Grief doesn't fruit in her until she spies, in an expressway embankment, a shaggy mane. The nar- rator lives in Chicago, eating mushrooms, when she does at all, bought in Styrofoam. The moldy family home is sold as a teardown and her mother returns to her homeland where she forages to her hearts content. Months later, he is found rotting in the woods with a morel sprouting at his foot. In his old age, her father disappears on a mushroom hunt.

So entwined are the family and fungi that oyster mushrooms colonize the damp basement of their rural home. The narrator, a daughter of Czech immigrants, grows up ashamed of her parents' accent and customs and the dirt encrusted on her hands due to her role as the mush- room cleaner after her parents' happy foraging. To the narrator, and the reader, the decay is at first banal, then terrifying, but finally serene, described as 'the sound of something come home.' Jane Hertenstein's Wild Mushrooms, perhaps the least weird of the stories, is my favorite because it locates both love and fear of mushrooms in our own histories and hearts. The opening story, for example, John Langan's 'Hyphae,' describes the dementia and death of the narrator's father as a transformation into mycorrhizal fertilizer. The strongest selections for me were the metaphysical, speculative, and contemplative stories that explore fungicidal tendencies but let us rest in peace. As a mycophile, I found the mycophobia of many of these stories excessive but I have yet to tire of Oliver Wetter's lovely cover illustration. Lovecraft tradition and some of the stories make this lineage quite clear with allusions to Lovecraft's mythology. Innsmouth Press specializes in fiction in the H.P.

As the editors put it in their brief and lucid introduction, terror and delight struck them as 'an appropriate combination for assembling an anthology of fungal stories.' These images reinforce stark black and white contrasts between good and evil, inner and outer space, the real and the hallucinated, the poisonous and the delicious, and life and death. In the hardcover version, which includes 3 more stories than the paperback or e-book, many of the selections are followed by a wood-cut-style illustration done by Bernie Gonzales. This anthology devoted to them features many fatal encounters with fungi, some touching and thought provoking, some predictable mycopocalypses, and some nearly incomprehensibly eccentric shroom trips. They sprout from underneath, spread over the top, and their visionary powers are never far from any surface. When it comes to weird fiction and fantasy, fungi have it covered. Edited by Orrin Grey and Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Fungi by Orrin Grey