Fungi

I’m fond of “cosmic horror,” and a fungal-themed anthology posted under the horror genre sounded right up my alley. While I enjoyed Fungi, it wasn’t entirely what I was expecting. Quite a few stories were more whimsical in nature and seemed to have little of horror to them. As is frequently true of anthologies, which are of necessity put together to someone else’s scheme and preferences, you’re unlikely to enjoy all of the tales equally. Mild content warning for self-harm, all sorts of methods of death, and some slurs.The book starts off well with John Langan’s Hyphae, in which John goes home to find out how his father is doing now that his mother has left. Though the place seems perfectly clean, it gives off a horrific stench. When John follows this to the basement and a tunnel dug out into the earth, you know things can’t possibly end well. This one was short, bizarre, and creepy, just the way I like ’em. A little later in the book, Kristopher Reisz’s The Pilgrims of Parthen involves a strange mushroom that’s started popping up. It enables people to visit a mysterious, seemingly uninhabited city, and users become obsessed with finding out the city’s secrets. I also liked Goatsbride, by Richard Gavin. It tells the tale of a dying old god and what happens when invaders come to his land. One of my favorites in here was Laird Barron’s Gamma. It’s a very unusual road to telling a tale of the fungal takeover of the world, and it made me shudder. Cordyceps Zombii, by Ann K. Schwader, is an elegant and intriguing poem.Paul Tremblay’s Our Stories Will Live Forever involves a man who’s afraid of flying who takes an ill-fated flight. The man next to him gives him something, saying, “take this if you want to live.” This is a fascinating story with an intriguing run-on style. A.C. Wise’s Where Dead Men Go to Dream sees Jonah going to a woman who “sells dreams” in order to find out what happened to his missing lover, and the results are fascinating. Daniel Mills’s Dust from a Dark Flower tells us a tale of a 1700s village in which gravestones have started to disintegrate precipitously into spores, and the spores aren’t content to stop there. The Shaft through the Middle of It All, by Nick Mamatas, explores a bit of vengeance wrought by a woman when her community garden gets torn down for a gentrification project. Note that the main character does refer to some characters by slurs, although it seems that this is a case of characterization rather than author editorialization.The second story, Lavie Tidhar’s The White Hands, totally jarred me. The atmosphere was about as different as you could get from the first tale, and it isn’t my cup of tea. It’s a collection of… maybe encyclopedia entries? It details various organisms and events and places, gradually laying out a strange world in which the “Human-Fungi Accord of 945” seems to have been followed by quite a few years of strange events, like a pirate captain (half-human, half-fungus) called “Scarlet Hood,” and the rise of a deadly empire. It’s… interesting. Camille Alexa’s His Sweet Truffle of a Girl struck me similarly. In it, Morel has created, through the abilities of Dr. Crimini, a living, organic, puffball submersible. His goal is to impress the father of Amanita, the girl he loves–only the maiden voyage doesn’t go as planned. Molly Tanzer and Jesse Bullington wrote Tubby McMungus, Fat from Fungus. The main characters are cats, a rat, and some bats, and Tubby himself is a merkin-maker (a maker of pubic wigs). A wager results in Tubby stealing some strange materials to make the very best merkin out of, resulting in terrible consequences. Yes, cats with pubic wigs. I don’t even know what to say. I’ll give it to the authors–this has to be the most creative tale in here, and that’s saying something.Andrew Penn Romine’s Last Bloom on the Sage was in-between for me. It’s a depiction of “the spore-changed West”, where Duke Winchester is working with tentacled beyonder Legs McGraw to rob a train. It has a touch of horror to it, but it’s still kind of whimsical and humorous. Jeff VanderMeer’s Corpse Mouth and Spore Nose is another in-between: it’s definitely creepy, but the ending is fairly silly. Still, the writing style drew me in. A Monster in the Midst, by Julio Toro and Sam Martin, involves a man and his automata tracking down the source of a globe-spanning fungal infection. It has a bit of that larger-than-life steampunk vibe to it, and it feels incompatible with the style of horror I was looking for. Chadwick Ginther’s First They Came for the Pigs sees a wealthy man trying to hire people to deal with the fact that all of his people are turning up killed by fungal growths. He goes with several men underneath the city, where he comes face-to-face with something awful. Ian Rogers’s Out of the Blue sees a real estate agent for haunted properties teaming up with a detective who works on supernatural cases. This story is a bit predictable, but fun to read–and it hints at a wider world that I’d like to read about.Steve Berman’s Kum, Raúl (The Unknown Terror) is a nice tale of a fungal terror in Mexico, but the presentation is dry and straightforward, robbing it of that frisson of horror. I enjoyed the not-so-horrific tale of Wild Mushrooms, by Jane Hartenstein, in which a cancer-stricken mushroom hunter goes into the woods to die, but it felt like it sort of stumbled to a halt. It’s nice and poignant, however. Lisa M. Bradley’s The Pearl in the Oyster and the Oyster Under Glass pulled me in, but I’m still not sure what to make of it. Main character Art is a bear? Or not a bear but wants to be a bear? Or not a bear but a phantom bear? Anyway, the tale involves cleaning up an oil spill using mushrooms. It’s kind of surreal, but it does avoid being excessively random, which tends to be a peril of surreal writing. Go Home Again, by Simon Strantzas, is an odd tale of a young woman coming to terms with her father’s death and her mother’s disappearance. It feels like it could have been pared down a little, but it’s an interesting read.Some of the stories read like the authors decided to try out some hallucinatory mushrooms before they started writing! Midnight Mushrumps, by W.H. Pugmire, reads this way to me. I don’t even know what to say about it. Polenth Blake’s Letters to a Fungus is a delightfully hilarious piece made up of letters by one of those people who sees themselves as being the neighborhood HOA police, constantly writing letters and making complaints about everything. In this case, she has some complaints about the fungal growths in her garden (although I can’t blame her for making a fuss when they eat Aunt Mabel).Overall I’m glad I read this anthology, but I’m also glad it wasn’t priced very high. Hopefully now that you’ve read this you have a slightly better idea than I did of whether this would suit your tastes.

This book is absolutely appetizing. Every story is so diverse, but always keeps the theme "fungi" in mind. Each story is very unique. Some you read and read waiting, anticipating the moment a mushroom will play a role in the story...and when it does, you can't help but laugh and smile. Every new story I read I find my self telling everyone I know about it! This is such a good read for anyone who likes a little bit of edginess in their fantasy.

Meh.The most useful part of the book was its further reading references: "Brief list of Fungal Fiction" at the end. There are stories from the 1960's I'd like to add to the list if I cold recall titles and authors.The present anthology: collectively, meh.For the most part stories followed predictable trajectories launched from hackneyed premises: the private detective, the returning son, the progressive infection, parasitic body-snatchers, the wasteland after, etc.Some stories created a promising initial scenario and stopped without developing or resolving a plot. Characterizations were often superficial, stereotypic, superfluous, or irrelevant, but quality was variable. Some stories showed strengths and were really not bad. I had the impression of young writers developing their styles: the type and variety of stories expected from a college sophomore writing class assigned a theme.None of the writers seemed scientifically knowledgeable about actual fungi, few convincingly referenced traditional mythologies and cultural significances associated with fungi. In this collection such knowledge should be central or at least complimentary to theme, character, and/or plot. Stories were sometimes entertaining but never frightening; I seek artistic expression of Mr. Lovecraft's "cosmic horror" an experience perhaps unfamiliar to most of our present authors.Some readers will understand: My own fungal experience of true cosmic horror occurred forty one years ago when I held a refrigerator handle. My hand looked and felt exactly like my hand, the refrigerator handle looked and felt exactly like a refrigerator handle. I knew that my hand was my hand and I knew the refrigerator handle was a refrigerator handle. It was vivid, it was terrifying, it was hideous. I never returned.Words must ultimately fail, though others describe better than I. Their best stories invoke remotely whispered and unquiet memories.The best "fungus" story I have ever read is "Leng," by Mark Laidlaw. He combines rich and colorful portrayal of a realistic foreign culture, well developed characters, a good scientific background in mycology as a guiding metaphor interlaced with plausible mysticism in a surprising, original and suspenseful plot tangentially launched from Lovecraftian premises. My only criticism was that I wanted the story to be longer. It appeared in Lovecraft Unbound (2009) and is well worth seeking out."Leng" does not appear in the present volume but is briefly referenced in the list of further reading.

With any anthology, youre bound to get a few bad eggs. But i believe an anthology should be considered as a whole, and to do that its important to look at what connects the stories. In this case, it is the titular fungi. Yes, fungus in some form or another appears in every story. Some focus on the qualities related to decay and death. Others play on psychadelia. Another common thread is the idea of a group conciousness or hive mind. All very interesting.However, this becomes a weakness as nothingelse connects, not style, not genre, not tone. There is a heavy skew towards darker fiction because that circle is where the authors typically roam. But i found the other stories to not fit, or seem placed or just not wlrking for me. I ended up skipping most of those stories and reading the big names. Maybe its just aesthetic taste, but i certainly feel like this anthology could have benfitted from greater direction.

This is a great book for Vandermeer fans. It's a compilation of stories he could have written himself. Excellent "weird" reading.

Great!

EXCELLENT COMBINATION OF HORROR AND THE NATURAL. GREAT NODS TO LOVECRAFT AND THE TERROR SQUISHING BENAETH YOUR FEET . BREATH DEEP.

Dull short stories. Maybe 1 or 2 mildly entertaining. Short paperback with cutesy, unnecessary intros to each story. Ugh. Man I hate that.