massive hole and a path of destruction in its wake.

Carbunclo

People of origin: Chilote

The exact form of the carbunclo (or carbuncle) varies from one myth to the next. Sometimes it’s some kind of oyster or similar bivalve, which contains a precious stone that will bring its owner great fortune. Sometimes it’s said to be a small fluffy animal with a mirror on its head, or clutching a gem. Whatever its form, it glows with a light that can be seen from a great distance, but also has excellent hearing, and clams up to protect its treasure whenever someone gets close. Most legends include an elaborate series of steps that must be undertaken to claim the carbunclo’s treasure.

Colo colo

People of origin: Mapuche

The appearance of this one varies depending on the area. Sometimes it’s a snake with rat paws or feathers. Other places, it’s a mouse with a head like a rooster. Either way, it’s born from a snake’s egg that was incubated by a rooster. It lives in the corners of homes, or under the floorboards, eating the saliva of the inhabitants while they sleep, weakening them over time and eventually killing them.

Cuero del Agua

People of origin: Mapuche

Here’s one with lots of potential for the cli-fi and environmental sci-fi writers out there. Also known as cuero vivo (living leather) or manta del diablo (the devil’s blanket), it’s animal hide that’s been transformed into a flat, snake-like creature, with spines or claws along the edges of its body. It hypnotizes its victims then kills them by suffocation, and is said to live in the lakes, lagoons, and rivers of Chile and Argentina.

Ew’ah

People of origin: Cherokee

This nightmarish demon of insanity is said to feed on the dreams of children. It’s so hideous that just looking at him causes madness.

Flying Head

People of origin: Multiple cultures, including the Inuit, Iroquois, and Seneca

Also called Dagwanoeient, Big Head, or the Great Head, this cannibalistic spirit appears as a disembodied head the height of a man, sometimes with a pair of bat wings on its cheeks, or with bird-like talons under the chin. They’re usually said to be created after a violent murder, and are cursed with insatiable hunger.

Guirivilo

People of origin: Mapuche

The guirivilo is an aquatic fox that lives in rivers and boggy waters, where it creates whirlwinds to drag people and animals down to the bottom so it can feed on them. Its main weapon is its tail, which looks like that of a fox but with nails at the end.

El Huallepen

People of origin: Mapuche

This is an amphibian creature with the body of a sheep and the head of a calf. It’s calm if you find it on the river bank, but once it’s in the water it’s ferocious, attacking any animal or human it finds. Mothers fear it especially because it’s said to make women sterile, or cause deformities in their future children.

Kee-wakw

People of origin: Abenaki

A variety of beings were said to walk the earth during the Ancient Age of Abenaki legend. Among them are the Kee-Wakw, a forest-dwelling cannibal giant that’s half-human and half-animal in appearance. In most legends, they were once human but became Kee-Wakw after committing a terrible crime, or during possession by an evil spirit, and they now feel only hunger.

Maski-mon-gwe-zo-os

People of origin: Abenaki

Here’s one from the Abenaki present age, a toad creature that wears the guise of either a partridge or a woman dressed in moss. It seduces men and lures in children then (as many of these creatures are wont to do) kills them.

Nagi

People of origin: Lakota

Nagi are spirits that never had a mortal tether. They can appear in many forms, including as an incomplete or monstrous human, or as an anthropomorphic animal. Their most fun detail is that they feed on human emotions, and can be either benevolent or malevolent depending on which emotions they eat. The good ones are attracted to love, joy, and peace, while the bad ones are drawn to sadness, anger, and vengeance.

Nun’yunu’wi

People of origin: Cherokee

Translating to “Dressed in stone”, these are monsters with impenetrable stone skin that can control people’s minds and have other powerful magical abilities. Oh, and they also eat people (natch). They carry a magical cane to point out their victims, and if you manage to kill one, their remains contain a great jewel. One fun fact of the Nun’yunu’wi legend is that they hate the sight of menstruating women. In one story, a village protects itself by making a ring of all the women on their period, which weakened the Nun’yunu’wi enough for their medicine man to kill it. If that’s not a ready-made analogy for toxic masculinity, I don’t know what is.

Opiyelguarbirán

People of origin: Taino

These are dog gods, described in one text as the “Cerberus of the mystic Taino world.” They served as psychopomps, guiding spirits of the dead or shamans on drug-aided journeys. They look basically like dogs, but with legs made of wood.

Peuchen

People of origin: Chilote

Mythical snakes exist in just about every world culture, but the Peuchen is a particularly fun one. It’s a giant, flying serpent that can shapeshift instantly into any animal form. Its gaze paralyzes victims, allowing them to suck their blood or eat their heart, without leaving a mark. You can tell one’s coming from the strange whistling noise they make.

Qallupilluit

People of origin: Inuit

Inuit parents who wanted to stop their kids from wandering toward the shore would tell them tales of Qallupilluit, humanoid creatures with green skin and long hair and fingernails who live in the sea. They kidnap children wandering alone, adopting them and carrying them underwater to live. Similar to the Peuchen, you can tell they’re near from their distinctive humming sound.

Sisiutl

People of origin: Many, including the Nuu-chah-nulth and the Nuxalk

Here’s another snake creature, though this one lives in the water. It has three heads, two reptilian and one human, along with skin that’s impervious to weapons. In some legends, it’s the pet of the god Qamaits and lives in a pool behind her home until it’s summoned to earth, where it can bring people either death or good fortune. Stepping on the slime trail they leave behind can make someone get sick or die, too, so they’re best to steer clear of, although its flesh has healing properties for anyone who manages to kill one. Salmon is said to be one of its forms, while Thunderbirds are its main natural predators, and it rides orcas, because why not.

Teju Jagua

People of origin: Guarani

Known as the Lord of Caverns, the Teju Jagua is a huge creature with the body of a lizard and seven dog heads. It’s fearsome, with eyes that shoot fire and clawed digits. Despite this, it’s a calm, mostly harmless critter who eats fruit and honey. Finding one is good news, in fact, because it protects buried treasure, and its skin is shiny from rolling around in the precious stones and gold it hoards.

Tlaltecuhtli

People of origin: Aztec

This is technically a goddess, not just a cryptid, called the Queen of the Earth among the Aztec. She’s also a demoness toad monster with mouths all over her body who is always hungry and demanding flesh, a fun enough detail I felt I needed to throw her on the list.

Unktehi

People of origin: Lakota

The unktehi look like giant ruminants (e.g. cows or goats) with long tails. Where you’ll find them depends on the gender—females live on land, and males in the water (how they reproduce, given those divisions, I didn’t dig deep enough to learn). They’re credited with contaminating water sources and causing floods, though they can also share knowledge, teaching humans the proper methods of ceremonial body painting.

Water Baby

People of origin: Yokuts

These mysterious spirits live in natural springs and ponds. Their cry sounds like a human baby and is seen as an omen of death. Responding to the cry by picking up the baby is bad, too. In some legends they have non-baby-like characteristics, like fish tails or scaled skin.

Wendigo

People of origin: Grand Medicine Society

Another one for the “cannibal monster” category, the Wendigo is a tall but gaunt creature that has a never-ending hunger for flesh. It brings winter with it, prompting icy blizzards and snow clouds, and the trees crack from cold when it passes. Its victims are ripped apart and the flesh stripped down to the bones. The Mi’kmaq have a similar creature known as the Chenoo that’s created from a human whose terrible crimes turned their heart to ice.

Xtabay

People of origin: Maya

The Xtabay is a dragon who takes the appearance of a beautiful woman wearing a white dress. She’ll wait behind a ceiba tree, combing her long black hair with spines of Tzacam cactus. Once she’s caught a victim, they have sex then she turns into a poisonous serpent and eats them (or in other versions rips their heart out then throws them over a cliff). In the version from Quintana Roo she’s a bit more justice-oriented, and specifically targets thieves, drunks, and violent criminals.

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While there’s a lot to discuss about Fall of the House of Usher—I may do a future blog post on the panoply of Poe references if the spirit so moves me—the thing that most impressed me was how well it pulled off two simultaneous and complementary tropes, what I’ll call “inevitable demise” and “cruel and unusual death.”

These are often found side-by-side in horror movies. Most frequently, at least in my experience, they show up in slasher films, usually ones that are either intentionally campy or are just plain not that good. This isn’t coincidence. These tropes are difficult to pull off with any kind of storytelling grace. When paired, they tend to end up in narratives where subtlety and depth weren’t ever on the menu.

In the “inevitable demise” trope, the audience knows full well that a character, or several characters, are doomed. This could be because a frame device tells you they’re already dead, or because other tropes are used that signal this likely outcome: a family moves into a haunted house; a group of teenagers arrives at a creepy summer camp; a collection of survivors flees a zombie apocalypse. The audience expects from the start that most of these people aren’t gonna make it.

What’s tricky about this is that it shifts the source of tension. The audience has no expectation the person will survive, so you lose the hope that adds stakes to life-threatening situations. The question becomes not if they die but when and how, and what that means for the other characters.

One thing to note is that the inevitable death trope isn’t unique to horror. It’s also common in historical fiction, military fiction, and disaster thrillers. In Titanic, for example, there’s a sense of impending doom hanging over the ship because the audience knows its journey doesn’t end well. This works for the film because it adds another layer to Jack and Rose’s relationship. Even as they’re falling in love, the viewer understands it’s going to end in tragedy, adding emotional weight to their romance.

The ”cruel and unusual death” trope is more firmly in the horror domain. This is when characters are picked off one-by-one in unique ways, often increasingly creative and gruesome as the story goes on. This can quickly veer into ridiculous territory that pushes the story toward camp, whether or not that was the intent.

I’ll cite my favorite example of this done poorly to illustrate, which is M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening. The premise of the film is basically that the trees are making people kill themselves—a concept bordering on ridiculous already, that doubles-down on the absurdity by having people choose absolutely bizarre methods to off themselves, including my personal favorite of “suicide by riding lawnmower.”

To keep cruel and unusual deaths compelling, rather than laughable, the story needs to give the strangeness some kind of in-world logic. This is usually done in one of two ways:

• Death finds a way – The character is doomed, and death overcomes their efforts to avoid their fate by making everything around them fatal. The Final Destination series is a prime example. The Rube Goldberg fatalities are intentionally over-the-top, demonstrating death’s power as it catches people who sidestepped their pre-determined demise.
• Psycho killer with a mission – The unusual deaths are chosen intentionally by a killer to send a moral message. Examples would include Jigsaw’s “games” in the Saw series or the murders in Seven. In both cases, the killer intentionally sets up bizarre deaths that mirror the victim’s sins or bad behavior.

Even when you give this kind of in-world logic, though, it doesn’t always hit. I’m thinking of the movie Smile, which combines these two strategies. In that film, an evil parasitic force passes from one victim to the next by forcing an observer to watch its current host kill themselves. That justifies the unusual deaths somewhat—making the deaths unusual amps up the new victim’s terror, making them more susceptible to the parasitic takeover. Even so, there are instances where the death method strains the viewer’s suspension of disbelief.

The Fall of the House of Usher avoids this trap and successfully wields both of these tropes in tandem. All of the deaths are inevitable and heavily foreshadowed within each episode. Every death is also extremely cruel, very unusual, or both, and no two victims in the series die the same way.

I think there are 3 main reasons this works:

1. The mystery comes from the why, not the who or how. The question that keeps the viewer hooked on the series isn’t who will die next, or whether certain characters will survive—it’s why Roderick Usher is convinced he’s the cause. The slow reveal of this underlying logic restores the energy and momentum that are otherwise lost by knowing who dies next.

2. The deaths aren’t random. The show employs both the “death finds a way” and “psycho killer with a mission” methods. A supernatural force steers the individuals to their respective demises, which are tailored to match their lives—not always a direct comeuppance for past sins like in Seven, but adjacent to that strategy.

3. Death has agency. The murderous force in Usher isn’t quite death personified a la Supernatural or similar shows, but we do see the bringer of death making conscious decisions about who will die and how. This adds another level of intrigue for the audience. Death isn’t indiscriminate—it targets the people who either must die or deserve to die, and punishes them accordingly. That makes the individual deaths more satisfying, along with reinforcing the in-story logic.

As someone who loves a good bloodbath, I was tickled by Fall of the House of Usher and will likely give it a re-watch in the near future, not just out of enjoyment but to study how it tells its tale. I’d definitely give it a strong recommend for horror writers who play in slasher, splatterpunk, or similarly high-body-count sandboxes. It effortlessly balances gore, mystery, and emotional weight, with winks of humor and camp. The concept is one that could easily have gone very wrong but didn’t, and that alone makes it worth the watch for horror writers, in my book.

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Part of my mission during my recent deep dive into world mythologies was to learn more about some of these lesser-known cryptids, critters, and beasties. Here are some of the ones that most tickled my fancy.

Ahuitzotl

Culture of origin: Aztec

The Ahuitzotl is a creature mentioned in the 16th-century Florentine Codex. Said to live in springs and lakes, it serves as their guardian, protecting the fish that live there from people. The size of a small dog, it’s described as similar to an otter, with sleek, slippery back fur that spikes when it’s on dry land. The main difference is that it has a prehensile tail with a human hand sprouting from the end of it.

Ahuitzotl would lure people to the water’s edge, sometimes by imitating the cry of a baby. It was also said to make fish and frogs rise to the surface to lure fishermen. Once it caught people, it drowned them and ate their eyes, nails, and teeth, which don’t seem like the tastiest bits of a person but did make it easy for people to tell when someone was killed by one and not a run-of-the-mill drowning. 

Aigamuxa

Culture of origin: Khoikhoi

Also called Bushmen, aigamuxa mostly look like people but with the major difference that their eyes are on the bottoms of their feet. Because of that, they have to do handstands or lay down with their feet in the air to see where they’re going. That’s good news for anyone who encounters one, since if they catch you they’ll rip you apart and eat you.

Baku

Culture of origin: Japan

Not all monsters are scary and evil, and the baku is case in point. Looks-wise, you’d probably be pretty creeped out to see one. They’re made from pieces left over after making other animals, with an elephant’s trunk, a tiger’s paws, the eyes of a rhinocerous and the tail of an ox.

Unlike most of the other critters on this list, though, a baku doesn’t attack people. Instead, they eat nightmares. If you have a bad dream, you can summon a baku to devour it so you can sleep peacefully. You don’t want to just summon them willy-nilly, though—if you run out of bad dreams to feed them, they’ll start eating your hopes and desires, instead.

Batibat

Cullture of origin: Ilokano/Filipino

Back to the evil beasties, the batibat is a vengeful demon that looks like an obese woman living in trees. Most of the time they leave people alone. If somebody cuts down their tree, though, they stay with the wood and start haunting whatever that tree is used to make.

When batibats get especially dangerous is if the wood they haunt is used as the main post of a house. Then, they’ll attack anyone sleeping in the home, invading their dreams and laying on them to suffocate them, making it so they can’t move when they wake up. There are similar myths to explain sleep paralysis from various world cultures, but this version seems especially rife for climate fiction writers or others who want to make a horror story from humans invading natural spaces.

Chemosit

Culture of origin: Nandi

Also called a nandi bear, the chemosit is one of the most distinctive-looking cryptids I came across. It’s half-man (on the top) and half-bird (on the bottom) with a single clawed leg and nine asses. To make up for the one-leg-ness, it walks around using a spear for support. It’s also twice the height of a human and has a red mouth that glows like a lamp at night. 

That mouth is what the chemosit uses to lure people to their doom. It also sings which, combined with the light, makes people think there’s a party up ahead. Luckily, once it eats someone, all isn’t lost—their friends can get them back by cutting off the chemosit’s thumb or big toe.

Joint-eater

Culture of origin: Celtic

Also called an alp-luachra, a joint-eater is a parasitic variant of the fairy. Basically they’re like a supernatural tapeworm. They first show up as a newt that climbs into someone’s mouth when they fall asleep beside a stream or spring. From there, they climb down the victim’s throat and live there, eating half of their food. You can lure them out by eating a bunch of salty food then laying next to a running stream. 

Kappa

Culture of origin: Japan

The kappa is a mischievous water demon from Japan that, like many aquatic cryptids, are most famous for dragging people underwater to eat them (and the kappa’s choice of internal organs makes much more sense than teeth and nails). They’re humanoid but with webbed hands and feet and a turtle shell. They also have a dish on their head filled with the water from their home stream. If they go on land and the water spills, they can’t move again until someone refills it.

Stories of kappa range from them being villainous murderers to cute troublemakers, depending on the tale. Even the murderous ones are fairly pleasant, though, and they’re polite to a fault. In fact, that’s the best way to defeat one—just bow to it, and it’ll be compelled to return the gesture and spill out its water. They also love cucumbers and sumo wrestling, are averse to sesame and ginger, and have three anuses so they can fart three times as much as normal humans. In some stories, you can make a kappa your servant by pulling off one of its arms, and it’ll do favors or share its knowledge to get its limb back.

Mintuci

Culture of origin: Ainu 

Another Asian water beastie, the mintuci is mostly human-shaped but with purplish skin the texture of a turtle’s, and either a bird’s legs or four sets of hooves. What’s most unique about the mintuci, though, is that its arms are connected—pull on one and it’ll get longer while the other gets shorter.

Mintuci are malicious, said to drown animals and people then disembowel and eat them. They can also possess people, especially women, who will then try to seduce men (presumably toward the water to be killed). On the plus side, fisherman have better luck in lakes and rivers where mintuci live, so it can be a good thing for a town so long as they don’t mind the uptick in violent drownings. 

Ochokochi

Culture of origin: Georgian

The ochokochi is similar to a satyr or sasquatch: a large forest creature that’s mostly-human and covered in shaggy hair. Their main distinctive feature is a sharpened bone that sticks out from their chest like an axe blade. They kill by taunting passers by then hug them to death with their chest axe. And, speaking of monsters with oddly affectionate methods of killing victims…

Ovda

Culture of origin: Finnish 

Another cannibal forest monster, the ovda looks even more human than the ochokochi in most reports. From a distance, they just look like a naked person. Once you get close, though, you’ll realize their feet point backwards. In a similar “killing with love” kind of tip, they tickle their victims to death, then eat them.

Tarand

Culture of origin: Greek

Lots of Greek mythology has been laced into modern Western folklore, but it’s also vast and there are plenty of hidden gems. One of these is the tarand, a chameleon moose. It changes its hair to match its surroundings and, as such, is exceedingly difficult to catch. It also had skin as hard as armor and was the size of a bull with antlers like a stag, which basically makes it sound like a beast not to be fucked with.

Xiezhi

Culture of origin: China

The xiezhi is a variant of the unicorn that basically looked like an ox or goat with thick fur and a single long horn sprouting from its forehead. Xiezhi were both highly intelligent and had a well-developed sense of justice. In fact, they could sense if someone was guilty of a crime. Legend says that Gao Yao hired a xiezhi and used it in court, which saved them the whole annoyance of a trial and also took care of the whole sentencing and execution part—they’d just let the xiezhi ram the guilty with its horn and that was that. 

Yara-ma-yha-who

Culture of origin: Australian Aboriginal

Last but certainly not least is this fun little guy from the outback who’s sort of like an amphibian vampire. The yara-ma-yha-who is a red frog-man with a large, toothless mouth and suckers on its hands and feet. They hang out in fig trees, then drop down on people who walk under them and drain their blood through their suckers, swallowing their remains.

Like with vampires, though, the victims don’t just die. After the yara-ma-yha-who swallows someone, they take a nap and then throw them up. The person looks normal except a bit shorter and with a reddish tint to their skin. Gradually, over the course of a few feedings, the victim turns into a yara-ma-yha-who themselves.

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