The Measure of Sorrow

Starred review from April 24, 2023
The debut collection from Ashley-Smith (Ariadne, I Love You) proves that he can pack just as much of a punch in short horror fiction as in his Shirley Jackson Award–winning longer work. Throughout these 10 stories, his talent for scene-setting especially shines; the inherent alienation of the rural Australian settings of “The Family Madness” and “The Measure of Sorrow” do as much to enhance their protagonists’ breaks with reality as the teeming, humid rainforest lends to the collapsing rot of one man’s life in “Our Last Meal.” The bushfire-charred moonscape of once-familiar picnic grounds exists in deeply uncanny parallel to a mostly destroyed family trying to survive however they can in “Old Growth,” and a flood-rotted dream house falls out from under a mother-to-be in “The Moth Tapes.” Perhaps best of all is “The Black Massive,” set in England, in the gray edge between the city and the fens, where two teenage ravers fall in with a man offering them chemical escape, a beat they can dance to, and an introduction to the darkness of the void beyond death. For lovers of voicey, elegant prose that lingers for days in the corners of the mind, this is highly recommended.

May 1, 2023
While several of the stories in this collection feature horrors that spring from the natural world, such as an infestation of enormous moths, others feature supernatural terrors, often assisted by human acolytes: siblings who sacrifice a schoolmate to earn a boon from creatures who live in the forest, or dealers whose particularly dark party drug creates the right atmosphere for something terrifying to rise from the underworld. Many of the characters are grieving tremendous losses, leaving them broken, isolated, and vulnerable. Repeated motifs among the stories--are the high-end terraria sold at a defunct florist in "The Whatnot Shop" the same ones made by the "Old Growth" protagonist's ex-wife?--hint at connections among the characters or perhaps an extended Ashley-Smith universe. Readers who are comfortable with ambiguity will enjoy these finely crafted, Australia-set short stories, some of which have been previously published. Recommend to readers of single-author, horror story collections such as Nathan Ballingrud's North American Lake Monsters (2013); Ghost Summer, by Tananarive Due (2015);The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, by Brian Evenson (2021); or V. Castro's Mestiza Blood (2022).

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