An unsettling, hard-to-put-down collection of horror…
Taut and addictive, Gaffney’s multiple award-winning debut easily transcends its genre when it comes to presenting an eerie grouping of tales. “Fraxinus” tells the story of a group of women who are forced to fight an ancient and seeming undefeatable enemy in a landscape at once relentlessly dark and vividly disquieting. In “FEEEEENIX,” the mild-mannered protagonist comes to terms with his late father’s legacy. In bleak but fascinating “Napkin,” the reader sees a troubled protagonist approached by a stranger who seems to know everything about him. In the unsettling “Ghost,” a little girl makes an unlikely friend after moving to her new home. The disturbingly credible “Celebrity,” tells the story of the young protagonist who thinks his interview subject, a former Hollywood actor, is driven to paranoia by the popular adage “celebrities always die in threes” and gets caught in the bizarre reality of the situation. In the grim and surreally dark “The Day Harold Sanford Got Cancer,” Gaffney masterfully evokes morbid horrors via sarcasm as the narrative reads back in time and the protagonist receives a few life lessons at an awful cost. Morbidly amusing “Missing” narrates the story of a recluse who is looking to fill voids in his life. An overwhelming atmosphere of doom and disaster hovers over the perpetual darkness of the area surrounding the morbid tree in “Fraxinus Americana” which tells the story of an old man who’s fighting Alzheimer. Stylishly written with excellent worldbuilding and nuanced characterization, this is a spine-tingler.
Stranger Things Have Happened
by Thomas Gaffney
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Pub date July 31, 2018
ISBN 9780999263006
Price $4.99 (USD) Paperback, $0.83 Kindle edition