Wild Things Live There: The Best of Northern Frights

Melanie Marttila is a Sudbury-based freelance writer and writing
consultant.

Five volumes of Canadian-written or Canadian-inspired horror and dark
fantasy have been distilled into this anthology.

What makes the stories frightening is the fact that they are steeped in
the familiar. In settings ranging from Toronto to rural British
Columbia, characters struggle with the real-life problems of love,
death, divorce, abuse, sibling rivalry. It’s oddly comforting to read
that dating can, in fact, be hell, or that one’s fear of heights is
completely justified

David Nickle’s “The Sloan Men” details the plight of a young
woman who discovers that she’s in love with a monster—quite
literally—and then, even more inexplicably, that she still loves him.
In Nalo Hopkinson’s “Slow Cold Chick,” the protagonist learns that
empowerment can come from outside the self, but that sometimes it has to
crawl into you first. In Michael Rowe’s “Wild Things Live There,”
a young boy finds out that creepy old Mrs. Winfield isn’t human.

Wild Things Live There is a welcome addition to the fantasy/SF/horror
collections of public and home libraries.