Hybrid: Misfits, Monsters and Other Phenomena by Donald Armfield

Hybrid: Misfits, Monsters and Other Phenomena Reviews

• 
  Karla Kay

  HYbriD: Misfits, Monsters and Other Phenomena Edited by: Donald Armfield & Maxwell I. Gold
  
  "We didn’t lie to you, folks. We told you we had living, breathing, monstrosities. You laughed at them, shuddered at them. And, yet, but for the accident of birth, you might be one as they are. They did not ask to be brought into the world, but into the world they came. Their code is a law unto themselves: offend one and you offend them all. And now, folks, if you’ll just step this way. You are about to witness the most amazing, the most astounding living monstrosity of all time." – Carnival Barker, Freaks
  
  ThE HyBriDs
  Introduction-James Aquilone
  Strange Progeny-Bruce Boston
  Making Friends-Angela Yuriko Smith
  As Dark the Night-Nicole Givens Kurtz
  Kolkata’s Little Girl-Alessandro Manzetti
  Raven-Wolf-Cindy O’Quinn
  Home Is Where The Howl Is-John Claude Smith
  Mother Eve-Marge Simon
  Ruination of the Gods-Dr Chris McAuley & Claudia Christian
  It Calls To You-Jamal Hodge
  Slo-Mo-Michael Bailey
  Maero-Lee Murray
  Vis-à-Vis-Jeffrey Thomas
  Hôpital Automatique-D. Harlan Wilson
  How Does Your Garden Grow?-Geneve Flynn
  The Scoocoom of Big Rock Mountain-Michael Knost
  Madre Tempesta-John Palisano
  Clawing Through Mud as More Leaves Silt Down, as Plastic Bags, as Cast-Off Bottles-Romie Stott
  My Father’s Ashes-Philip Fracassi
  Savages Anonymous-Alicia Hilton
  Fracking-lution-Linda D. Addison
  
  Poetic form introducing us to an alien/witch hybrid. Monsters of love and light. Monsters that hunger and feed on emotions. Little ghost children. Human transformations into creatures of the unknown. Vampires and werewolves that have a surprising food source. Evolution stepping towards the stars. Druids and ancient beasts.
  
  The calling of an ancestral life.
  “By the Orishas, we are stubborn! There are other moments of the ancestors to be experienced. Birth. Lovemaking. Growth. The kiss of the wind, a caress of spring. Truth is in the living, not in the dead.”
  
  Sloths luring the curious into its rainforest, watching and waiting. Backpacking amongst beasts of legend. A vindictive clone and a story of obsession, passion and revenge. Entertaining the
  consciousness and machines. A progeny of origami with a selfish mother. An ancient, monstrous beast that hungers for children. A mothers hidden secret and the power that lies within. Vampire/human hybrid, hunted and rebirthed. Extraterrestrials and the fight against the injustices of humanity. The dishonoring of mother earth and the monstrosities blooming into life.
  
  The unique writing style and creations within evoke emotions from the depths of the mind. It wraps around like a shadow reaching out, clawing, grabbing, and then letting go for only a moment. Pondering each story, reveling in its dark beauty in words, the hybrids are imaginative creatures, discomforting and yet there is love and light that shines from the darkness. A labor of love for the unnatural, unusual and the monsters that lurk around corners.
  
  "Hybrid creatures are the result of our far-flung imaginations and our
  deepest fears."-James Aquilone
  
  Coming
  JUNE 21st –
  The Summer Equinox!
• 
  JM Cozzoli

  My review for Hybrid: Misfits, Monsters and Other Phenomena first appeared in The Horror Zine (
  https://www.thehorrorzine.com/). It is reposted here with permission.
  
  
  Editors Donald Armfield and Maxwell I. Gold have taken their book, Hybrid: Misfits, Monsters and Other Phenomena, very much to heart in selecting the poems and stories within (a hybrid format in itself), to include bizarro, noir sci fi, sword and sorcery, and speculative fictions for a reading that has something for just about anyone. These tales will either provide you with a straightforward reading or something to puzzle over, leading your thoughts to deeper meanings. Or maybe no meanings at all, just some go-with-it and enjoy moments. A good collection of mixed authors should always make you want to seek out their other works and this book will certainly have you doing that. It should be noted too that the cover design and illustration by Luke Spooner (we often overlook the graphic designers when doing reviews, don’t we?) is quite good.
  
  The first story, Making Friends, is a comedy of errors involving a happy dog, a curious but unhappy creature, and a couple of farmers meeting the neighbors they never knew they had. Angela Yuriko Smith paces it all into a 1950s sitcom-like nocturnal interlude for Miriam and Bill. It is a good choice as the opening story, breezy and light, and visually funny: there be monsters here, but they are not all gloom and doom and gory pieces.
  
  That is, except for what happens to the villagers in the Ruination of the Gods by Dr. Chris McAuley (Stokerverse) and Claudia Christian (Babylon 5 and Wolf’s Empire: Gladiator). A wizard tries to raise the dead but gets caught. As all diligent readers know by now, what happens to people who get on the wrong side of wizards, caught in the act of doing questionable things, means terror to come. Kail, the Conan-like warrior (or Kali, since the proofreader must have been out to lunch with this one), ignores the giant stew-pot death waiting for him for doing the same punishable act and gets into trouble quickly. Luckily for him the monsters from the sea provide a bloody good diversion for the villagers. While this story uses the standard sword and sorcery approach (an angry wizard, a beguiling witch, and a warrior torn between duty and personal need), McAuley and Christian handle the action, the gory pieces, and the tragic fallout of his decision well, leaving the path open for future adventures.
  
  If you lean towards a 3 Stooges-like bizarro storyline, go to Hopital Automatique by D. Harlan Wilson first. It defies description, as any good bizarro fiction should, but if you have watched the 3 Stooges in the comedy short, Men in Black (1934), that provides a bit of a warm-up to the absurd mayhem wrought here. It is an I-don’t-know-what-is-happening narrative and therein lies the fun. The pace is frenetic, the characters and milieu insane, and this opening line will sum it all up for you: “The car didn’t run over the nurse until she had changed my bedpan and injected a second dose. It was a Datsun.” I question how a Datsun got into his hospital room in the first place, but at least it was not an elephant*, and that second dose sounds like a clue. On the plus side, she did manage to change his bedpan before being run down. The only other meagre clue I can give you for this one, without giving up and speaking to Wilson first, is that Hopital is the French word for hospital. For the rest, you are on your own.
  
  More sensible humor will be found in Alicia Hilton’s Savages Anonymous. A funeral home basement in Trenton, New Jersey, provides haven for a nude extraterrestrial with two heads, an extraterrestrial arachnid and other assorted aliens—along with some mutants—griping about the challenges of getting along with humans. A boy’s ghost interrupts their proceedings, sending Xapanna (the two-headed alien) on a vendetta for the boy’s murderers. The Crime Stoppers Tip line sends her in the right direction. The action and humor are conveyed through very short paragraphs, many one to two lines long, and an endearing ending that ties back to the difficulty of getting along with way-out others.
  
  The Scoocoom of Big Rock Mountain is a more serious weird western with a more traditional approach to hybrid terror. Taking place sometime between the 1860s to early 1900s, a former buffalo hunter, Max, now sheriff, has family and Big Foot problems (skookoom is a Chinook word meaning Big Foot). Max, having helped to decimate the Indian tribes by hunting the buffalo to near extinction, is partially responsible for the scoocoom putting the bite on the settlers for its food source. Max also has a drinking problem that makes his aim a bit tricky and his step a lot unsure. Once you get past the proofreader still out to lunch (scoocoom flips to skoocoom a few times), Michael Knost delivers a simply plotted western with all the right emotional and weird elements for his characters and events.
  
  The Big Foot theme is seen again in Maero by Lee Murray, a poem where a day packer is enjoying his hike until he comes across a severed limb and “glossy giblets quivering.” This first-person account with the Maero (Māori for Big Foot) is not the usual “train-train” encounter. A sadder one is to be felt in Kolkata’s Little Girl, in which Bandhura is “waiting, in front of a blue-clothes shop for someone to tell her story.” A too long and heavy mala hangs around her neck, hinting at a deeper meaning hidden among the poem’s lines. Alessandro Manzetti’s acheri is haunting and begs for a longer treatment.
  
  There are many hybrids to be found in this collection of twenty stories and poems. The editors have crafted an engaging reading experience across genre types, of which this review has only scratched the surface. As Dark the Night will trap you in Stella’s depression-fueled shadows; the noir science-fiction Vis-à-Vis puts you there in Punktown among the low-lives and no-lives; and Slo-Mo will make you mind the sloths and give them a wide berth and forget the selfies. All these stories make for an enjoyable and rewarding experience.
  
  *For those not familiar with the Marx Brothers, the reference comes from Groucho’s quip as Captain Spalding: “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got to my pajamas I don’t know.”  Feel free to also substitute proofreader for elephant if you are so inclined.
• 
  Rex Hurst

  The theme of this collection is Hybrids, that is the creatures made up from many parts. Just take a look at any monster from Greek Mythology to get a basic understanding – Not that these tales focus solely on creations on that part of the world. As it states in the introduction, all modern horror delves from the idea of the hybrid monster – from the Werewolf, Frankenstein’s Monster, or even the killer rabbits from Night of the Lepus – all are the result of a creature created from scattered parts.
  
  This anthology boasts twenty-two short stories and poems. Each unique, each different in their interpretation of the chosen theme. They are an amazing collection of work, dark and dangerous in one tale, light and humorous in another, ponderous and thought provoking in a further. There is something for everyone in this incredible volume. Highly recommended for all lovers of horror.
  
• 
  Renee G

  I'm pretty generous with my ratings - if a book entertains me, I will overlook all kinds of errors and flaws, and I rarely am too critical, even of indie books, but this one was rough. The writing is consistently just plain bad - I started just plowing through it to get to the end and stop the pain. Sentence fragments, incorrect word usage, and writers working too hard to try to create images. I can't even say if any of the stories or poems have interesting or unique ideas because the writing detracted too much. I really can't recommend this collection to anyone.
  
  I received an ARC through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program