Challenge 168

Don’t look under the bed

Dust bunnies are the least of your worries. In this issue you’re more likely to find monsters: six of our eight stories feature beings that are not quite natural. Let’s list them in their order of appearance in the Index:

Conniving serpents
A human clone
Battling dragons
Insurrectionist plant life
Subterranean monsters
An arboreal pathophagus

Sorry about that last: it means “something that lives in a tree and eats bad people.”

Just a few questions:

Would you classify any of the stories in this issue as true “horror” stories? If so, why?
What might account for the purple-prose style of “The Eldritch Horror”? Is it a tip-off that a joke is coming up that we’re supposed to get? Would the story have been as effective without the style? And what is the joke, anyway?
Is “Flowers at Dragon’s Pool” a story or a vignette? If it’s a vignette, what might the “larger story” be?

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving. And here at Bewildering Stories it’s Halloween all the time.

Responses welcome!