Death Comes for the Trophy Wife and Other Stories by Vaughn, Karen M. 2024 NEUF

No one can strip down love to its primordial fertility and minerals like Karen M. Vaughn, and in this immersive follow-up to her debut collection, love is stripped so we can watch it haunt, seduce, whisper, rage, and slink.

Good horror-and Vaughns is the best-looks lingeringly on what wed rather only glance at over our shoulders. With Technicolor magical realism, Vaughn pulls and worries at every kind of love that humans feel (especially secretly feel) and how it might save us even as we let it consume us. As is so often the case with Vaughns scary/witty/delicious stories, Death Comes for the Trophy Wife gloriously muralizes our most private fears until we feel more human than we did before we read it.