The first anthology from Allegra Press — Wicked Little Girls, edited by Christina Sng — is a mixed bag of stories and poems involving female children who are “made of sugar and spikes and everything >not< nice" (as Scott Urban puts it in his introduction). Sng -- a genre poet of repute -- has done a good job selecting a wide array of approaches to the topic. While the production quality is a bit disappointing (especially the bare-boned red cardstock cover, with the words of the title blown up in a large, familiar, blood-dripping horror font), the length is a little short (26 pages), and the story quality is a little unbalanced, there are also some nice gems hiding in the rough of this small press chapbook about darkness lurking where you'd least expect it: in the form of the sweet and innocent girlie.

Welcomingly, half of this book contains the work of female horror writers, and there's a good mix of international authors represented, as well. The horror genre still seems dominated by male voices writing about male preoccupations, and Wicked Little Girls stands as a small press corrective to this hegemony. It dramatizes, in many of its pieces, a turning of the tables and a revolt of the "little girl" against patriarchy and male power. Some stories, like Jamie Rosen's allegory, "Alis Bender's Life Lesson #36," deliver that revolt with humor, with a direct kick to the groin. Others are more literary, exploring the role of storytelling in disempowering the "little girl." Marsheila Rockwell's excellent poem, "Gretel" -- reminiscent of Angela Carter's feminist work in fairy tales -- retells the famous tale of gingerbread house kidnapping in a monologue by Hansel's sister by turning the finger of blame away from the wicked witch and pointing it squarely at Hansel himself: "no wonder father wanted/him gone/it was >his< ungodly hunger/that beggared us...his voracious appetite/that brought the witch's wrath upon us." I also enjoyed Simon Bestwick's sf/horror piece -- "Emily's Song: A Life Cycle in Three Parts" -- which may be the best story in the anthology. It's about a little monster named Emily who takes over the body of the president in a parasitic fashion, leading to grotesque and genuinely surprising ends. Bestwick manages to balance gross-out humor against the story's political allegory in an expert fashion. Jonathan William Hodges' excellent contribution, "Deep in the Gloom of Lights from Rescue Squads" is an extended prose-poem, written in a hypnotic weave of prose that moves in and out of reality in quite a bizarre but eloquent fashion. Indeed, poetry sneaks into the prose where you least expect it in many of the stories in this collection. For example, when I first read Robyn A. Hay's "Scrapbook" I almost read right past the rhyme that recurs in paragraphs like this one -- "'How's the knee, Bea?' Rodney asked his wife quietly" -- even though the over-reliance on adverbs in the dialogue tags made the creative writing teacher in me writhe.

Because the collection's premise is about "wicked little girls" almost every story's ending was telegraphed to some degree: I always already assumed that the little girls of the stories were going to do something wicked or horrible. Perhaps this is why a few of the stories didn't work for me. One might think that this premise is the book's limitation, but with characters ranging from daughters to dollies, and settings from Africa to alien worlds, Wicked Little Girls has enough variety to make it an enjoyable read all the way through, regardless. If you're looking for something on the alternative side, get your copy direct from Allegra Press -- or through the small press distributor Project Pulp -- for about $6 postpaid.

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