TC Anthology Review: Horror Anthology 'Shadows Edge', Edited by Simon Strantzas for Gray Friar Press, Cuts Deep and Fields Strong

With Shadows Edge (Gray Friar Press), dark fiction writer Simon Strantzas has put together an evocative and beautiful anthology of subtle Horror that follows a texture championed and furthered by Strantzas throughout his acclaimed career as an author.  Indeed, the tales reflect the man at the selector switch, as each of the 16 assembled pieces (including a “short story as prologue” by Strantzas himself) represent works of patient, often quiet weirdness and terror that get under ones skin rather than braining you with a cudgel.  These stories fit into the category of what Strantzas himself personally creates as a writer, so it stands to reason he’d release an anthology of similarly styled works that resonate with him as editor.  He states in his Afterward that the theme of the aptly titled anthology is exploring those “thin places,” “soft spots,” and “cracks in reality” that separate our world from those vistas and realities that lie beyond what we know to exist.  The edge separating light from shadow.  In their own way, each of these stories successfully lives up to (and thoroughly explores) this nuanced theme, and do so in spades.

Thin places.
Where worlds crash against each other,
rippling soft spots through reality.
Ancient portals through which the darkest nightmares seep,
spreading uncertainty and doubt.
These places haunt us, and from them
shadows edge.

A figure from the past, lying in a field...
The unlikely three, bound by their quest...
A high-rise apartment, where creatures crawl...
The drive in the storm, through blurring edges...
The brother, hiding from his sins...


Most anthologies these days have their hits and their misses, with the best books of the bunch having more of the former than the latter.  But with Shadows Edge, no matter how hard I squinted, I had – and have – a very difficult time finding a broken crayon in the box.  These are 16 solid-to-great tales, and reflect well on the talents of their individual creators, as well as Strantzas ability to wrangle excellent stories from some of the top names in speculative fiction today.

The standout tales (in ToC order) among the uniformly strong field are many, and include Joel Lane’s “Echoland,” Richard Gavin’s “Tinder Row,” “The Falling Dark” by Daniel Mills, Gary McMahon’s “The Old Church,” “Morning Passages” by Lisa Hannett, “Stabilimentum” by Livia Llewellyn, Peter Bell’s “The True Edge of the World,” and “Bor Urus” by John Langan.

Among these, I found “Echoland” (a story about questing after a doorway to that glimpsed land just behind the veil), “Morning Passages” (a truly original natal piece that reads like something out of a more brutal version of the Twilight Zone),  “Stabilimentum” (a woman must deal with an infestation of spiders in her new dream apartment that becomes the very least of her startling discoveries about where she now lives), “The True Edge of the World” (for my cash, the highlight of the book, due as much to Bell’s writing style and description of the Scottish setting as the folklorish supernaturalism), and “Bor Urus” (a dissection of a man obsessed by violent storms, and what can happen during them, to the detriment of everything he holds dear) to be the crema fresca of a rather creamy crop, and some of the best contemporary short stories I’ve ever read.  Lane, Hannett, Llewellyn, Bell, and Langan are now on my “must ALWAYS read” list, joining several other contributors to Shadows Edge who made the list many moons ago.

Stranzas has acquitted himself impressively in this his first anthology.  As noted above, there isn’t a bad story in this folio.  I just singled out those that appealed to me the most, for a variety of stylistic and story reasons.  But all are worthy of praise, and especially worthy of a read.  More collections need to taste like this one.

An unquestionable and enthusiastic HIGH RECOMMEND, receiving four and a half (out of five) stars on The Cosmicomicon's glimmer scale.  Pick up this  if you want to peruse some of the top talent in the Weird fiction/Horror game doing what they do best by exploring the thin spots in the veil, the hidden pocket of quiet dread, that make life so interesting, and worth living, as the more we know about what lies beyond, the less we want to end up there.  Visiting via prose, however, is entirely another matter...

TC Book Review & Interview: Simon Strantzas Brings The Horror Home in 'Nightingale Songs' for Dark Regions Press

The genre of popular literature commonly known as Supernatural or Horror Fiction is going through somewhat of a Renaissance these days, and in doing so, its practitioners, consumers, and overall celebrants threaten to unknowingly abandon part of Horror Fiction's past in favor of a seemingly new incarnation that is really just the same creature dressed in a different set of clothing.  Smaller hats and longer sleeves, to hide the scars and the rad tattoos purchased back in more classic yet looser time.  A time before irony and paralyzing self consciousness. 

Slasher cinema and the "YA-ing" of centuries-old supernatural creatures and tropes seems to be one of the biggest culprits in this unspoken yet readily apparent re-branding, but so too are the pop culture success stories of certain writers of "horror books" that sometimes cut as deep as a Bic razor, with scars that last about as long.  In an unrelated artistic field, it brings to mind so many modern/hipster bands fleeing the sexy, dangerous roots of rock 'n roll, so as not to be associated with the embarrassing lipstick and Aqua Net years of super popular hair metal.  The sad part of this is that rock music will always be rock music, and the swagger and smoke of its founding should never be fully forgotten, even if it eventually wore spandex.

Put it simply (and with far less digression):  Horror is out.  The Weird is in.

Indeed, Horror or Supernatural Fiction is now better known to fledgling readers as Weird Fiction.  I, too, am guilty of aiding this re-christening of that tasty miasma of Dark Fantasy/Sci-Fi/Horror Fiction as a monolithic product better known as The Weird, for reasons that have as much to do with interpretation as they do with a lazy sort of short hand (Speculative Fiction is also an increasingly popular catch-all phrase, also liberally employed by yours truly... I'm nothing if not honest).

With that clumsily rendered primer expressed, I'd like to announce Simon Strantzas as an unabashed champion of straight up Horror Fiction, and for that, he should be applauded.  He should also be applauded for his own unsettling tales and contributions to the above, which are meditative explorations of the dark and chilling, which touch on diverse foundational points that make up the creaking yet sturdy skeleton of Horror past, present, and future.  He kicks stereotypes in the nuts with his clean, confident carving of the subtle bizarre that doesn't dance on the horizon, but does a jerky, beady-eyed soft shoe through your living room during Sunday family dinner.  He isn't a barking merchant of swirling, universal doom.  He's whispered death amongst the hydrangeas in your own goddamn backyard.  He's a '57 Chevy, a Colt six shooter.  He's a Horror writer.

Strantzas, the Toronto-based, British Fantasy Award-nominated author of the critically hailed Cold to the Touch (currently out of print and selling privately for upwards of $170) and Beneath the Surface, recently released his anticipated third collection, Nightingale Songs, which explores all those great themes that make up great Horror Fiction - madness, ghosts, hauntings, misshapen freaks, deadly creatures, old houses that are a threat by their very lean and aspect.  Strantzas' horror unspools in the bedroom, the musty basement, the decrepit hotel room, that claustrophobic cabin in the woods, in the backstage area of that poorly lit nightclub, around that piano that always sits empty.  He has an introspective, sometimes existential style, deeply exploring the mental and physical breakdown that often manifest before or because of some jarring, unexplainable event.  The outside world rarely invades these intimate scenes, nor is it effected by the terrible things that occur... at least not yet.  What is effected are those few, intertwined individuals caught in this strange, terrifying nightmare without end or rational resolution other than oblivion.

In Nightingale Songs, Strantzas' horror can be nameless, but rarely is it from the stars.  Insanity lurks, but it comes not from ageless, whispering gods from another dimension.  These terrors creep from someplace far closer - from the nearby wilderness, from across the street, or even from within.  His monsters are those that lurk in the dark, ignored places, both inside us and out.  Danger to ourselves and those we love - which, for my money, is the heart of all Horror - has no one single origination, nor any real solution, creating a frustration of dread, of the grinding inevitable that the protagonist is powerless to change.  Much like Alfred Hitchcock took great relish in horrorizing those mundane, often comforting things we deal with every day (a bathroom shower, a flock of birds, an innocuous chat with an old friend), so too does Strantzas inject the bizarre into the commonplace, with devastating results.

He bends supernaturality (if I may coin a word) to its breaking point, but doesn't snap it, allowing the Horror he writes - no matter how fantastic or shocking the outcome - to assume the trappings of reality.  This stuff could happen, he'll have us believe, and MUST, to people who seem familiar enough to be glaring back at us in the mirror each day.  This isn't fantasy casting, folks.  This is the PTA, the corner table of muttering hipsters, the person sleeping next to you.  Strantzas' characters have deep, meaningful, loving relationships (a rarity in Horror, it seems), steady jobs, friends and family.  They are us, which makes what happens to them/us all the more visceral.  These twelve tales place horror on our lap, daggers wrapped in velvet.

To again parallel Hitchcock, Strantzas creates a thinking person's style of Horror and Weird (sorry) Fiction that is patient and trusting enough to let the audience connect the pattern in the wood grain, and write the coda in their own mind long after the nightingale's song has ended.  That is the essence of Horror - that personal, insidious presentation that inspires an unsettling mindfuck created unconsciously but no less powerfully by the mind of the readers themselves.  Once the door is opened, we always scare ourselves best.  Simon Strantzas, bless him, opens many doors.

In Nightingale Songs, Strantzas' stories run the dusky gamut, drawing in varied notes and thematic flourishes from around the creepy spectrum like jaunty, oddly grinning pianist working the ivories (as an aside:  pianos feature in two of the stories in this collection, and somehow Strantzas has permanently knocked the docile instrument out of alignment and left it forever latently menacing).  In "Pale Light in the Jungle," Strantzas comments on the stultifying power of television and other technological noise, the eeriness of new quiet, and how boredom and apathetic rot masked by electronic media can have dire consequences.  "The Nightingale" and "Something New", while differing greatly plot-wise, both share veins of longing turned to unexpected obsession, and are just as unnerving and Weird as anything you'll read today.  These are two grisly, Lynchian nightmares bolstered by a Ligottian backbeat, set in Midtown of Anytown and yet No Town where I'd want to live, but probably do.  "Her Father's Daughter" embraces classic Horror themes and situations from both the page and screen (car breakdown on abandoned road, cell phone trouble, creepy-ass farm house) with a dash of the supernatural, and while the setting is chilling, I wanted a bit more out of the ending.

I don't think I'm alone in saying that Strantzas is at his best when constructing his tales atop the relationship scaffolding built between a man and a woman, which are often quite powerful and surprisingly passionate.  This is refreshing, as one doesn't tend to see that in a lot of modern Horror of Weird Fiction (and next to never in Lovecraftian fiction), which often cavort with anti-heroes and outcasts, loners and four-time losers at love.  Strantzas, on the other hand, seems to almost be a "Big R" Romantic, celebrating the power of real, abiding love, and showing you what can happen because of it, or due to a sudden lack of it.  "An Indelible Stain Upon the Sky" (recently selected for inclusion in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 23, edited by the renowned Stephen Jones) and "When Sorrows Come" truly hum on the page, creating a duet of profound heartache that echo long after like a dirge.  The protagonists are gutted by lost love, allowing the noxious blackness to seep into the empty spaces between the cracks.  "Tend Your Own Garden" takes a different angle on relationships, and crafts a bold, frightening metaphor of bitter breakup and betrayal embodied by a once shared house.  These three tales anchor Nightingale Songs, and provide a thematic melody present throughout the collection.

In addition to the Romantic, Strantzas work can also get close to you through nostalgia.  "Out of Touch", which starts out the collection, brings to mind an era familiar to me, when children still explored their suburban neighborhoods and the wilder places just beyond on bikes that could have been chariots. The critically acclaimed "Mr. Kneale," another stand-out, allows Stantzas to comment on the Horror Fiction industry in general - and inspiration in particular - by setting his story in the realm of the horror convention.  It's a truly spooky tale, with plenty of multilevel bite.

In short, Simon Strantzas is a writer in full bloom, and Nightingale Songs shows all of his varied foliage.  These are powerful stories, adroitly told, which serve to stack him up favorably with anyone writing Horror/Weird fiction today.  
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Shifting gears just slightly, I'd like to announce that this is the first of what is now called The Cosmicomicon Review & Interview, where I personally read their writing or check out their art and then annoy a writer and/or artist with a series of hackneyed, superficial questions to go along with my review of their work.  Think of it as a poorly moderated Q & A panel at your favorite con, sans cocktails (although you're certainly welcome to enjoy one whilst reading).

I hope you enjoy the interview below, and thank you to Simon for agreeing to spend time with blue card questions better left on the floor under James Lipton's desk.

TC:  Hi, Simon.  Thanks for sitting down with The Cosmicomicon, especially in March, as I know that the debauched revelry and dark ritual of Commonwealth Day can last well into summer…  Speaking of things uniquely Canadian, what is it about Canada that seems to breed comedy, affability, and horror in equal measure?

SS:  Canada is an interesting place. We have all manner of influences coming at us from every direction, whether it's our Commonwealth heritage or the influence of American media upon our daily lives. The country is enormous, and its population so spread out that by its very nature it breeds a certain isolation. All these factors add up to a nation of quirks, something our American cousins don't quite fully grasp. I'd wager your country knows more about England than it does what goes on north of the 49th.

TC:  You’re also an artist/illustrator.  Why did you choose to turn your talents almost exclusively to the written word, rather than the drawn image?

SS:  I spent a good time of youth drawing, painting, etc., but realized early in my 20's that I was not cut out for that world, that my talents were mediocre in comparison to what others were doing. So, I simply stopped. For a few dark years, I did little of anything creative until a crisis of the soul brought me into the fold of writing, and it's something from which I have not looked back.

But, more practically, I'm a firm believer in conveying a clear message, and once an artist starts mixing mediums it tends to water down their impact. For example, Ted, are you a filmmaker or a prose writer? Do you identify yourself as one or the other? Do you worry readers aware of your film work will think "Oh, Grau is slumming it with prose" or think you some sort of "poser"? I worry about these things, and to focus on art now would inevitably undermine my attempts at forging a writing career. Perhaps I'm misguided in this belief, but so far I've seen nothing that convinces me otherwise.

TC:  The term “Weird fiction” gets thrown around a lot these days (with few throwing more than I).  Thomas Ligotti describes his own writing as “uncanny” fiction.  How would you personally describe your writing in terms of genre and/or style?

SS:  I suppose I consider my fiction "strange stories", not accidentally because that's the term Aickman bandied around. In my heart, I simply call it horror, but outside, in the world, the term carries with it so many negative connotations that I hesitate to use it. In the end, despite my stumbles and stutters when asked the question, I do ultimately use the term Horror, because I feel it's up to those of us on the genre's fringes to reclaim it. If we don't associate with the genre, all we do is reinforce the belief the genre is made up of its worst elements. Science Fiction has managed to escape into the mainstream and into "literature", as has the Western. Horror is due its share in the serious limelight. I think it's within our reach if only we hold faith in it. Ramsey Campbell often says that he has yet to explore everything a horror story can tell. I like to believe the genre is as endless as he says. And, really, who would know better?

TC:  Your fiction focuses a lot on the internal, the personal/individual, or the interplay of a relationship in an almost microcosmic sense, which is an angle that is quite different than that of macrocosmic horror and the works of Lovecraft.  Which writers do you view as inspirations, or thematically/stylistically similar to yourself?

SS:  My fiction comes from a large number of approaches, all synthesized into my own. Ligotti, Lovecraft, Lieber, Aickman, Campbell, Tuttle, Tem ... these are genre names that rattle in my head, but even beyond horror's walls voices like Millhauser and Auster and Borges and Jackson ring certain notes. There can be a terseness from Miller, the puzzle-box plotting of Moore, all sorts of different masters fighting for dominance. In terms of the "microcosmic", I'm not sure who my literary forebearers are. For me, as an introspective person, it seems only natural to obsess over the tiny movements of a hand, the shifting viewpoints of someone in doubt. Understanding what's happening, regardless of how fantastic that happening is, is really what interests me most.

TC:  What sort of reaction do you want to elicit from your readers?  Name your ideal reader reaction, then one which would appeal to you the least.

SS:  I want my readers to react however they'd like. Any reaction is pleasing to me, from laughter to tears. I can tell you though that what I care about doing least -- what I spend little to no time attempting -- is frightening my readers. It's sacrilege, in this genre, to say that. So many people want only to evoke that sensation. I care more about eliciting awe in my readers, or if I can't get awe, then at least make them think a bit longer than they might normally. I want them to question their world, their own feelings. I want to evoke an image that even when the story is done stays with them. I want to change my reader in some way. The rest, the entertainment, the show, the rollercoaster -- it holds little importance to me. I care only enough to keep the reader involved in the story. After all, no matter how much a story can deliver on the second or third reading, if it's not interesting on the first read no one is likely to return.

TC:  What was the first bit of fiction you completed, and how did that first finished piece play into your current career?

SS:  There are different answers to this, of course. The first bit of fiction I wrote was no doubt as a child, and remember no one of it. The first published piece appeared in a university alternative newspaper, and is best left unearthed. The first proper story, under my name, to see print happened about a decade ago in All Hallows, and it has subsequently appeared in my collection "Cold to the Touch" to positive reviews. In truth, I don't think that single story did much for my career, other than allow me to achieve a goal I'd set for myself at its outset -- namely, get published in All Hallows. By the time it saw print, though, I'd already sold a few more, but I'll tell you, finally seeing my name in print was something it took a long time to get over. Even now, I'm not quite so jaded that I don't enjoy the sensation of cracking a book open and seeing that.

TC:  I ask this a lot, but I truly have an interest in this -- What is your impression of the small press speculative fiction scene, both from the POV of a writer/editor, and as a reader/fan?

SS:  The small press is a necessary evil for the horror genre. Horror, despite what I might have suggested previously, is not really made for the mass market. By its nature it fits in better on the edges of the world, in the shadows. Good horror is transgressive, it questions everything, it challenges right from wrong, and the grander concepts it explores aren't something most average people want to encounter. Except for a brief bubble in the eighties, horror fiction has never been popular, and will always be something sought out by sympathetic readers. They are enough only to fill a small pond, so I consider us lucky the world of technology has allowed even the smallest of ponds professional level production values. Do I enjoy the ephemeral nature of most markets in horror? Not particularly, but in honesty I spend little time in the small press magazine world anymore anyway. Most of what I write nowadays is solicited, which can be both a blessing and a curse.

TC:  I asked Stuart “Re-Animator” Gordon this once, and I think I’ll use it as a Liptonesque tag in my interviews --  What scares you?  (BTW, Gordon said “Everything”)

Nothing interesting scares me. My fears are boring and common.

TC:  To follow up on that, what DOESN’T scare you?

Horror fiction.

TC:  This sounds a bit “job interviewy,” but what do you see yourself writing in 10 years?  30?

SS:  If the dark heavens allow, I'll be writing forever exactly what I'm writing now. Just, I hope, with a bigger audience.

TC:  What do you have on the docket as far as upcoming projects?

SS:  I have more than a few irons in the fire, many of which I can't (or won't) discuss. I will tell you though that I have fiction appearing this year in two anthologies from Stephen Jones. The first, the sequel to the mosaic novel, "Zombie Apocalypse", the second, a reprint in this year's "Best New Horror" volume. As well, I have a piece in the just printed "Aklonomicon", and work in the two tribute volumes from Joe Pulver, "The Grimscribe's Puppets" and "A Season in Carcosa".  And let's not forget the reprint of one of my stories in the upcoming "Night Land" magazine in Japan. Wow, that's a lot, and there is more yet I have to keep under my hat. Let's just say I'm keeping busy.

TC:  Finally:  Bob and Doug McKenzie - a great Canadian impression, or the GREATEST Canadian impression?

SS:  What do you mean by "impression"? That's what we're all like up here. You Hoser.

Ether Made Print: The Cosmicomicon Gets Write-Up in Strange Aeons #5

Okay, I've been geeking out over this cover for weeks, as soon as it was announced by Strange Aeons Executive Editor K.L Young.  Happily, it arrived - hugging Issue #5 - in my snail mail box just tonight, a full day earlier than expected.  Behold, Weirdlings.... THIS:

In this incredible wrap-around cover piece, ace concept artist and illustrator Brett MacDonald truly captures the essence of the massive size and scale of the Cthulhu Mystique (did I just coin something there?), which was a key component in what originally drew me to H.P. Lovecraft's work in the first place.  I've always been horrified by the impossibly large, the infinitely massive, the incalculably vast.  Cthulhu, to me, always embodied that, as do the other Great Old Ones and, of course, their incomprehensible liege lords, the nebulous Outer Gods.

So, the freshly minted edition of Strange Aeons arrives, populating a gift basket (box) that includes a few missing back issues, and matching Strange Aeons T-shirts (scroll down to the bottom) of staggeringly different size, so my girl Ives and I can stroll through the neighborhood looking like two loons gone prematurely old-people-batshit, when dressing in matching outfits becomes the norm among the early morning power walking mall circuit.

This was a waiting package worth running a few red lights and treating the 110 Freeway like my own slice of poorly paved Autobahn.  And it didn't disappoint...  Lords above, didn't it ever...

Whenever I get a new issue of Strange Aeons, I always do the wide-eyed quick scan first, as I need to see and feel EVERY PAGE before I can cool my 8 cylinder engine long enough to actually read and absorb the entire magazine.  So - after moving through the Eldritch Words and Forbidden Lore sections, amazing graphic novelry, Nick "The Hat" Gucker's fantastic "The Strange High House in the Mist" (oddly, a story I just read in our garden this last weekend) classic movie poster insert, and Robert M. Price's "Lost Gods of Lemuria" short story (art by Nick Gucker) - imagine my shock and awe when I flipped to page 48, the always interesting "Unearthed" section of Strange Aeons (fixed with the truthy sub-header:  "How can you not already know about this stuff???"), and my already misty eyes were instantly drawn to the now-familiar image (created by artist/writer Ives Hovanessian) that not only hangs on our wall, but has truly become my eternal logo and Badge O' The Weird:

To the left of "The Ives Cthulhu" was this bit of delicious and totally unexpected verbiage:

"The Cosmicomicon!  Author T.E. Grau's blog site is an electronic repository for all things cosmic, terrifying, and strange. In this little corner of darkened space, Grau explores the mind bending and possibly terrifying realities that await us as we push forward as a species, discusses speculative fiction, horror cinema and artwork, and tracks real-life news of the weird and unexplained.  A must for Mythos fans, as Grau has his finger on the creative pulse of Cthulhiana."

You could have knocked over my oddly thick, sturdy ass with a feather.  My wife and daughter had to fan me back to semi-consciousness, then we all took shots of Irish whiskey.  Okay, TWO of us did.  Angelina downed her cranberry juice like a pro.  No chaser.

When I regained my rational senses, I noticed that on the same page was a mention of Nick "The Hat" Gucker's amazing blog, and on the next page was an advert for Joseph S. Pulver's masterful, nightmarish new tome Sin & Ashes by Hippocampus Press, together with glowing S&A reviews from such horror heavyweights as Laird Barron, Simon Strantzas, and Paul Tremblay.  I felt like I was invited to a surprise party where all my favorite friends and heroes were in attendance.  Yes, that might sound like a bit much, but that's how I felt.

Getting a surprise write-up in your favorite Lovecraftian magazine is almost indescribable, so I won't even try here.  Simple words will fail me.  But, what I CAN say is that I want to extend a HUGE thanks to Strange Aeons, and all my readers and fellow writers.  This is a lovely moment, and one that I shall never forget.  I tip my fermented Irish grains to you all.  After all, it was in Gonzo that I was born, and in Lovecraft that I was baptized.  The evolution continues...

IA!!  IA!!

p.s. The preceding blog was written with my loyal and all-business battle bunny Cthulhu "Lulu" Grau guarding my feet from any underneath Dhole attack.

p.p.s.  Always end a good blog with a bunny pic.  Okay, not quite "end," because...

p.p.p.s  Please check out Brett MacDonald's artwork.  He's truly an under-appreciated genius.  I mean look at this:

(c) Brett MacDonald

Guest Blogger: Jeffrey Thomas Reviews "Engines of Desire" by Livia Llewellyn

On this eve of long promised, righteous destruction, The Cosmicomicon continues its much talked about, days old tradition of bringing you the best guest bloggers working and lurking in the murky biz. 

This week is no different, as noted author/artist and Punktown creator Jeffrey Thomas (featured recently in Alex Luggo's guest blog review on pages prior) marvels at the roar and hum of Livia Llewellyn's widely celebrated Engines of Desire: 

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A Review of ENGINES OF DESIRE by Livia Llewellyn

- Jeffrey Thomas

     It’s no novel observation that it’s always exciting to discover a writer you’ve never read before; what greater satisfaction could account for one’s love of reading? Sometimes the pleasure comes from discovering someone others discovered quite a while before you. Last month, for instance, I completed BRAVE NEW WORLD, and in January I came across this guy named Cormac McCarthy. (I always feel a bit late to the game when it comes to movies and music, too -- but better than never, and all that.) Other times, the author you discovered is relatively new, or at least wholly new to you. Recently, writers who became favorites of mine with just one book were Richard Gavin (with OMENS) in 2009, Otsuichi (ZOO) in 2010, and Simon Strantzas (BENEATH THE SURFACE), earlier this year. And now, maybe not too late this time, here I am discovering Livia Llewellyn, via her new collection ENGINES OF DESIRE (Lethe Press).

     There’s a lot to admire here, and where to begin? I’m always impressed when a writer can work confidently within multiple genres or subgenres, and the stories in ENGINES OF DESIRE could be called a mix of horror, dark fantasy, science fiction -- though I wouldn’t blame Llewellyn if she’s as uncomfortable with such limiting categorizations as I am. Better to say, then, that she’s unfettered by genre. The stories tend to be either quite long or quite short, which again impresses; she’s going to let this story be the length it wants to be, whereas many other writers seem to weigh their efforts on the scale of whatever is going to fit the word range of the next zombie anthology. And where so many writers go through the motions of being shocking and edgy, Llewellyn makes them look like posers, writing as she does unflinchingly of infanticide, incest, madness and self-destruction. Her female protagonists are both empowered and compromised. Childbirth is a repeated subject matter, and repeatedly viewed not as a means of bringing joy and promise into the world but perpetuating the suffering of the doomed and damned.

     Among the standouts in these ten stories, we have the grim, apocalyptic “Horses” (and I’ll just stop introducing each story as grim right now -- that’s a given; this is not a feel-good bunch of tales), about a woman discovering the most basic imperatives of a human being, at the hour of human extinction; “The Engine of Desire,” a chilling tale of erotic obsession, the reading of which is like watching a film of a tornado brewing in reverse, from terrible aftermath to the first churning storm clouds; the increasingly nightmarish “Jetsam,” one of my favorites, about the resonance of 9/11; “The Four Hundred Thousand,” about a future civilization where young women are used to spawn whole armies that serve as a metaphor for the pointless sacrifices of war; the eerie, icky, enigmatic “Omphalos,” about the implosion of a most insular family; and easily my favorite, the concluding novella “Her Deepness.”

     “Her Deepness” is about as New Weird as New Weird can be, and again I hate categorizing here. That subgenre has been declared dead before it was even declared legitimate. I think some of those pronouncing it dead did so for their own purposes, owing to their competition with or envy of other authors whose future work they hoped to thwart by labeling it passé in advance. Politics, don’t you know. But categories do have their use when taken with a grain of salt, helping us stumble into the vicinity of things we’re going to like, and I was pleasantly surprised to find something of this particular flavor in Llewellyn’s book. “Her Deepness” could also be called Lovecraftian, but again that would be limiting it too much. It’s a dense, complex story about a sculptress with mysterious powers of shaping stone, called to the outer reaches of an impossibly vast, gritty, alternate Earth megalopolis to release a god-like being said to be trapped within rock, like some sentient fossil. In this tale most especially, Llewellyn indulges her considerable powers of description and setting, her ability to craft hard-edged characters who might not often be likable but are all the more fully real for that, her abundant and fresh imagination, her ability to generate an atmosphere heavy with a true sense of doom, and a prose voice full of glittering black poetry. Like many of the stories here, “Her Deepness” flirts with and ultimately plunges into the hallucinatory. It’s a heady experience. Forget I called it New Weird. Writing like this can never be passé, so I don’t want to run the risk of giving the wrong impression. I will say, I think Livia Llewellyn can hold her own alongside a China Mieville or a Jeff VanderMeer. I will say that much.

     And I will say this: I have another favorite writer. Ah…so this is why I read.