
When Other People Saw Us, They Saw the Dead is a collection of gothic stories by BIPOC writers, exploring ghosts, witches, death, curses, and dreams amongst other things. As the title might suggest, a lot of the stories deal with death in some way, from ghosts and memories to legacies and escape. Some of the stories explore colonisation and gentrification, self and belonging, and all the while there’s a sense of considering who gets to tell gothic stories.
Some of my personal favourites were: ‘The Mountain Air’, a strange tale of a trip to a cabin that gets weird; ‘We Have Always Lived in the Projects’, an unsettling look at gentrification (with a fantastic title); the very real horror of ‘Headmaster’; and ‘The Candlemaker’s Daughter’, which tells a familiar story in a different way. I enjoyed that the stories varied in length but were generally on the shorter side, meaning there was lots of variation and they were generally tight and concise. It’s a great collection for diving into atmospheric stories and exploring a range of modern gothic set across various places and time periods.
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