Hell Hath Only Fury: A Gripping Collection of Speculative Horror

Hell Hath Only Fury, Edited by S.H. Cooper & Oli A. White

A Horror Book Review by Rebecca Rowland
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The American judicial system’s overturn of the landmark Roe v. Wade decision guaranteeing access to abortion sparked a number of projects in rebuttal, from art installations to literary collections. S.H. Cooper and Oli A. White’s contribution, Hell Hath Only Fury, is an array of twenty-seven speculative short stories penned by twenty-five different scribes. With a theme “of fright and fighting back” to regain control and reclaim independence of one own’s body, the anthology is an evocative display of quiet horror, dark fantasy, science-fiction terror, and psychological fiction.

Although pregnancy does factor into several of the stories, more often than not, protagonists are plagued by forces outside of their bodies.

Co-curator Oli A. White’s own tale, “A Gentle, Soft Boy,” tackles an aspect of misogyny rarely spied in horror literature: while internet trolls and incels are ubiquitous, the toxic person who hides in feminist facades are invasive forces far more destructive. The narrator explains, “This was his Twitter bio: ‘Nice boy, good friend, soft-spoken somebody.

Kindness is cool, selfishness sucks! #RespectWomen.’ Every time I see a guy with a bio like this these days, I start shaking.” White’s villain is certain to make the reader angry, if only because we have all met a Robin and seen him nurtured by the blind sheep of social media, but White gleefully evens the score. Likewise, “June 24th, 2032” by G. Kimball, the anthology’s closing tale, provides a haunting glimpse at the possible domino effect anti-abortion rulings could have regarding the rights of sexual assault victims; in this story, it is both the judicial system and the angry mob of society that the narrator must defend against.

Two other tales take widely different approaches to the theme of reclaiming one’s destiny but are equally effective in evoking shock and horror.

Syn McDonald’s entry will have readers thinking long after they have closed its pages. In “Life Support,” when a nonbinary person discovers that they are pregnant, their ferociously religious mother threatens to do everything in her power to prevent her child from having an abortion: “‘I’m on birth control, Momma.

Apparently it didn’t work.’ She lifts her chin. ‘Just another sign the Lord wants you to have this child! He bypassed those medications you used to stop it from happening!’ Says the woman with seven children.” The shocking denouement of this tale reiterates the harm deadnaming and dismissing gender identity generates. Sandra Ruttan pens a sly wink to Ancient Greece’s deity of the hearth in “The Goddess Complex.”

Vesta walks home with a male co-worker who hides a secret, nefarious hobby, and soon, her life direction is reorientated by acts of violence and vigilante justice: “Dark hoodie, dark jeans, dark sneakers. Nothing that would stand out. A lamp near the road offered enough light for her to read the street numbers. This was it…Her variation of the 12-step plan was a little different than the usual ones, but they started the same.” There are some acts, however, for which there is no absolution.

Three other standouts in the collection utilize a Cronenbergian method of skirting the edges of bizarro horror, and the resulting effect is delightful.

The narrator in Dana Vickerson’s “8W2D” is trying to get pregnant but suffers a missed miscarriage. Her state’s laws, however, prohibit medical intervention in expelling the tissue. What follows is a visceral experience in terror: “Inside the black and white bulge of my uterus, I see the monster. I see its wriggling tentacles, its gaping mouth.

I see claws and fangs and hundreds of eyes, all opening and closing with the lub-lub-lub of its heart.” Vickerson constructs a wickedly smart extended metaphor of the helplessness felt by women in the overturn of Roe as well as the patronizing misogyny set forth by the right-wing faction who pushed for it. Still more chilling imagery wafts through “The Change,” where Alice Towey’s protagonist begins a transformation. The world wants to teach Sarah skills to “cope” with her body’s change, but Sarah has a better idea: “She threw up, yards of thick white material spilling from her mouth. She touched it with trembling fingers. It was wet and fibrous. Soft, but strong. She understood.” Towey’s tale is quietly creepy, offering empowerment in a time of seeming impotence.

​Finally, co-curator S.H. Cooper’s “The New Front Line” is simply genius: an art exhibit that is removed by officials from a political protest returns, grows, and shatters the fourth wall.

The Inheriting Her Ghosts author offers a mesmerizing piece of speculative fiction that saddens, angers, and provides hope to the reader all at once. Cooper and White have assembled a solid line-up of writing styles and approaches. Reinforcing the notion that Draconian decisions affect more lives than those in power may comprehend, people with uteruses in all stages of life are represented Hell Hath Only Fury. Sexual assault and misogyny, menopause and infertility: all of these horrors are told in tales that are often heartbreaking, sometimes allegorical, but always unsettling if not downright terrifying.

Hell Hath Only Fury, Edited by S.H. Cooper & Oli A. White

On June 24, 2022, a cry rang out across the United States of America. It echoed, reverberated, and extended out across the world. To some it represented the fear of what’s to come. To others, a reality that was all too familiar. It was a cry of anger. Of terror and anguish. Of desperation. But it wasn’t one of surprise.

In its wake, voices joined and rose with warning tales of the impending future. Bodies stripped of autonomy, identities denied, freedoms robbed, lives lost. And so much rage. For these are not voices that will go gentle into this terrible night. These are stories of fright and fighting back, these are stories of reclamation and defiance. These are stories of warriors. Because when all they give us is hell, we will respond with only fury.

Hell Hath Only Fury is a charity anthology for the benefit of abortion services in the United States of America following the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Rebecca Rowland

Rebecca Rowland is an American dark fiction author and curator of seven horror anthologies, the most recent of which is American Cannibal. She delights in creeping about 

Ginger Nuts of Horror partly because it’s the one place her hair is a camouflage instead of a signal fire. For links to her latest work, social media, or just to surreptitiously stalk her, visit RowlandBooks.com.

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