Publishers Weekly gives The Measure of Sorrow a starred review and praises J. Ashley-Smith’s “talent for scene-setting.”
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. … For lovers of voicey, elegant prose that lingers for days in the corners of the mind, this is highly recommended.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (starred review)
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.
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