Discontinue If Death Ensues: A Women-Led Horror Anthology

Book Review – Beyond and Within: Discontinue If Death Ensues

Discontinue If Death Ensues (Beyond and Within) by Carol Gyzander (Editor), Anna Taborska

This anthology had no right to make me feel as viscerally emotional as it did. And yet, it had every right. While the grim tipping point of humanity doesn’t seem like an especially new angle for horror to take, in the hands of five accomplished authors each of whom bring a unique voice, it is devastatingly special. The five forces at work are Anna Taborska, Carol Gyzander (these two only doing double-service as co-editors), Lee Murray, Cindy O’Quinn, and Kyla Lee Ward, united by being nominated in 2021 for the Bram Stoker Award for ‘Superior Achievement in Short Fiction’.

Through them you get on one hand everything which a horror anthology might need – body horror, emotional viciousness, tension, and enough apocalyptic eventualities to make your stubbed toe from the other week the least of all your worries; on the other hand, it has everything it and the ‘Beyond & Within’ range is trying to achieve – an array of voices, interrogating us and them and plumbing a few unfathomable depths of emotion at the same time.

Lee Murray begins the anthology with a poem and 3 stories, each bringing her usual smarting prose and sense of indomitability to the stories. The highlight of her stories has to be ‘Glow: An Oral History’ which takes a truly brilliant premise – of men gaining a glow which seemingly links to their “superiority” but which in fact reveals a dark truth – and spins it into something which had me more than simply smirking with cathartic joy.

Being a man, the experiences plugged into this book are different from my own, however the story’s nature – essentially as dystopian non-fiction – is so ripe for causing discomfort and malice that whatever your angle, you’ll find a terror in what Murray writes. Her writing knows how to crescendo into its twists here, and none more so than here; it’s simple yet beyond devastating. Dare I say, it’s my favourite the anthology has to offer, which is quite an achievement since every story serves up tragedy and dynamism on a platter.

Continuing the anthology with a poem and 3 stories too is Carol Gyzander, and takes a slightly more fantastical bent to matters. Most memorable is her sci-fi story ‘Wearing White Out of Season’, with Ada Lovelace collecting women – namely Marilyn Monroe and Cleopatra – throughout history and thereby improving the future with their gleaned knowledge, and in some ways it stands as this book’s most upbeat perspective despite the comeuppances entwined in the story; her ‘The Tempest’-inspired ‘Storm Warning’ is however a work of genius.

It makes no assumptions on the reader, though as a lover of ‘The Tempest’ there’s an extra sharpened edge which digs in, and the story of a magician’s daughter, the island’s resident slave-creature, and the spirit of the island has complexions of both rage and manipulation which terrify even before the most powerful tendrils of emotion take route.

Kyla Lee Ward contributes just one poem and story to the anthology, but her story ‘Maleficium’ is proof positive of how a longer story (as ‘Glow: An Oral History’) can prolong your discomfort with sacrificing its expected snappier pace. Ward’s contribution, I have to assume, was written in a frenzy of wanting to be one of cinema’s mad scientists, since if adapted for the big screen it could hand over some truly brilliant and creepy visuals.

In a pseudo-Lovecraftian endeavour of bleakness, indignity, and pufferfish venom, Ward writes very close to the bone; her prose is emotionally tiring to survive, but that’s only because it possesses a precision and intricacy which knows how to affect you in just the right way. Part epistolary, part action, it’s vaguely evocative of the dystopian tales of the early 1900s too.

Next up are Anna Taborska’s contributions and they add an element of humour to proceedings, never infantilising or belittling anything while giving matters the kind of caustic edge I’m a sucker for. And of course she adds a cat or two, her writing hallmark, to her stories. ‘A(n)nus Horribilis’, a spin on vagina dentata (which the horror film TEETH so famously capitalised on) but with nuns, sisterly love, and false memories, is a story very blunt in its messages but also incredibly clever.

It’s simultaneously everything you expect and also joyously left-field, and while I don’t think it’s my favourite story here it’s certainly the one that’s stayed with me and creeped me out the longest. Her duo of stories, ‘Fat’/‘Thin’, are excellent too. They tread a path of destruction you can see from a mile off, yet remain enjoyable nevertheless. With Taborska, whether she’s weaving in snarkiness or the kind of bite determined to turn infected and vengeful, it’s less about the twist and so much more about the journey. A number of the anthology’s stories have a kind of “biological warfare” aspect, yet the rapids you can feel beneath these stories enhances that harrowing descent.

Rounding off is Cindy O’Quinn, the only one of the five authors I hadn’t come across before reading this, but who I will be sure to investigate further. Although her set of contributions might not be quite as exacting or intensely memorable, they deliver a slice of wildness and a sort of inevitable ability to carry you in its slipstream, surely demonstrating the book’s key theme in one of its more subtle and more riveting forms.

Like Ward’s contribution, her story ‘Rolling Boil’ has a Lovecraftian influence, though here it’s far more profound – sometimes you just need an Old One possessing a young man to give you the shivers, and if that’s the case then you need look no further. It’s worth noting too that although the stories spoke to me far more than the poems – nothing against the art, but I’m just less inclined to it as a rule – her poem ‘Pardon Me While I Hum’ landed with me in a way I didn’t expect, and the caustic edge that Taborska’s tales also shared again really worked here and as such throws one of the anthology’s more outwardly dark punches.

Even though it’s themed towards a certain angle, this anthology has something to offer to whomever picks it up. And that’s an accolade ‘Beyond & Within: Discontinue If Death Ensues’ can hold its head up high and flaunt. No one contributor offers the same thing as the last and although there are slight overarching ideas – for instance, in Murray’s stories expect a savagery that strikes only once you’ve finished the book but which grows and grows afterwards, or in Ward’s an intricacy and bleakness which go hand in hand – it’s as variegated as it is driven by its imperative: don’t let the bastards grind you down. Now, excuse me while I lock all my doors and never sleep again.

Discontinue If Death Ensues (Beyond and Within) by Carol Gyzander (Editor), Anna Taborska

15 horror stories and 5 poems about women, written by 5 women, facing down the grim tipping point of humanity and offering a glimpse of the hope to come. This is Discontinue If Death Ensues

Horror stories about women, written by women. This anthology focuses on the strength of women faced with adversity. It explores many ways in which societal structures and personal action – including mistreatment of the environment and other people, particularly women – can reach a tipping point, creating unexpected changes, empowering women around the world.

It contains fifteen interlaced stories and five poems from five authors in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand – all women who were nominated for the 2021 HWA Bram Stoker Award® for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction: Lee Murray, Cindy O’Quinn, Kyla Lee Ward, Anna Taborska and Carol Gyzander.

The Flame Tree Beyond and Within short story collections bring together tales of myth and imagination by modern and contemporary writers, carefully selected by anthologists, and sometimes featuring short stories from a single author. Overall, the series presents a wide range of diverse and inclusive voices with myth, folkloric-inflected short fiction, and an emphasis on the supernatural, science fiction, the mysterious and the speculative. The books themselves are gorgeous, with foiled covers, printed edges and published only in hardcover editions, offering a lifetime of reading pleasure.