Combat Monsters
Untold Tales of World War II
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Combat Monsters brings together twenty award-winning and bestselling speculative fiction authors who each bring their own spin on an alternate history of World War II.
New research has uncovered deeply buried military secrets—both the Allied and Axis special operations during World War II included monsters. Did the Soviets use a dragon to win the Battle of Kursk? Did a vampire fight for the Canadians in Holland? Did the US drop the second atomic bomb on a kaiju?
This collection takes real events from World War II and injects them with fantastical creatures that mirror the “unreality” of war itself. Each story—and two poems—feature mythical, mystical, and otherwise unexplainable beings that change the course of history. Dragons rise and fall, witches cast deadly spells, mermaids reroute torpedoes, and all manner of “monsters” intervene for better or worse in the global turmoil of World War II.
Together, Combat Monsters challenge the very definition of monstrous, with the brutality of war as a sobering backdrop.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Herz (Red Stars and Shattered Shields) makes good on the fascinating premise of his latest anthology, bringing together 20 high-octane stories that add terrifying monsters to the battlefields of WWII. The creatures range from the familiar—the vampires in Peter Clines's "The Night Crew"—to the more obscure, including taniwha, a monstrous serpent from New Zealand, which features in Lee Murray's "Breakout." That variety is also manifested in the list of contributors, which puts genre titans like Jane Yolen and Jonathan Maberry alongside relative unknowns. Herz himself provides one of the collection's standout tales, the gripping, Soviet Union–set "Das Mammut." In it, Germany deploys the eponymous weapon, a supersized "walking battleship," and the Soviets summon a dragon to counter it. Jeff Edwards's "The Fourth Man" is another highlight, told as an English academic's confession to his priest about his battlefield clash with "a mountain-sized sea crab or lobster, with arms like a gigantic octopus." All the entries provide gritty depictions of the fog of war and combat stresses that facilitate suspending disbelief at the introduction of mythic creatures. Fans of alternate history and military horror will want to check this out.
