Review: Unearthed - a Horror Anthology edited by Dan Coxon and Philip Fracassi

Genre: Horror Anthology, Short-stories

Published: Titan Books, October 2026 Review: 1/5 stars

Anthologies are always iffy to rate, as it comes with the territory that you will inevitably like some stories more than others. To me, an anthology is good if it’s well curated, consistent in its theme and preferably inspires me to pick up at least one new author’s work because of their story.  

Unearthed is unfortunately the first anthology ever that I rate 1-star. This collection contains 19 stories across 400+ pages, and I didn’t enjoy a single one of them…

The stories here all had me feeling one of three ways:

1. “That was fine”. 2.5-stars, will probably never think about it again, though…Examples include: Lost out Here in the Stars by Mark Chadbourn and ReHistory by Cavan Scott.

2. Big nothing-burger that fizzled out into nothing. E.g. the ones by Josh Malerman, Tananarive Due and Steve Toase

3. I hate this, what the heck were the editors thinking when they included this?! Don’t worry, Grasshopper, we’ll get to you in a bit…

Although the theme of ancient ruins is present in all of theme, I felt like many of the stories were ones that the authors already had lying around somewhere, that were adapted to include a ruinous setting to fit the theme, rather than having been inspired by the theme from the start. The all-star line-up of authors who contributed is obviously impressive, but it also gave me the feeling that editing and curating may not have been as rigorous as it should’ve been. In other words: whatever these authors sent in was included, on the merits of the author’s name alone. Whereas none of them would’ve made the mark had they been sent in anonymously, or by indie-authors.

Finally, there’s the story that truly made me wonder what lapse in judgement made Fracassi and Coxon want to include it. Grasshopper by Eric LaRocca read as tasteless, exploitative and written with nothing but shock-value in mind. It also had nothing to do with the theme of ancient ruins, and felt like the author had only retro-actively changed the setting, to be able to send it in for this collection. <b>Trigger-warning: </b>The entire “horror-element” of this story is the inclusion of repeated sexual violence committed by one child upon another child. Needless to say, none of it was appropriate, nor handled with the respect and care a topic like this deserves. It is 2026, we should know this by now: just because something is horrific, does not make it a suitable horror-topic to exploit in fiction. <b>Someone else’s trauma is not your profit-model, Eric.</b>

 Thanks regardless to Netgalley and Titan Books for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

You can find this book here on Goodreads.