Monstrous Affections edited by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant. Small Beer Press. 2014.
Fifteen acclaimed authors, most of them of Young Adult fiction, contribute stories of love and monsters. Like all anthologies, the quality of the stories ranges wildly. A couple are exceptional. A few are pretty good diversions, but most didn't really do it for me. There is a quality to the writing, but almost all of the stories lacked any real bite to them. The monsters wherever truly monstrous and typically didn't veer too far out of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer comfort mold of vampires and very human behaving demons. The stories leaned a bit more towards the Twilight kind of monstrous love and not the Guillermo del Toro type of monstrous love. Maybe it's the YA background of many of the writers but this book is probably better for your twelve-year-old niece than for an adult looking for some darker tales. Link (whose story is the best of the lot) and Grant have edited some incredible anthologies of genre fiction, which I actively encourage you to seek out.
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