Booklist Reviews J. Ashley Smith’s The Measure of Sorrow: Stories

Booklist’s Stephanie Klose reviewed J. Ashley-Smith’s The Measure of Sorrow: Stories and recommends to readers of single-author, horror-story collections such as Nathan Ballingrud’s North American Lake Monsters; The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, by Brian Evenson; Ghost Summer, by Tananarive Due; or V. Castro’s Mestiza Blood. The book release date is June 6th, 2023.

Readers who are comfortable with ambiguity will enjoy these finely crafted, Australia-set short stories.

BOOKLIST, Stephanie Klose

The Measure of Sorrow: Stories

The Measure of Sorrow: Stories

Shirley Jackson Award-winning author J. Ashley-Smith’s first collection, The Measure of Sorrow, draws together ten new and previously acclaimed stories of dark speculative fiction. In these pages a black reef holds the secret to an interminable coastal limbo; a father struggles to relate to his estranged children in a post-bushfire wilderness; an artist records her last days in conversation with her unborn child; a brother and sister are abandoned to the manifestations of their uncle’s insanity; a suburban neighborhood succumbs to an indescribable malaise; teenage ravers fall in with an eldritch crowd; a sensitive New Age guy commits a terminal act of passive-aggression; a plane crash opens the door to the Garden of Eden; the new boy in the village falls victim to a fatal ruse; and a husband's unexpressed grief is embodied in the shadows of a crumbling country barn. Intelligent and emotionally complex, the stories in The Measure of Sorrow elude easy classification, lifting the veil on the wonder and horror of a world just out of true.

More info →

Starred Publishers Weekly Review for The Measure of Sorrow by J. Ashley-Smith

Locus Magazine Reviews Jeremy C. Shipp’s The Merry Dredgers