This review first appeared on scifiandscary.com. I received a free copy of the book in return for an honest review.

‘Garden of Eldritch Delights’ is packed with stories that are nearly great. It contains more of a mix than I was expecting. Horror is definitely at the forefront, but science fiction and fantasy are also represented here, with mixed results.
I think that in many ways short stories are more difficult for a writer to pull off than novels. The requirement to establish characters, convey ideas and weave a compelling story around it all in a limited number of pages presents challenges and constraints that writers of longer form fiction don’t have to worry about. Balancing those three elements is the key to a great short story, and in too many of these tales Snyder only manages one or two out of three. That’s a real shame, as there are flashes of brilliance here.

My favourites of the collection were the first two stories. ‘That Which Does Not Kill You’ is a weird, effective, horrific musing on love. It’s packed with great imagery and has a couple of moments that had my skin crawling. The second story, ‘Sunset on Mott Island’ is Lovecraftian and wonderfully creepy. What makes it brilliant is the weaving of emotion and modern sensibilities into the tale. It really does feel like eldritch horror for the 21st century.
It was with the third story that things started to slip. ‘Gentleman Caller’ has a great heroine in Janie, a disabled woman who works on a phone sex line. The story’s central concept is interesting too, but the execution in the last third of the story didn’t work for me at all. As with many of the other stories I ended up with a “so what” feeling at the end.

That’s not to say all of the other stories don’t work, they just don’t work as well. ‘Executive Functions’ is a creepy and often effective dissection of workplace misogyny with a nightmarishly fantastic twist. ‘Blossoms Blackened Like Dead Stars’ is a bite sized sci fi/horror epic about humanity’s last effort to defeat a terrible alien foe. It swept me along right up until the ending, which was interesting but felt rushed. ‘Dark of the Moon’ was similar, a cyberpunk heist romp that’s great fun until it falls apart at the end.
The other seven stories are various shades of “not as good as the above”. Most of them have either a good concept, or great characters, or a rousing story, but none of them achieve that elusive perfect blend of all three elements. So as a collection ‘Garden of Eldritch Delights’ is very much a mixed bag. It’s often enjoyable, is creepy and exciting at times and has a humanity woven into many of its stories that is really engaging. Too often though, the stories end up being unsatisfying. This is made even more of a shame by the fact that when Snyder is good, she’s very good indeed. ( )