I recently finished reading All the Fabulous Beasts by Priya Sharma, a collection of fantasy short stories. Common themes are about transformation: birds transform into people, people transform into birds, plants transform into (terrifying) people, people transform (horrifically) into insects, and so on. Many of the stories are dark in tone or content, or horror adjacent. There's some body horror in there too. Familial relationships or romantic ones (when they come up) tend towards the gothic.
My least favourite story was The Anatomist's Mnemonic, which felt like a fairly straightforward serial killer's origin story (insofar as something like that can be said to be straightforward!) I was waiting for it to surprise me, but it didn't, keeping to predictable lines. I think it stood out because some of the other stories did much more interesting things with either their plots or the characters.
That includes my favourite story, Rag and Bone, which was set in a kind of alternate history Liverpool, rife with social inequality and mysterious medical procedures that seem to suggest organ harvesting practiced by the rich upon the poor. What I liked about this story was the sense of world-building I got from it, along with the way it interrogated the gap between the privileged wealthy and the oppressed poor. I would happily have read a longer piece from that setting.
Most of the other stories fell somewhere between those two for me. I found them interesting, and often full of strong imagery. I don't think this book will appeal to everyone, but at its best some of the transformations and strange shifts remind me a bit of Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, if that was less about fairytales and more about messed up contemporary family dynamics.
