You Had “Killer Mermaids” on Your Summer Horror BINGO, Right?

You know what is always a terrible idea? Exploring an abandoned military bunker rumored to have been used for top secret scientific experiments. (She says, knowing that she’d probably do it anyway if given the chance.) Because, I mean, even if the local legends are wrong, you’re still going to be underground in a creepy, abandoned bunker. I’ve seen that horror movie. It seldom ends well. It certainly didn’t end well for Liv, who led her friends on a trip to a former military bunker that, so the stories say, is inhabited by monsters. But it’s just a story, right? Where’s the danger? Well, apparently it’s in that bunker. Because Liv is the only one who gets out alive. She turns up at the local police station, covered in blood, raving about — of all things — killer mermaids.

This book. Ya’ll, seriously. It’s so good. It fulfills all the dreams of the little mermaid loving horror fan I once was (and still am, let’s be honest). All Ren Yu wants is to become a mermaid. (And feast on the flesh of tasty sea goers.) She’s already a swimmer, whose love of being in the water butts up against the expectations that she’ll use her skill at swimming to advance in life. Get into a good college on an athletic scholarship. Be successful — a state of being highly defined by everyone in Ren’s life except herself. When really all she wants is to escape from landlocked concerns and sink deep into the ocean until she’s nothing but fins and teeth. She wants to be free, and she’ll stop at nothing to make it happen.

Now Into the Drowning Deep is the obvious pick for this list, I know. It’s a fantastic bit of ocean horror, killer mermaids included, and I’ve actually never featured it in The Fright Stuff before now! So I’d say it’s about time. Seven years before the story begins, a cruise ship called the Atargatis set out for the Mariana Trench with a film crew on board. Their plan was to acquire enough footage and eyewitness testimonies to slap together a “mockumentary” on mermaids, but they found much more than they bargained for. Now a second crew has been brought together to research the fate of the Atargatis, among them Victoria Stewart whose sister was lost when the Atargatis went down. The truth about what happened to her sister can only be found on that same stretch of ocean above the trench, the Atargatis’ last known location, and Victoria isn’t going home without answers. No matter what secrets might lurk beneath the waves.

I have chosen to include Mermaids Never Drown in this week’s list with the caveat that it is an anthology that is not exclusively horror. I’m willing to lay odds that there’s more than one dark and horrifying twist on the mermaid mythos in this collection of 14 stories, given that a few of the authors included frequent the horror genre. However, I cannot promise you an anthology full of JUST flesh eating and bloodied waters. That being said, I’m so beyond excited that Zoraida Córdova and Natalie C. Parker are editing another collection like Vampires Never Get Old, and this time around, centering the history of merfolk in folklore and storytelling. And with authors like Kalynn Bayron, June Hur, Kerri Maniscalco, and many others on board, you just know that Mermaids Never Drown is going to be fin-tastic. (I won’t apologize for that, you can’t mako me.)