The Ushers by Edward Lee

THE USHERS is the author's long-awaited first collection of short fiction and features some of his most disturbing and provacative horror stories, including "Goddess of the New Dark Age", "The Seeker", The Wrong Guy", the 1994 Bram Stoker award nominee "Mr. Torso," plus more over-the-top classics, along with seven brand new stories appearing here for the first time.

If you're ready for horror fiction that takes you well past the edge, Edward Lee is happy to be your tour guide.

I have read and loved a few of Edward Lee's novels but these short stories were pretty hit or miss.
There were only a couple that I really liked a lot, one of which previously appeared in Cemetery Dance Magazine and had a more main stream horror feel to it.

The thing about Edward Lee is that he likes to write about vomit, urine and feces, and forcing people to swallow waste. He likes to write about rape, sexual deviants, and after a while though the titles of the stories change the subject never seems to.

In "Almost Never" a young girl is being stalked by would be kidnappers who mean to sell her but they don't know she is not as easy a target as they expect her to be.
In "Please Let Me Out" Joyce Lipnick is a woman scorned, who will make sure she gets and keeps her man. These two stories were the best of the bunch.

The rest of the stories? meh.
The have all blended together in my mind. I can't tell you which story had someone vomiting into someone else's mouth, or raping a corpse (oops that may have actually been the same story.) but it seemed to me that only the names of the characters changed and bled into the same acts in the same stories over and over.

3 out of 5 stars only because of the 2 stories that I enjoyed so much.