Three Mothers, One Father (Black Shuck Shadows) Paperback – April 27, 2020

The idea of using The Three Mothers as a central link for merging the characters and worlds of various European films along the darker side of the aesthetic spectrum holds much potential. However the repeatedly rushed execution makes most of these stories seem like mere summaries of themselves, regardless of how much the author eagerly uses references to Argento's infamous franchise to ground so many flimsy vignettes; the pervasiveness of omniscient third-person perspective only further mires any liveliness that might have otherwise served to vivify the telling of these tales.The only piece that I found to be memorable occurs early in the book and involves an artist who is commissioned to paint the Three Mothers and suffers the consequences of this foreboding task; its distinction doesn't derive only from bearing the collection's more compellingly macabre details but also involves more development of character and plot than any other piece herein.Beyond this narrative the other entries seem to drift between faint relevance to or heavy reliance on the framework of the Three Mothers to stand as proper stories at all. Throw in recurring appearances of the Devil, who stereotypically masquerades as an angelic youth when leading the usually generic protagonists to their all too obvious doom, and all the high-concept extravagance unfortunately devolves into an occult battle of the sexes by the end.