Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing the book in exchange for an honest review.

This book is a lot of fun! I'm a huge classic horror fan (Universal and Hammer) and I really enjoyed reading these reinterpretations of some fan favorite classic monsters. Each story is well paced and a good length, so you're always moving on to something new. I would love to see some of these fleshed out into full length novels or even series. The potential is definitely there.

I was surprised to see this was a kickstarted project and hadn't been picked up by a major publisher. Clearly the editor is very passionate about bringing these stories to the audience that helped make it a reality. It would be great to see this with an official endorsement from Universal and other studios who own these properties, just to reach a wider audience if nothing else.

If you are a fan of the classics, definitely check out this collection of reimaginings and mini "sequels".

Really enjoyed this anthology. Many great stories, but many great authors. It would be hard to pick a favorite. #ClassicMonstersUnleashed #NetGalley

Classic Monster Unleashed is a horror anthology that takes the stories of classic monsters and reimagines them and turns them on their head while also paying homage to them. I loved this collection overall though I didn't want some of the stories to be longer but all of them had stratifying endings. Some of these stories make the monsters not all that monstrous but others take them to another level. Most of these takes were not one's I was expecting which I loved and I loved how many of the authors gave voice to characters that didn't have much agency in the original stories. I received an early copy though Netgalley but I plan of buying a physical copy as well.

This book is a new area for me. I never read any Horror books before. I rarely watch any Horror movie but still i wanted to read this book mainly because i am a Fantasy reader and i like classic fairytale like stories.

I really enjoyed reading this book. Since the stories inside this book are anthologies, of-course some stories were more enjoyable than others. The main reason could be i am a character based reader and Anthologies can't explore deep characters like a full novel does. I liked many illustrations throughout the book and they gave me an immersive reading feel. Of-course since its a horror book, i have to read it at night with all lights off.

In general, i really enjoyed this book and others can also enjoy this if they are not deeply analysing this book and if they are up for the ride rather than the philosophy and characters.

When @blackspotbooks reached out to me with the opportunity to read this book, I was hesitant at first.

The main reason being, if you know me at all, you'll know I'm a massive wimp, and I'm terrified of anything even remotely creepy.

However, I was really intrigued and decided to give it a go, and I regret nothing!

As with any anthology, there were some stories that stood out more than others to me, but overall, the quality of each story was really high.

I loved all the new interpretations of the monsters that even non horror fans like me know about. It was really interesting to see things from different points of view from what we're used to.

A few particular favourites of mine were:
The Picture of Dorianna Gray,
Hacking the Horseman's Code,
They Call Me Mother, and
Beautiful Monster.

This was a wonderful collection that even non horror fans can enjoy too.

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

I love the old classic horror stories, Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Headless Horseman, the Invisible Man, I loved them all.
So this Anthology was an easy choice for me, but as with a lot of anthology's, this was a mixed bag, some of the stories I loved, like Höllenlegion by Jonathan Maberry – This story is a sequel to H. G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau, and
The Viscount and the Phantom by Lucy A. Snyder – A phantom of the Opera sequel.
While others like The Invisible Man: The Fire This Time by Maurice Broaddus, and The Picture of Doriana Gray by Mercedes M Yardley felt like they drifted too far from the feel of the original stories.
Overall, there is a lot to love about these stories, there are some sequel and spinoff stories, and some reimagined, with a variety of writing styles it means there is something for everyone.
I’d recommend this book to anyone who loves the classics or there modern counterparts.

*Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with a copy of the book in exchange for a honest review.*

Not too much surprising here; fewer vampires than would have been present a decade ago, more werewolves and Frankenstein’s monsters. Seanan McGuire contributes a mad scientist rant; also features Joe R. Lansdale, Jonathan Maberry, F. Paul Wilson, Ramsey Campbell, and others.

Like most anthologies, I liked some of the stories, some underwhelmed, and most were decent. While I enjoyed the theme of the anthology, nothing really blew me away. I did really enjoy the various illustrations though

A really solid anthology of horror fiction, bringing together newer authors alongside some classic ones. Some are pulpy fun while others push into a more character-driver literary territory. This is a great title to hand to someone wanting to explore new authors or get exposure to a variety in the genre.

Stories of famous monsters in a new horror anthology. Brilliant writing and more importantly, riveting reading.

5/5

I really loved this collection. Like, REALLY loved this collection. If you like horror, especially if you like classic horror (either movies or literature), this is definitely for you. Every story does something unique or interesting with the source material. The stories also benefit from the diversity of their authors; I especially appreciated the queer elements. I really love adaptations because I like to see what elements authors tease out or change or interpret, and all the authors did just a fantastic job.

That said, an encyclopedic knowledge of the source material isn't needed to enjoy the collection. For some, all I had was passing knowledge picked up through cultural osmosis. For example, I have never seen "The Blob" (I know, I know) yet "Da Noise, Da Funk, Da Blob" was one of my favorites. It makes me want to watch the movie at some point and then re-read the story, to see the choices made.

Of course, in some instances, I do wish I had been familiar with the source material first. For example, "The Invisible Man: The Fire This Time." I only have a passing knowledge of "The Invisible Man" and next to none about "The Fire Next Time" (both now on my to-read list). I still really loved the story, but I feel I couldn't appreciate it fully. That's not a knock against it, of course; it's given me some new things to read and return to it, and I am very excited to do so.

I cannot overstate how hard this collection goes. Every story absolutely oozed with love. I know what I am getting my mother for Christmas (no one tell her).

I enjoyed the majority of the tales,

There is a variety of types of stories in the collection; while many are directly based on or sequels to the classic tales, there are several re-imagined versions as well as some loosely inspired by stories. While I do think too many authors took the easy way out basing their stories on Dracula, Frankenstein and The Wolfman, there were a number of more adventurous takes on less popular/obvious fare like the Mummy, Jack the Ripper, the Phantom of the Opera and even the Wizard of Oz.

My two favorites were among the more audacious of the group: Höllenlegion by Jonathan Maberry is a sequel to H. G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau, my favorite story by Wells, and this sequel was so excellent I would gladly have read a full novella of the story

Overall I had a fun time

Okay so as a lover of classic monster stories I jumped at the chance to read this and review it. There are some mega names attached to this anthology and while that makes it a great read, it was the little known authors that really stole the show for me. My only issue with this is that I didn’t always get sucked into some of the stories from the get go. With that said I do believe that this will be an enjoyable read for most lovers of the good old fashioned monsters we have grown to love and in some cases hate.

Review is for an ARC copy from NetGalley -- 2.5 stars, rounded down.

Super brief summary: An anthology collection of 30 short stories tied together by classic monsters.

Snack pairing: Classic drive-in movie nachos, extra napkins.

Pros:
•The few stories I liked were real gems. The ones that stuck out are "Mummy Calls," "The Picture of Doriana Gray," "Moonlight Serenade," and "Modern Monsters."
•If you love Dracula or Frankenstein, you're in for a treat (not a pro for me, but potential pros for others).

Cons:
•I didn't feel like the stories tied together very well. Sure, they all had something to do with classic monsters, but the tone, time period, themes, writing style, vibes were all so incredibly different. This might have worked if they were presented in an order that embraced that diversity, but the order had no introduction and seemed to be nonsensical.
•By not including introductions to the monsters, the audience has been narrowed down to only those very familiar with the intricacies of classic monster stories rather than horror fans as a whole. There were references I knew I wasn't getting even though I'm generally familiar with most of the monsters. This is targeted to that small niche of fans.

Overall, I would not recommend this to anyone that isn't a die hard classic monster fan.

As I have said before on more than one occasion, I am wary of anthologies - I worry about changes in quality and tonal whiplash between stories in themed multi-author collections. But this is one of the better ones I have sampled lately. A new-to-me story by Seanan McGuire is always a treat. Give this one a try! Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to NetGalley and Black Spot Books for allowing me this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

When I saw this book, I knew I had to read it. I've always loved horror stories and I already knew some of the authors, because I read some of their books for my MA Thesis about Dracula. I knew I liked their writing style. Despite this, I'm surprised by how much I enjoyed reading this. Anthologies and short story collections tend to leave me with mixed feelings; I will love one story and dislike the other.

This anthology was different. Each story really managed to pull me in and I had a great time reading this. It contains a good variation of stories. Some popular monsters feature more than once in the book, such as Frankenstein's Monster and (my personal favourite) Dracula, but there was still enough variation to keep things interesting. You can clearly see the authors know how to write a good story and I will need to read more by them in the future.

I don't want to spoil the stories for anyone, so I won't go into more detail, but I will say that I highly recommend this to anyone who likes horror stories. I think this would also make a nice present, not only because the stories are so good, but also because the book has some stunning illustrations.

A solid collection of short stories inspired by classic Monsters. The blurb is what initially made me pick this read, the cover was a plus. Overall, I enjoyed most of the stories included in this anthology, although a few I was unable to get into. The stories are eerily creepy and I felt were well written. I was pleasantly surprised by the variety of monsters featured throughout. Overall I highly recommend this to any horror lover.

Overall this is a solid anthology. I enjoyed most of the stories but there were a few that were not my taste. Recommend for any horror reader.

There are a lot of stories in this one, however not many of them were intriguing enough to keep me entertained. Overall I give this a 2.5 star rating

As with all anthologies, this was a mixed bag. There were two stories I truly loved, several good ones, a couple of mid-level tales, some disappointments, and a couple I disliked so much I didn't even finish them -- I mean, there are THIRTY FRICKIN' STORIES in here (or rather, 29; more on that later), so my let's-skip-this threshold was pretty low. There were also a number of illustrations, but to be honest, I didn't really see the point in these; IMO they ranged from tacky to kitschy to not all that great, and I felt that the book could have done without them, but then I feel more or less this way about all illustration that's not done by Edward Gorey, so this might simply be a case of pearls before swine.

It's probably no surprise that with a themed anthology, some of the stories cover the same ground; nevertheless, I thought there was way too much Frankenstein going around (I counted five Frankies). Also lots and lots of Dracula (six), but I felt that the authors did a bit more with that old chestnut than they did with The Monster. Okay, we got a Girl Monster, or rather plenty of Girl Monsters, and there was quite a lot of Commentary with a capital C (although in all fairness, this was by no means limited to the big reanimated one; Maurice Broaddus's "The Invisible Man" was one of the stories I felt life was too short for, with all its heavy-handed earnestness), but to me the whole Frankenstein angle got very old very quickly. (Also, no-one thought of having Frankenstein and the Count meet? I'm sad.) Thankfully, most of the other authors were a bit more imaginative in their choices, so you're not completely stuck with the usual suspects.
I think I'll start with the good stuff; the one story I liked best was hands-down "Hacking the Horseman's Code", by Lisa Morton. This was well-written and highly original as well as genuinely spooky, although I thought the ending would have been better with a bit more carnage (think Terminator or the original Westworld movie) than touchy-feeliness, and I'm not exactly a lover of carnage. I just thought the ending was a little mild.
I also loved Ramsey Campbell's "Someone to Blame" -- how could I not! Although of course *strictly* speaking we're not really in Classic Monster territory here, as (I think) that *other* count has not crossed into collective pop culture memory yet and doubtlessly never will. (As a huge James fan, I also felt quite clever when my early hunch panned out.)

Other high points to me were "Mummy Calls" by Simon Bestwick, because it was funny as well as nasty as hell, and Lucy Snyder's turn-it-on-its-head POTO reinterpretation "The Viscount and the Phantom". Here were two writers who obviously were having fun with their stories, and it shows.
"Rapt" by Rena Mason was a great story hindered by sub-par writing and structure; do we really need the same scene from two different angles? Right on top of one another? Time and time again? But the *idea* was very cool, scary and highly original. A bit of ruthless editing, and this would have really sung.
"Blood Hunt" by Owl Goingback was nice, but suffered from a pretty milquetoast ending; I felt that a lot more could have been done with this story. I mean we're already bringing vampires into the Wild West, so why not go all alternate history and really play with the facts? We have Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill mourning the loss of the old ways, feeling like relics from a time gone by, so why in the world not turn them into vampires as well and set them loose on American Progress and its horrors?

"God of the Razor" would have made my list as well, even though I'm not into the nasty kind of horror, but there were some lapses in logic (why would you check out a long abandoned building after dark when you're looking for antiques to salvage? I mean, you have the key, everything's above-board, so why not go there during the day when you can actually SEE something?) and I'm also not a huge fan of Lansdale's style of writing; stuff like the weirdly specific "It was as if someone with ice-cold water in their kidneys had taken a piss down the back of his coat collar" takes me right out of the story, because first I have to laugh at the over-the-top dumbness of the simile and then I have to work out why/how someone would have ice-cold fluids in their kidneys, and whether that was even technically possible or if that person would die on the spot, and how in the world that would even feel like -- would that pee still be icy, having passed through tubes and ducts down to the bladder and then, presumably, down THE BACK OF HIS COAT COLLAR (so not the shirt? So it would be, like, between the coat fabric and the shirt fabric? Why wouldn't it trickle down his neck instead, soaking his shirt or sweater rather than the coat worn over it? Wouldn't you need some fantastically good aim to hit that exact back-of-the-coat-collar spot?), or would said pee be lukewarm by then? Maybe even of body temperature? So yeah, that one was a tad distracting. And just when you get back on track story-wise, here it comes again, a couple of pages later: "Richards had that sensation like ice-cold piss down his collar again". So now my brain goes, Down his collar? So now that piss, having bypassed the kidneys altogether and staying gloriously cold, is actually soaking his back? So no kidneys, and no coat either?
I found this needlessly (and endlessly) distracting, and when it wasn't distracting, "God of the Razor" liked to play icky, but if Lansdale had played up the atmosphere while dialing down the ick, this would have been a fantastic story. Of course, then it wouldn't have been a Lansdale story anymore, but oh well.

A handful of stories lived in that no-man's-land of okayness; not bad by any means, but also not all that memorable. And then there were the ones that actively ticked me off.
First off, I would like to say that IMO it's not the very best idea to start off a horror anthology with a poem, especially if it's such a limp little "experimental"/"clever" thing like Alessandro Manzetti's "Inferno". Skim-read that one. Still pretty bad. ("A thousand thin devils belched from their black hole/like geysers of madness, screaming cold." Oh yeah?) I don't know what that was, some attempt at originality? A favor to the author? No idea.
Next off, we get some Dr. Moreau from Jonathan Maberry, who had to irk me with one of my pet peeves, Dumb Nazi German. I really don't get this; if you absolutely HAVE TO include non-English dialogue, would it be so hard to find a native speaker to look it over? Here, amongst lots of "oberleutnants" (which have to be capitalized) and Herr this and Baronin that, we get that deathless line "Gott in Himmel", which first of all is grammatically incorrect (it has to read "im"; dative, people, dative!), and 2. in all my years on this earthly plane, I've never heard this phrase uttered by anyone who did not live inside a histrionic WWII movie. The story itself is okay, but nothing to write home about, neither plot-wise nor stylistically.

A couple of stories on, I run into another pet peeve, the Badly Written Woman By Male Author; in this case it's F. Paul Wilson, who thankfully (and needlessly) lets us in on what he thinks being a lady with lady bits feels like: "Such a relief to be [...] back in my own body -- young, lithe, smaller, smoother, with slim legs, dainty fingers , and firm, compact breasts." Ah yes, always the breasts... it must be hard to imagine that owning a pair of those is no different to having a nose, or feet -- they're simply THERE, no need to reference them.
That whole story is quite breast-centric, actually, as another character is getting some other girl's bare boobies shoved at him for no particular reason. I'm inclined to think of Mr Wilson as a breast guy, which is, you know, totally fine and all, but if you're writing from a female perspective... well. Also, I don't know if this is Mr Wilson's attempt at wokeness or the actual way he sees men and women and that whole power imbalance business, but this is what he thinks women think of living in a men's world: "I never realized until this instant how fear has influenced my day-to-day dealings with men. [...] Somewhere in the depths of my mind [...] has been the realization that almost any man could physically overpower me at will. Although I never before recognized its existence, I see now how it has colored my waking life."
So is this Mr Wilson's view of women ("Hey little lady, I could overpower you at will if I felt like it, because I'm a Man")? Or does he seriously believe that women (all women) feel helpless all of the time (all the time) because walking amongst men (even the runty ones!) is like entering a circus ring of bored, underfed lions? I mean, I realize this is just a stupid little story, but the way this is phrased and the way it's inserted into this really quite underwhelming Woman's Revenge narrative gave me thought. I don't like the idea of the Helpless Little Every-Woman being dependant on the decency and mood of the Big Bad Male. I think it's sexist (for both sexes), and also it isn't true.
All that, combined with some seriously clunky prose fresh from You Too Can Write -- Teen Edition ("I'll just lie back and rest my eyes for a moment... Oh, no! The dream again!") made this one of my less loved entries.

Same goes for "Make the Blood Go Where it Wants", another offering by Mr. Manzetti (he of the Bad Poetry fame), which handles infatuation between two young women in a way that felt less than feminine, as when Mercy looks at the "shapely body" of the girl on the beach thinking, "I can't be Whitby's only lesbian, can I?"
The weird convoluted prose and the fact that this story felt absolutely interminable without being entertaining in the least or even just making a lot of sense (those ever-changig POVs!) meant that to me, this was one of the least impressive stories in this book. A chore, and one of my DNFs.
Maybe it's only fitting that the editor chose to follow this up with the most WTF?-ish tale of the bunch, Linda Addison's "Da Noise, Da Funk, Da Blob", whose title pretty much sums the whole thing up quite nicely in a WYSIWYG way. Another DNF.

Terrible, terrible writing made me skim through "Mai Doon Izahn" by Gary Braunbeck (really, how did this make the cut? I dare anyone to expose themselves to this prose and live); "The Invisible Man: The Fire This Time" by Maurice Broaddus (who gets the award for Most Pretentious Story Title) was too didactic for me; more awful prose from Michael Knost in "The Nightbird", another DNF; ditto interminable Found Document style epos "Enter, The Dragon" by Butts & Stoker.

All in all, though, this was a fun read. I would have liked a bit more range, maybe (less Frankenstein, less Dracula), and some of the stories could have done with a little tweaking. Then again, I'm sure there are plenty of readers out there who would appreciate multiple reinterpretations of their favorite monster(s) in the same volume, so this collection should definitely appeal to them.
I would like to thank Netgalley and Black Spot Books for the opportunity to read an advance copy of "Classic Monsters Unleashed" in exchange for an unbiased review.