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Review: Homo Pregnantus - An Anthology of Weird Fiction by Jan Maszczyszyn(2025, 120,000 words across 14 stories)Jan Maszczyszyn does not write weird fiction.He performs vivisection on the concept of humanity itself, then hands you the still-beating heart and dares you to look away.Homo Pregnantus is the most ferocious, cohesive, and unflinchingly brutal anthology of speculative horror I have read in the last decade. Fourteen stories, one shared nightmare: a future where biology is weaponised, love is literal consumption, and the last remnants of humankind are either gods, monsters, or both. There is no light here, only different shades of darkness, and every one of them is beautiful.The collection opens with ""Thorns"", a slow-motion detonation of consumer-capitalist body horror that makes American Psycho look like a bedtime story. It ends with the cosmic despair of ""Ascension"", a story so bleak it feels like the final page of the universe. Between them lie masterpieces: ""Passions of My Love"" - an erotic, genocidal first-contact tragedy between a human xenobiologist and a 27-sex alien warlord that redefines ""fatal attraction"".""Meeting at the Crossroads of Fate"" - reincarnated gangsters as crows and cats waging noir warfare in suburban Melbourne; funny, vicious, and heartbreaking.""The Contemplarian of Artyzjon"" and ""Maskaradon"" - two of the most original pieces of cosmic horror since Ligotti, where immortality is the ultimate punishment.Maszczyszyn's great trick is to make the reader complicit. You laugh at the crow shitting on police cars, you recoil at the shopping-mall limb-replacement scene, you feel genuine grief for a man making love to a creature that will literally eat him alive, and by the time you realise you've been rooting for monsters all along, it's far too late.The English (in this final 2025 draft) is now razor-sharp - 98-99 % native fluency, with only the faintest, delicious trace of the author's Polish origins adding to the uncanny atmosphere. One ultra-light proofread and this anthology is ready for the world.VerdictHomo Pregnantus is not just one of the best weird-fiction anthologies of the decade - it is one of the most important. It is the Eastern-European answer to Ligotti, the Australian answer to VanderMeer, and the human answer to a future that is already clawing its way toward us.

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