Grab the Lapels

Thanksgiving Horror Anthology edited by Allisha McAdoo

*This is the 10th book in the 13 Books of Fall.

Well, I am just a sucker for horror that uses a specific holiday as the theme. Sometimes, the day is spot on, like Halloween or April Fool’s Day, and even Black Friday. Other times, it’s more a seasonal time, like Fall Break (sadly retitled The Mutilator) or Rare Exports. If you know the genre, you know everything I just listed is a movie. Imagine my delight when I saw Thanksgiving Horror Anthology pop up in my Google Books recommendations. At only a couple of dollars, I snatched it up. Plus, I’m playing Book Bingo and needed a holiday-themed read for one square.

If the cover doesn’t inspire much faith in you — same. Allisha McAdoo is the brain child behind around fifty works, typically collections or collaborations. The tone of each story within this festive frightener was unfortunately juvenile. I was sadly reminded of rough drafts of short fiction I read in undergrad. Even worse, the authors fall prey to that notion that if they write something “edgy,” that means it’s cool. In my experience, it’s the twenty-something guys who are most guilty of this. And McAdoo loads her collection with dudes.

What does “edgy” mean in Thanksgiving Horror Anthology? Eating people. That’s right; almost every author chose to make their turkey horror tale tied up in swapping out that delicious bird Ben Franklin apparently wanted to make a U.S. mascot…for a person. [insert exasperated sigh]. With all the fodder of Thanksgiving right at their fingertips, they chose the inevitable. Why not include horror in the traditions of families fighting, football games on TV and in the back yard, and hell, arriving at your destination often proves dicey once the snow kicks up. It’s even terrifying if a meemaw chokes on a turkey bone; we don’t need to have the fam eat meemaw to land on a horrifying vibe.

There was one story that caught my attention for it’s unique premise, and it fits right into a subgenre that scares the shit out of me: folk horror. You know, those families that believe in weird stuff, like sacrificing children to make the crops grow every year. Except in the case of “The Contributor” by Chase Will, they farm family doesn’t sacrifice anyone living. Instead, they dig up grandma every year at Thanksgiving and feed her a little offering of, uh, themselves. Maybe just a pinky. And that appeases their crop god. Then, granny drags herself back out to the land to bury her corpse again until the next year. Will uses imagery from Catholic rituals: the eating of flesh and drinking of blood, and doesn’t an ear look just like a Eucharist? Eeewwww.

Sorry friends.

In general, the stories were rushed and needed workshopped. I saw potential in “Barnyard Blood” by Ivan K. Conway, but it, too, read as underdeveloped. So, that’s it for me, everyone! No more Thanksgiving Horror Anthology — I can cross that one off my yearly holiday reading list. Instead, I’ll flim flam my dad into watching Black Friday with me this year.

15 comments

    • I appreciate that this lady is trying something, and it feels like the kind of collection that you would pick up when you’re about 20 and at your undergrad university. It reminds me of when people would make handmade gonzo magazines of fiction that they and their friends wrote. The whole thing would be self-made, the cover image would be somebody’s friend’s doodle, it would be computer paper folded in half and stapled, that sort of thing. However, The fun of that kind of magazine is that your friends made it; here, the content felt a little meh.

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  5. But at least you filled a box on your bingo, eh?

    This interested me, “In my experience, it’s the twenty-something guys who are most guilty of this. And McAdoo loads her collection with dudes.” Do you mean your experience overall, that is, from your teaching days? Is there something young women tended to do? Just wondering if there’s a sort of gender-specific writer’s rite of passage?

    I wonder why she loaded it with dudes? Do more men write horror? I suspect not but it’s not a field I know.

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    • You’re right, I did fill a bingo square!

      My experience stems mostly from my student days but also one particularly, uh, memorable semester teaching undergrads at Notre Dame.

      I think more men write horror — at least, when I’m looking for titles there are loads of them. The 80s seemed to be run by men in horror. Funnily enough, older stuff seems more evenly split, like around the 70s.

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  6. Yikes to this cover. You were brave for even attempting it. Sorry it didn’t work out, but the meemaw joke made me LOL so this review was a success for me! Folk horror is ESPECIALLY creepy, I can so relate to that.

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