The rules of horror are supposed to be simple: don’t go into the basement, don’t split up, don’t make a deal with the devil—or go into business with the infernal, period. That’s easier said than done in Leah Abrams’s “Real Human Bones for Sale,” when the job market is shitty and a Rick Owens-wearing “collector” offers a one-way ticket to easy street. And as Daisuke Shen explains in “The Executioner,” what else to do, when your lover’s doppelganger comes to the door, but make him dinner? The siren call of a cult proves too compelling to resist in an excerpt from Grace Byron’s new novel Herculine. Things being what they are, we get it. Live deliciously.
