I had hoped I would love this book. One of my favourite Booktubers gave it high praise and everyone knows I love my short stories, especially horror. What I didn't expect it to actually love it as much as I hoped I would. I honestly didn't think it was possible but here we are. Slasher Girls & Monster Boys is a wonderful collection of horror short stories and every single one ended up being something I enjoyed.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to overhype it. A realistic review is probably 4 or 4.5 stars but this was catered so well to my personal tastes that I felt like I had to give it 5. I read it entirely in one day and the variety in it is astounding. The overall tone of the anthology manages to be remarkably consistent though which is so nice to see. Usually with anthologies every writer has a different voice, and while I think each author probably has different strengths, in this book you could tell me they were all written by one person and I would believe it.
Onto the stories themselves-I think almost every (if not every) story is supernatural in some way which normally isn't my jam but it definitely works here. It's YA horror so it manages to be incredibly creepy without any weird sexual horror. There is sadly a bit of vagueness or ambiguity in some of the stories which I am not a fan of. For some reason authors seem to think they can get away with being confusing in horror short stories and it very rarely works for me in a positive way. However, I did genuinely enjoy every story and none of them felt dramatically weaker than the others, even if I ended up liking them less. If I had to pick some favourites, I would have to go with 'The Girl Without a Face', The Flicker, The Fingers, The Beat, The Sigh' and 'Hide and Seek'. The weakest were probably 'Fat Girl with a Knife' and 'Emmeline'. Even then, there were no stories I actively disliked.
Honestly I would definitely recommend checking this anthology out. If you like horror, there is so much creativity and talent to be found here. I will be checking out books from every single one of these authors (to be fair, most are on my TBR list anyway) and I wish there could somehow be a sequel to this anthology.
Overall Rating:
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