Mental Health Initiative

Short-Story Review by Lee Murray “Through the Looking Glass and Straight into Hell” (a short story by Christa Carmen, published in In Orphans of Bliss: Tales of Addiction Horror, edited by Mark Matthews Plot Summary: In Christa Carmen’s weird science through-the-looking-glass tale, a braided story juxtaposing two timelines, Allie/Alice is back at the detox centre for the 13th time and bunking with the irrepressible Judy, when she is offered a virtual reality simulation recovery, a programme which offers addicts a glimpse at their future without drugs. There is no doubt that the author knows this horror. In fact, Carmen has been refreshingly…

NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: “No Flesh over Our Bones” by Mariana Enríquez Reviewed by Belicia Rhea Short story in Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enríquez. Hoggarth, 2017. Trigger Warning: This review addresses eating disorders and mental health. Synopsis “No Flesh over Our Bones” by Mariana Enríquez follows a narrator obsessed with a human skull she finds in the street. She then isolates with it in her room, fantasizing about becoming a skeleton. “A week after giving up food, my body changes. If I raise my arms my ribs show through, although not much. I dream: someday, when I…

NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: “Know Your Code” by Ramsey Campbell Reviewed by Penny Jones. Short story published in Chiral Mad 3: An anthology of psychological horror, edited by Michael Bailey, published by Written Backwards. Trigger Warning: This article addresses mental health. Synopsis: A retired teacher encounters a down-on-his-luck former student at the cash dispenser, prompting him to change his security numbers in a tale of spiralling paranoia and memory loss. The horror you feel reading Ramsey Campbell’s story “Know Your Code” may be a quiet, creeping horror, but it is one that we all feel. In the story, as in our…

NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: We Have Always Lived in the Castle, novel by Shirley Jackson First published by Viking Press, 1962. Reviewed by Rosemary Thorne TRIGGER WARNING: This review addresses mental health. Synopsis: Taking readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate. My beloved Shirley Jackson passed away when she was 48 years old. It means I am currently six years her senior, which shocks me weirdly as an…

NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reviewed by Brooklyn Ann Butler. New England Magazine, National Library of Medicine, and now public domain. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/theliteratureofprescription/exhibitionAssets/digitalDocs/The-Yellow-Wall-Paper.pdf Trigger Warning: This review addresses mental health. Synopsis: A woman with postpartum depression is diagnosed with hysteria by her physician husband. He takes her to a house in the country and locks her in the attic as part of “the rest cure" a popular, traumatic treatment for women in the late 19th and early 20th century. Having no other stimulus, the author tries to “read” the wallpaper in the room and spirals into…

NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: EV Knight’s “The Flannigan Cure” from American Cannibal Reviewed by L. E. Daniels Disclaimer: An author and editor, I am not a mental health professional. Trigger warning: Addiction, grief, loss, animal death. Just before the COVID-19 pandemic, alcohol-related cirrhosis claimed a member of my family in Australia. Johnny was so deep in the trenches in his final years, that when he stopped drinking, he experienced seizures, so he didn’t stop anymore. No conversations or bargaining or pleading altered the pattern bleeding the life from him and the slow, torturous death by cirrhosis was something I never wanted…

NOTABLE WORKS  REVIEW: “Dream’s End” by Henry Kuttner and Catherine Moore Reviewed by Kyla Lee Ward Short story first published in Startling Stories magazine, July 1947. Variously anthologised. Story link: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/68170/pg68170-images.html TRIGGER WARNING: This review addresses mental health.  In this collaboration by two of the 1940’s most notable weird writers, Dr Robert Bruno is connected by wires to his patient and sedated, offering himself as an “empathy surrogate” in an experimental treatment for psychiatric disorders (in this case, severe, clinical manic depression) that have not responded to other therapies. He awakens to accolades, his patient already showing signs of improvement…

NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: The Grief Hole by Kaaron Warren Reviewed bv E.F. Schraeder Trigger Warning: This review addresses grief and trauma. A universal of all life, death touches everyone sooner or later. With inevitable losses follow forms of grief and depression that can range from manageable to complicated, and in Kaaron Warren’s The Grief Hole we find a mesmerizing supernatural lens to consider how loss, even the deepest pain, connects us all. In The Grief Hole readers meet Theresa, a woman who has an unusual gift for seeing people’s clinging ghosts, each hinting at how they will die. This ability…

NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: Shards: A Mental Health Charity Anthology edited by Kara Hawkers and Emery Blake, RavensQuoth Press 2024. Reviewed by Stevie Morley Trigger Warning: This review addresses mental health. Edited by Kara Hawkers and Emery Blake with poetry by Dale Parnell, Marie C Lecrivain, Michele Mikel, Alison Bainbridge, Catherine A. Mackenzie, Rebecca Kolodziej, Lisa Reynolds, Shikhandin, Jose Ángel Conde, Jodi Jensen, Engelbert Egill Stefánsson, B.A. O’Connell, Nerisha Kemraj, Francis H. Powell, Courtney Glover, Maggie D. Brace, Christine Fowler, Henry Corrigan, Pauline Yates, Gabriella Balcom, Sharmon Gazaway, Dawn Debraal, Brianna Malotke, Renee Cronley, Max Bindi, Kay Hanifen, Norbert Góra, Gerald…

NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: “I’ll Be Gone By Then” by Eric LaRocca  Iin The Strange Thing We Become and Other Dark Tales, published by Off Limits Press; also reprinted in The Trees Grew Because I Bled There: Collected Stories, published by Titan Books Reviewed by Geneve Flynn Trigger Warning: This review addresses mental health. After leaving behind her home and identity to seek a new life in America, a woman is plunged back into a difficult relationship when her aging, ailing mother arrives from Italy and she must become her carer. As the failed Miss Vecoli settles her mother into her…

NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: “Survival Ritual” by John Edward Lawson In SuiPsalms, Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2012 Reviewed by E.F. Schraeder Trigger Warning: This review addresses mental health and grief.   At the midsection and heart of John Edward Lawson’s provocative poetry collection SuiPsalms, readers find a potent two-page poem called “Survival Ritual.” With a striking concise narrative repetition of the anchoring end of stanza lines, “This is life, and you survive / You survive” the poem constructs a poignant portrait of the insidious and incapacitating nature of grief and yes how to survive it. Lawson moves readers through experiences and…

NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: Welcome to the Black Parade Song/Poem by My Chemical Romance (musical group) Reviewed by Kevin Kennel Trigger Warning: This review addresses mental illness and trauma.  “Welcome to the Black Parade” is about death, memory, and transcendence as one grieves his life in a hospital. It’s about a character known as “The Patient” who is dying and, as he does, remembers his most precious memory of his father and how his father asked him to defeat his demons. As The Patient descends into the afterlife, shadowy figures of “The Black Parade” come for him. The Patient is a…