Chatter

The Skeleton Melodies (Hippocampus Press, 2020) received two particularly generous mentions this past week by a pair of authors who I not only admire, but who possess a massive amount of respect in our literary community.

Patricia Lillie added the book to her list of favorites for the year, and John Langan acknowledged The Skeleton Melodies as part of his year in review for Locus Magazine. Both Lillie and Langan’s own collections (The Cuckoo Girls and Children of the Fang and Other Genealogies, respectively) are currently on the Bram Stoker Awards’ final ballot for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection.

TWICE-TOLD: A Collection of Doubles

 

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With the recent release of C.M. Muller‘s Twice-Told:  A Collection of Doubles the estimable Des Lewis is conducting another venerable “real time” review dedicated to the anthology.  Here’s a portion of what he has to say about my contribution, “Details That Would Otherwise Be Lost to Shadow”:

[B]oundaries here in a residential area explicitly akin to sovereignty of identity and today’s nationalism. Whatever I go on to say, this remains a totally compelling first-person narration by a woman, self-seeking as well as self-conscious, ruthless in her ambition and optimisation of her nuclear family, husband and daughter. […] Finds herself in the house opposite where she had not yet met whomsoever lived there – a house described by her in a wondrously hypnotic mannered way, a sort of House of Leaves blended with something completely unique, with fleeting shadows and angles […] She foolhardily leaves her signature as it were, some written boundary of statically unique self-identity, on ‘stationary’ as stationery inside this house, a house aptly named Motley House […] another Clint Smith work to cherish. If I tell you more, I would spoil it.

Snag a copy (Kindle, paperback) here:

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