The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own

This slim but harrowing collection from Kiste (The Haunting of Velkwood) packs a punch, much like most of its heroines. Looking deep into the eyes of difficult, often literally monstrous women is Kiste’s specialty. Sometimes the faces are familiar, as in the Bram Stoker Award–winning “The Eight People Who Murdered Me,” written as an entry from the diary of Lucy Westenra as she transforms into a vampire after meeting Dracula, and “Lost in Darkness and Distance,” in which an undead Marie Antoinette (with severed head in tow) meets Mary Shelley as she’s in the process of writing Frankenstein. Other protagonists are entirely original, like the clerk of “The Last Video Store on the Left,” who hides a dark past among her dusty VHS tapes until a beautiful reporter asks the right questions; the eponymous heroine of “The Sea Witch of the World’s Fair,” lurking in plain sight in the Salvador Dalí exhibition; and the mysterious, visionary filmmaker at the center of standout entry “The Eleven Films of Oona Cashford,” whose obscure horror classics sometimes make their audiences disappear. Kiste lends each story the deeply unsettling quality of an apparition half-glimpsed in a dark mirror. The result is a visceral celebration of women’s wrongs. (Apr.)