I’ll end 2012 with a total of 118 submissions during the year. It was quite a relief to have a series of five acceptances over a couple of months this summer. I knew the stories were better, and had assumed I’d start to have an easier time finding homes for my stories. After seeing my first story published in 2011, I had started to wonder around mid-year why I was having so much trouble seeing that second acceptance. That additional effort has helped me improve, and I’ve started to see the results of improvement, with a good series of story acceptances and publication starting with a burst this summer. I'd love to discuss this book with anyone else that's read it, and if you haven't, please do! It's a very good novel by a unique, excellent, and I hope promising author.The past year has been a time of significant progress. In another recent comment, I mentioned my love of Latin magical realism such as Gabriel García Márquez and Roberto Bolaño's 2666 in particular, because they invoke a sort of supernatural dread - the concept that we and our struggles are all figments of a diseased imagination in the ailing brain of an incomprehensible, higher creature, and that reality is not absolute, but malleable and, in most cases, malignant. If you like crime fiction with a focus on the intrigue and conflict rather than mystery, it's a rewarding read.
If you liked any of his short stories, this one is a must read.
I knew what was happening, had happened, would happen, and I was compelled and horrified all the same. Nevertheless, it doesn't really matter if it's spoiled - it's relentless and horrible. It describes the story in total, and is definitely insightful, but I'd rather not have had it spoiled. Straub's introduction is best read after the novel IMO. He doesn't stop after the narrative ends. The protagonist is an unwilling participant in the narrative, but after a certain point he's an unstoppable, inscrutable force. Nothing is fully explained, and a few important elements to the story remain ambiguous. Although it's a short novel (in effect, it's two novellas "joined at the hip" as noted in the introduction written by Peter Straub), it's effective and chilling in all the right ways. I put off reading this novel for a while - Evenson wrote such great horror fiction, I figured a novel might leave me feeling wanting. He fills short, blunt sentences and almost-mundane scenarios with a sense of menace and the uncanny. But anyone who's read Evenson's A Collapse of Horses knows that, regardless of the subject matter, Evenson is a horror author of the highest magnitude. This may not qualify as a technical horror novel, as there's no supernatural element (maybe), and it doesn't fit any traditional slasher archetypes.
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