A marvelous yet mystical fairytale approach was absolutely stunning to see. I really loved reading these and in the most abstract of ways, they made sense. Sometimes a book like this is so beautiful and refreshing, story after story.

Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart is an interesting and varied collection of short fiction by GennaRose Nethercott. Due out 6th Feb 2024 from Knopf Doubleday on their Vintage imprint, it's 272 pages and will be available in paperback, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links throughout.

The stories are varied and across a range of subjects. The author has a very abstract style of writing and most of these selections are more vignettes than actual character or action driven stories with a discernable plot. They are weighted toward the fantastic and horror(ish) side, and there is a fairytale vibe to most of them.

There are 14 stories in all, and they vary in length. One of the best features of anthologies and collections is that they're often full of new-to-me authors for further reading. Another bonus is that short fiction is spare and technically challenging, so you get a better feel for an author's expertise with the form. Short fiction is less of a time commitment as well, so if one story is not working for you, there's another piece readily available in a few pages.

The author is undeniably talented and there are glimmers of the sublime in some of the word pictures. On the other hand, it's *not* particularly narrative. Fans used to a more stream-of-consciousness style of storytelling will find a lot to like here. Although it's not at all derivative, some of the more stunning passages recall Cat Rambo, Bruce Taylor (Mr. Magical Realism), or Ray Bradbury's more fanciful imagery.

Four stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

DNF. I just can't get into Nethercott's stories. I had the same problem with Thistlefoot. Her writing and the stories themselves are by no means bad, they just don't hold my interest.

This is was exactly the kind of strange I was looking for. Some of the stories felt a bit meandering and didn’t pack the punch they were hoping to pack. I absolutely loved A Diviner’s Abecedarian! Such a great story.

Reading this book felt like sitting in a room filled with dry flower bouquets, on a rainy day, staring out the window at a cemetery. This short story collection told powerful stories about the different kinds of loss: whether that be grief, breakups, or a loss of self.

I liked how this book was able to balance weird, eerie, and emotional. Some of this was very light and fun while other stories made me feel a deep empathetic sadness. A stunning addition to this book was the drawings that went with the bestiary story. This is a short story collection I will happily recommend.

An Eclectic Collection of Hits and Misses

GennaRose Nethercott's "Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart" is a collection of dark fairytales and fractured folklore exploring all the ways love can save us—or go monstrously wrong. While I found some stories far more enjoyable than others, there were a few that failed to capture my interest, leading me to skip them altogether.

The strength of Nethercott's work lies in her ability to craft narratives that evoke powerful emotions. Certain stories within the collection struck a chord, weaving poignant and memorable tales that lingered in my thoughts long after reading. The author's lyrical prose and imaginative storytelling were evident in these standout pieces, making them the true gems of the collection.

However, the collection is not without its pitfalls. As with any anthology, personal preferences play a significant role, and there were stories that didn't align with my taste, prompting me to skip them altogether. The eclectic nature of the compilation means that readers may find themselves more drawn to specific themes or styles while remaining indifferent to others.

Standout stories for me included: Sundown at the Eternal Staircase, The Tread Boy, Drowning Lessons, A Lily is a Lily, and The Plums at the End of the World.

Despite the varied reception of the stories, Nethercott's talent as a storyteller is undeniable. While not every story may resonate with every reader, the diversity of the collection ensures that there's something for everyone, making "Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart" a worthwhile read for those who appreciate a mix of literary styles and narrative approaches.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.

(Actual 3.75⭐) I'm a lover for abstract stories, so while some may have found this book difficult or "pointless" to read, I did not. As with all short story collections, not every story featured here is a winner, but I definitely loved the writing for most of them— it was moody, atmospheric/gothic in style, and overall quite beautiful.

"It's true-you can't really be angry with someone without loving them first. Sort of the way that you can't cook a meal without heating the pan. You have to care to the point that the grease starts spitting up at you in pinpricks, and then, only then, can the anger start.”


Overall I felt like many of the short stories went over my head. The theme or overarching meaning of the story at times felt so buried within the imagery that I had a hard time seeing the bigger picture.

Of all the short stories I really enjoyed:
Sundown at the Eternal Staircase
The Thread Boy
Fox Jaw
Drowning Lessons

If you're a big lover of folktales, I can definitely see you being a big fan of this.

Thank you to Netgalley & Vintage for the ARC!

3.5 stars

First, I'm not usually a short story reader because I like to get a lot deeper into stories with more development so the short form doesn't work as well for me. I read this slowly, with a story here and there, usually one sitting per story. The author did a lot of different types of storytelling as far as formats and such, which I appreciated. Here are my brief thoughts on each story:

Sundown at the Eternal Staircase - neat concept; letdown in the telling

A Diviner's Abrecedarian - interesting storytelling format; too much mean girls

The Thread Boy - succinct, symbolic, good

Fox Jaw - completely unmemorable

The War of Fog - I think this one would have a lot to say if I spent more time unpacking it

Drowning Lessons - I was really enjoying this one but it just ended without any type of resolution

The Autumn Kill - really short and a bit gruesome, but I liked it; has a developed character

Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart - inventive; sometimes disturbing illustrations; enjoyed the story within the entries

A Lily Is a Lily - I liked this one; am I supposed to connect it to the Tristan and Isolde (of the White Hands) story?

Dear Henrietta - creepy in a mostly good way

Possessions - cynical or realistic? probably not good for someone who has recently lost a loved one

Homebody - extremely symbolic

A Haunted Calendar - amusing snippets

The Plums at the End of the World - disturbing ... too disturbing

Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart is a stellar collection of 13 stories (and one incredible bestiary–more on that later) from the spectacularly creative and brilliant mind of GennaRose Nethercott, who wrote the equally spectacular novel Thistlefoot.

I don’t think I’ve read a collection by a single author where I loved so many stories to the extent I loved the stories in this one. With one exception (Fox Jaw), I ate every story in this book up with a really sharp grapefruit spoon and then licked the bowl clean.

A quick summary of my thoughts on the remaining stories:

Sundown at the Eternal Staircase - Spectacularly eerie, fascinating, and great symbolism on how some people are just heading in different directions in life.

A Diviner’s Abecedarian - Tween girls can be mean as hell when not in possession of the sight. Give them the sight and that’s just horrifying.

The Thread Boy - Poignant, emotional, and magical story about a life well-lived even though there was pain.

The War of Fog - I read in a book coming out soon that war is a place, not a time. This story reminds me of that. War is endless and eternal and you’re stuck there.

Drowning Lessons - Cynical, sad, but neat story about what it’s like to be responsible for a sibling’s well-being.

The Autumn Kill - This one is angry, visceral, and vengeful. I loved the ending.

A Lily is a Lily - This one is hard to sum up in little words. Let’s just say it’s a haunting story about what can happen when we build people up in our minds so much they take up our entire existence.

Dear Henrietta - Provocative, creepy, and downright wicked. Dude, this one is good.

Possessions - Don’t mess around with sketchy witchcraft books you find at thrift stores. This one is hard to describe but it’s beautifully written.

Homebody - Awful to read, awful to describe, awful to think about. It’s sad and tense and made me want to punch something.

A Haunted Calendar - Funny, horrific, and imaginative.

The Plums at the End of the World - This was incredible. It’s heartbreaking, evocative, and all about how people fear anything different.

My last note is on the titular “story”, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart. It isn’t a story so much as a bestiary and it’s the crown jewel of this collection. Complete with eerie, creep-tastic sketches, each beast is named and described with short, incredible paragraphs. They’re utterly fantastic in every way. I couldn’t get enough of them. The bestiary is practically worth the price of admission.

This collection isn’t to be missed.

I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.

File Under: 5 Star Review/Anthology/Dark Fantasy/Fantasy/Fairy Tale/Folklore/Ghost Fiction/Horror/LGBTQ Friendly/Mythology/Paranormal Fiction/Supernatural Fiction

Thank you to Netgalley and Vintage Anchor for sending me a copy of Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart (and other stories).

I have always struggled with short story collections. I love some stories and hate others, or struggle with how the collection goes together as a whole. But this collection has changed my mind. It is unique and absolutely beautiful.

These stories are about love as much as they are about heartbreak. About identity, and giving it up for someone else. About distinguishing between the person in front of you, and the idealized person you built them up in your head to be. About the connections we make with others and how they stay with us long after they’re gone.

I liked this story collection, as someone who doesn’t like story collections, for a few reasons. The stories all felt like the right length. They were often short, giving you just enough of a taste where it didn’t drag on forever but also didn’t leave you wanting more. The author played with a handful of unique formats that made the reading experience feel fun and new. There were little twists of magic and fantasy and folklore throughout. The stories all felt totally different, but still made sense in a collection together.

Thanks for renewing my faith in short stories, GennaRose Nethercott

I enjoyed the weirdness of these stories. They read like folktales or a story from Grimm - something a bit out of place and not much in the way of happy endings. Not entirely horror, but most of the stories leave you uncomfortable.

I feel bad. I wanted to like this so much more than I did. While I enjoyed some of the stories in this collection, others were very confusing to me and left me wanting more. I like the idea of dark fairytales but I feel like a lot of the stories were overly abstract or convoluted for my taste.

* Sundown at the Eternal Staircase - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
* A Diviner’s Abecedarian - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
* The Thread Boy - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
* Fox Jaw - ⭐️
* The War of Fog - ⭐️
* Drowning Lessons - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
* The Autumn Kill - ⭐️⭐️
* Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart - ⭐️⭐️
* A Lily is a Lily - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
* Dear Henrietta - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
* Possessions - ⭐️⭐️
* Homebody - ⭐️⭐️
* A Haunted Calendar - ⭐️
* The Plums at the End of the World - ⭐️⭐️

Thank you to NetGalley, Vintage and GennaRose Nethercott for this ARC ebook. Fifty Beasts To Break Your Heart: And Other Stories will be published February 6, 2024.

I loved the previous book I read by GennaRose Nethercott, and while there were a few stories in this anthology that I found intriguing for the most part I couldn't get into this book. The stories were all kind of nebulous and vague, which I think was part of my problem. I do like a book that makes me work for it, but I didn't understand most of what was happening and found myself seriously confused by what I was reading.

While this didn't work for me personally it was a unique set of stories with some great illustrations and a lot of other people seem to really enjoy this anthology, and since I loved Thistlefoot by this author I will definitely be reading her future works.

This book is a real trip! And not a good one. The stories are, super abstract. Most of them feel more like wild fever dreams than your typical stories. There's this crazy stuff with armies of fog, endless staircases, girls drowning in the rain, a dude made out of thread, and some mysterious fox action. I'm telling you, it's a wild ride, and right now, I'm just sitting here like, "Oh god, what did I just read?" Seriously, after each story, my reaction is pretty much just a puzzled "Huh?!?"


Getting through these fourteen stories is like navigating a maze because they're incredibly abstract. The plots are so nebulous that most of the time, you're left wondering what's even going on. It's all stream-of-consciousness, and the haziness of it all makes you feel like you're getting lost in this intricate web of (admittedly beautiful) words. Nethercott definitely has a way with language, but it seems like she's more focused on making it sound pretty and vague, which unfortunately takes away from the storytelling and character development. It's like she's got a treasure trove of words, but sometimes you just wish she'd let the characters and the story shine through a bit more.

I was taken in by the gorgeous cover, expecting fairy tale retellings, beauty and the beast type of stories. That was my mistake, Perhaps I am just not clever enough to understand the depth of these tales.

There is a reader for every book and I’m sure some will devour this collection but I have to say it was not for me.

Thank you to Net Galley for providing me with an E-ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

Thank you Vintage and NetGalley for an eARC in exchange for an honest review!

I loved Nethercott’s debut novel this year, and I’m delighted that her short stories have the same sort of delightful prose and infusion of fantasy into the real world. As with most short story collections, I definitely felt some stories were stronger than others, but I didn’t find any of these particularly weak. I thought these were all well crafted and I enjoyed their literary slant, which is about what I had expected after reading Thistlefoot. Nethercott’s writing is such a joy to indulge in, and each one of these was a treat.

My favorite is the titular story, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart, in part because I thought it was absolutely fascinating to read a short story told in the form of a bestiary (and the illustrations are gorgeous!). Some of these are structurally risky, but they definitely pay off. Nethercott’s ability to convey such raw emotion in some of these stories is impressive. Still, there are a couple where I didn’t quite feel like the ending stuck the landing, and at times I felt like some of them were a smidgen too long. There’s a certain kind of abstractness to these that made the overall meaning a little muddy, but as a prose and vibes-forward reader, I had a blast.

This book came in ebbs and flows and while it wasn’t necessarily my favourite book I’ve read lately, it was evident that it was a strong set of works.

I was impressed with the authors imagination and ability to create these lyrical and fascinating fantasy premises that are, at times, very gripping. In many of the stories, you’d be moving through this fantastical premise just taking it in and then out of nowhere, BAM, an emotional kick to the gut. These were the moments that kept me turning pages, even through the stories that resonated less with me.

I also felt like the author was structurally very strong. The ability to craft a story, to immediately immerse you in a unique premise, was definitely there. Her use of symbolism and the parallels between fantasy experiences and real-world emotions were also at times very poignant. That said, not all of the stories were equally gripping for me, so I did find my attention lagging here and there.

As a whole, I feel like this was a very literary-feeling fantasy story collection and I do think there’s an audience for it, even if that audience isn’t me. Some of the stories, like The War of Fog, are likely to stick with me for some time I think. If you’re a reader looking for fantasy stories that you can really analyze and peel off the layers of, this collection may be for you.

Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart is a haunting collection of short stories that touch on the brutal, greedy, dark secrets that lie within each of us. These fables speak to those small voices in your head who whisper of violence and revenge, who urge you to take that one step closer to danger. Fans of Carmern Maria Machado's "Her Body and Other Parties" with enjoy this deeply creepy collection of horror folk tales.

Stories that particularly stood out include:

A Diviner's Abecedarian - You'll find a theme here, but I loved the way GennaRose tells stories through compendiums. Each entry begins as a definition of the type of divination, but evolves into an interconnected story about teenage girls and the dangers and drastic measures taken by cliques.

The Thread Boy - A fable a la The Gingerbread Boy, this story illustrates the way our live becomes irrevocably interconnected with the people and places we find along the way.

Fifty Beast to Break Your Heart - A love story told through entries in a magical bestiary. This one is for all the medieval geeks out there who ogled over weird medieval bestiaries, and fell in love while doing it.

Dear Henrietta - This epistolary takes SUCH a twist. For the scorned women of the world.

The Plums at the End of the World - Goat girl and vampire examine what it means to be a monster. Unsurprisingly it's the humans who were the most terrifying of all in this story. This one has been haunting my thoughts since I finished.

Please consider this a dazzling 5 star review.

When I saw this book on NetGalley, I prayed to the universe that they would ignore my very little experience using the website and grant my request for the ARC. I read Thistlefoot the year before and couldn't (still can't) stop thinking about it and recommending it to everyone. I knew I was going to love this one, and I was so excited to read it I thought I'd be done in a couple of days, but this book didn't let me do that. I read each story pretty slowly, but I was able to savor it the way this book deserves to be savored. I am a ravenous beast wanting to devour, but finding myself chewing on each morsel of a story with reverence and relish. That is to say, I could deeply identify with some these beasts, and I didn't expect that.

Historically speaking, I don't like short story collections. I've tried many over the years and almost never get through them. (Even Murakami. Even Bradbury, excluding The October Country.) I read a few stories and I'm struggling by the end of each one to understand what the point is or what the author is trying to say, then get fed up and put it down. I never felt that way reading this book. They read like bizarre fairy tales and even when things aren't apparent at the beginning, each story drives quickly and purposely toward their meaning. Every story made me think, "This one is my favorite!" until the next story and actually that one was my favorite, all the way to the end. Now these beasts just live within me as my friends.

The writing was delicious. The stories were all different and interesting and yet they fit so perfectly together in this collection. I preordered myself a physical copy and I intend to tell everyone I know to read it. Anyone and everyone could learn something about life, about themselves from these stories. This one was so special.

NetGalley: Thank you so much for letting me read this book early. Please consider me for any GennaRose Nethercott book to ever come out for the rest of eternity, I am a fan for life.

A collection of short stories if you like fairy tales/folklore or loved Thistlefoot by the author! I recommend and will continue to read books by Genna Rose