While all but one of the anthology’s stories are supernatural, I was impressed by the wide variety of paranormal elements contained therein. My favorite story in the collection is probably the least violent and scary, “Tacoma Girl” by Luciano Murano. It’s a wistful story about a man who spent most of his life working on the ferries that crisscrossed Puget Sound. He spotted a strange woman on the Tacoma Ferry one day and learned more about her from one of the veteran dockworkers. The story is beautifully written and will stay with readers for quite a while.

 Other stories in the anthology are more gruesome but equally entertaining. “Hell is No Fiery Pit” by Mackenzie Hurlbert is the story of an abused wife accompanying her husband on a transatlantic voyage around the turn of the 20th century. Most readers will probably guess what will happen to the husband, but how it happens is unique. “This Devouring Place” by Chloe York is also a story of an evil husband, except here, his evil is far more supernatural. The story involves the husband’s sinister ancestral home on an isolated island and a wife who is about to deliver her first child.

Many tales of the high seas involve pirates or mermaids, and this anthology has one story about each. In “The Isle of Khaolos” by Kenneth Tilford, a pirate ship’s crew comes ashore on a seemingly deserted island to recover the booty that had washed up on the island when the pirates sank their most recent prize. When the crew investigates the island’s interior, they discover the ruins of a strange building and an even stranger precious statue. Anyone who has ever seen an “Indiana Jones” movie knows what happens when you disturb a site like this, but this crew predated motion pictures by a couple of centuries, so they had no idea what was about to occur. “The Lady of the Lake” by Marc Sorondo is the story of a man who encounters a mermaid, not in a lake, but in a narrow ocean inlet. All I can say is that the ending wasn’t what I expected.

One of the best stories in the anthology is more of a mystery than a horror story. “Pelagus Green” by Rob Nisbet features an artist named Jocelyn Pelagus, who specialized in seascapes painted with a special paint she developed. Her husband and sister figure they can make money by killing her and then forging dozens of the artist’s “lost” paintings using the special paint. It’s an ingenious scheme that doesn’t work out quite the way the pair had intended. Like several other stories in the anthology (and in much other horror fiction as well), “Pelagus Green” can be summed up as “bad things happen to bad people.” However, knowing what will happen in general doesn’t diminish the reader’s satisfaction at seeing exactly how it happens.

Editor D.L. Winchester contributed the opening story in the anthology, “Cabin Nine.” It’s the only story in the book that doesn’t involve the supernatural, and it’s also one of the goriest. A group of college-aged young people spends their summer break on a luxury yacht owned by one of the group’s parents. The parents make only one request of the vacationers. They are not to open the door to Cabin Nine under any circumstances. Naturally, they decide to open Cabin Nine, and equally naturally, they soon regret their decision.

I wish that Stories to Take to Your Grave hadn’t relied so heavily on the supernatural. As Winchester’s story illustrates, you can have plenty of terrifying moments at sea without resorting to the supernatural. Fifty years later, Jaws remains one of the best horror movies of all time without a demon or mermaid in sight. However, the anthology’s biggest sin of commission (as opposed to omission) was the editor’s decision to rely as heavily as he did on one specific subgenre of oceanic horror: creatures from the deep. About one-third of the stories involve some variety of largely unseen supernatural monsters. Although descriptions differ among the stories, these creatures all have very big teeth, very many teeth, or both. The monsters are also very hungry, with human flesh on the menu of choice. Some tales are better written than others, but they all blend in readers’ minds, especially since they are located close to each other in the book. The law of diminishing returns is at play here. I will give one author credit; however. In Desiree Horton’s “Bergy Bits and Growlers,” the monsters are pieces of an iceberg—with very sharp teeth, of course. Shades of the Titanic here.

I was pleasantly surprised by Stories to Take to Your Grave. The authors may be relatively inexperienced, but they are talented, with a knack for atmospheric descriptions and ingenious premises. Even more importantly, the authors usually deliver on their premises with some genuinely creepy tales. I congratulate the editor and publisher for finding this level of writing talent among the vast sea of mediocre horror flotsam and jetsam out there. Horror fans will want to take Stories to Take to Your Grave on their next vacation, but they might want to avoid the beach if they do.

NOTE: The publisher graciously provided me with a copy of this book through BookSirens. However, the decision to review the book and the contents of this review are entirely my own.