Book Review

Book Review: Pardon me and other fears (أعذرينى و مخاوف أخرى) : There seems to be a horror literature renaissance taking place in Egypt. With more and more horror titles coming out every month, it isn't an overstatement to say that Egyptian horror fiction is alive and well. Pardon me and other fears, a collection of horror short stories by up and coming Egyptian writers, is one of the best of these titles.

With more than a dozen writers contributing to this collection, the reader is exposed to a myriad of styles. Some of the stories contained here are good, some are mediocre, but, mostly, they are all interesting, and sometimes even superb.

From Shaimaa El Sioufy's title story about a painter haunted by the ghost of his dead wife, to Hanan Abdel Ghafar's Liberation, a disturbing tale about the deadly wrath of a woman scorned, to Abdel Aziz Abo El Mirath's hallucinatory Night tales, which is made up of seemingly unrelated nightmarish vignettes, to the closing tale, Ismail Khaled Wahdan's clever The monsters of our city, this collection covers almost all of the standard plot devices (monsters, ghosts, demons, vampires . . .) and then some.

If this is any indication of things to come, then Egyptian horror sure has a bright future ahead of it.