One
thing I love about horror is how it allows authors of different cultural
backgrounds opportunities to explore their mythology and express the
complexities of their lived experiences.
All cultures have ghosts, or
demons, or monsters. And the stalking spirit in The Only Good Indians is
strange, wonderful, and terrifying all at once.
Told as three
interconnected stories, it builds both terror but also a sense of empathy, not
only for the human victims but for the monster herself. It’s a tale of trauma,
guilt, and survival that I could recommend to anyone.
"Thrilling, literate, scary, immersive." -Stephen King
The Stoker, Mark Twain American Voice in Literature, Bradbury, Locus and Alex Award-winning, NYT-bestselling gothic horror about cultural identity, the price of tradition and revenge for fans of Adam Nevill's The Ritual.
Ricky, Gabe, Lewis and Cassidy are men bound to their heritage, bound by society, and trapped in the endless expanses of the landscape. Now, ten years after a fateful elk hunt, which remains a closely guarded secret between them, these men - and their children - must face a ferocious spirit that is coming for them, one at a time. A spirit…
I
haven't decided which of Evenson's short story collections is my favorite, but The Glassy Burning Floor of Hell is up there.
He is a master of using
ambiguity in horror; you never know when starting each story whether it will be
about a true flesh-and-blood monster, or just a simmering madness in the
narrator's head, or something else beyond comprehension.
His style is stark and
direct, leaving you no space to hide from the strange mind-bending forces or
half-defined malevolent entities which haunt his pages.
I'm hardly the first to
call Evenson a modern-day Poe, but he has a similar ability to fuse the grotesque
with the literary, the horrific with the sublime.
A sentient, murderous prosthetic leg; shadowy creatures lurking behind a shimmering wall; brutal barrow men―of all the terrors that populate The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, perhaps the most alarming are the beings who decimated the habitable Earth: humans. In this new short story collection, Brian Evenson envisions a chilling future beyond the Anthropocene that forces excruciating decisions about survival and self-sacrifice in the face of toxic air and a natural world torn between revenge and regeneration. Combining psychological and ecological horror, each tale thrums with Evenson’s award-winning literary craftsmanship, dark humor, and thrilling…
I’ve
always disliked the double meaning of the word “fantasy,” both as a signifier
for a world with supernatural elements but also as something one desires.
For
I do not desire to be in the world of Mordew. It is a grim place, a city built
on the corpse of God, where children spawn deformed from the rotting muck. A
city protected from the battering sea by a great wall and ruled by the cruel,
magic-wielding master of Mordew.
It reads like a Charles Dickens novel, but twisted,
infected by foul magics, and run through the mud. There’s nothing else quite
like Mordew.
GOD IS DEAD, his corpse hidden in the catacombs beneath Mordew. In the slums of the sea-battered city a young boy called Nathan Treeves lives with his parents, eking out a meagre existence by picking treasures from the Living Mud and the half-formed, short-lived creatures it spawns. Until one day his desperate mother sells him to the mysterious Master of Mordew. The Master derives his magical power from feeding on the corpse of God. But Nathan, despite his fear and lowly station, has his own strength and it is greater than the Master has ever known. Great enough to destroy…
Those are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to actions some will take to protect their interests in æther-oil, the coveted substance that fuels the city of Huile.
As both a veteran and private investigator, Marcel Talwar knows this firsthand, and he likes to think he'd never participate in such things. However, that naïve idea comes to a crashing end when he takes on a new case that quickly shatters his worldview.
