When Your Heart is a Broken Thing
- karenlykkebo
- 1 minute ago
- 2 min read
When Your Heart is a Broken Thing
by Helen Whistberry
Find Helen's books and art here: Linktree
A collection of horror, dark fantasy, and sci-fi short stories told like the grimm fairytales of old.
Horror is a diverse genre and this short story collection showcases that brilliantly. With 19 stories all of various subgenres of spec-fic (gothic and dark fantasy, fairytale and folklore retellings, dystopian sci-fi), they all have elements of horror from slow, looming vibes to ominous endings.
I really enjoyed the fairytale and folklore section (I'm a sucker for folklore so not really surprised) and what Helen really excels at is catching the vibe of old-timey fairytales. It felt like reading original Grimm and HC Andersen with new dark twist. They're ominous, creatures are tricksters, and somewhere there's some obscure moral we don't want to think too much about. I really like Helen's ability to bring sentience to everything and smoothly break the fourth wall in her stories. I don't think we see that often in modern stories anymore. Again a quality that brought me back to sitting in front of the fireplace while my grandma would read aloud from her book of fairytales (the very non-disney kind).
My favorite stories were Cinderella from the perspective of her faithful mice and the surprisingly haunting origin story of the song "Cotton-Eyed Joe". Of the sci-fi section, "Howl" absolutely gave me goosebumps, and "Eyes, Shining in the Night" at the beginning of the collection was a brilliant paranormal story!
The collection has an overall sensation of nostalgia and grief. Like a reminiscent of things lost and changing times. It comes in regrettable decisions, longings of what was, and the bitter acceptance that we can't go back and change the past even with all of our good intentions. Helen's writing is descriptive and alive and weaves in the fantastical and the real seamlessly.
With 19 stories (reading time between 5 and 45 min) there's a little bit for everyone and it makes for an enjoyable palette cleanser between novels. It contains original artwork in between each story so if you're generally a paperback reader, I'd definitely get the physical copy of this.
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