That Which Grows Wild collects sixteen dark and masterful short stories by award-winning author Eric J. Guignard. Equal parts whimsy and weird, horror and heartbreak, this debut collection traverses the darker side of the fantastic through vibrant and harrowing tales that depict monsters and regrets, hope and atonement, and the oddly changing reflection that turns back at you in the mirror.… mirror.
Discover why Eric J. Guignard has earned praise from masters of the craft such as Ramsey Campbell (“Guignard gives voice to paranoid vision that’s all too believable.”), Rick Hautala (“No other young horror author is better, I think, than Eric J. Guignard.”), and Nancy Holder ( “The defining new voice of horror has arrived, and I stand in awe.”)
Stories include:
• “A Case Study in Natural Selection and How It Applies to Love” – a teen experiences romance, while the world slowly dies from rising temperatures and increasing cases of spontaneous combustion.
• “Dreams of a Little Suicide” – a down-on-his-luck actor unexpectedly finds his dreams and love in Hollywood playing a munchkin during filming of The Wizard of Oz, but soon those dreams begin to darken.
• “The Inveterate Establishment of Daddano & Co.” – an aged undertaker tells the true story behind the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, and of the grime that accumulates beneath our floors.
• “A Journey of Great Waves” – a Japanese girl encounters, years later, the ocean-borne debris of her tsunami-ravaged homeland, and the ghosts that come with it.
• “The House of the Rising Sun, Forever” – a tragic voice gives dire warning against the cycle of opium addiction from which, even after death, there is no escape.
• “Last Days of the Gunslinger, John Amos” – a gunfighter keeps a decimated town’s surviving children safe on a mountaintop from the incursion of ferocious creatures… until a flash flood strikes.
Explore within, and discover a wild range upon which grows the dark, the strange, and the profound.
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THAT WHICH GROWS WILD renews my faith in well-written, entertaining collections of short stories! Great book all around, 16 tales of the weird, scary, beautiful, and a range of other emotions. All the stories are unique, different samples of the author’s imagination. Good recommendation for this, especially “Certain Sights of an Afflicted Woman,” which rings true for today; “Last Days of the Gunslinger, John Amos” (weird western, cowboys vs monsters); and “Dreams of a Little Suicide”, heartbreaking tale of a good character turned monstrous.
This a well written dark fiction and horror collection. The stories are incredibly varied and I love it when these collections have little to no repetition like this one. They were all pretty original to me and had a lot of violence and gore, as well as great characters and meaningful moments.
“A Case Study in Natural Selection and How It Applies to Love”, the Earth is heated up from global warming, and sometimes people spontaneously combust, or as the people in this story call it, fireball, which sounds so much cooler. The author wordplays with this ‘fireballing’ quite a bit, my favorite being the remark about people heating up and popping like popcorn. Gave me quite the visual.
Also, mankind somewhat reverts back into smaller nomadic tribes, and often wars with one another in competition for dwindling supplies. In this terrible world, a young teenager comes to age and finds himself and it’s quite moving despite how messed up everything is.
“A Serving of Nomu Sashimi” is about a salesman invited to a special restaurant with his high scoring coworkers, who let him in on the secret of their success. I won’t spoil what that is, but oh man this story. I imagine this one would be the attention grabber and the one people remember the most. It’s so dark and imaginative and that ending… This is one of those stories you want to talk about but can’t cause you’ll ruin the fun.
“Those Who Watch From On High”, the last one I’ll pick out was my favorite. We follow Bruce, a drone operator in the military. He is tasked with watching the same patches of the Afhaghni desert for twelve-hour shifts and his job is mind-numbing and boring. Until of course, he is ordered to pull the trigger on a target there. He hates his job, and his commanding officer and his inner dialogue and insights about everything were excellent.
He watches a little boy, who he continually remarks on having perfect teeth. You find out his backstory, and why he becomes so fixated on this boy, and everything is so perfectly paced and revealed to the reader I thought. Such a great story about a man losing his mind to past trauma.
Well, I could be here writing about this one all day. There are sixteen stories and so much going on in each one. There’s also a gunslinger battling alien creatures, a Beauty and the Beast like story, only the prince becomes an undead creature that craves flesh, even one about a grandfather telling his grandson about the time he and his hunting buddies encountered and fought Bigfoot…
Just a great collection, and with the varied plots, there is something for everyone to enjoy. The author had a lot of ideas and pulled them all off in my opinion. If you like dark fiction, horror, and short stories, this one is a must-read.
I was worried when I started this book because the very first story in the collection was my least favorite (a global warming dystopian thing that moves too slowly), but I read on, and I’m glad I did because I loved the very next story. Overall, I enjoyed the collection with my favorite three stories being:
“Last Days of the Gunslinger, John Amos” because it has the scariest creatures. They are sharp-teethed, big, purple things. Eek!
“Dreams of a Little Suicide” because of how disturbing it is (yes, suicide) when dark subjects are juxtaposed with The Wizard of Oz.
And “Last Night” because it’s an artsy werewolf story. The universe is frozen in time, and Earth has stopped spinning. Permanent darkness, permanent cold, permanent full moon, and werewolves.
I am astounded by the variety of topics from the aforementioned purple creatures to a mournful American soldier in Afghanistan to Bigfoot. Guignard’s ideas are fresh. Even the werewolf story when Guignard tells it seems like a brand new idea.
Guignard’s prose is neither overdone nor minimalistic. It’s efficient, has a masculine vibe, and is particularly engaging in “Last Days of the Gunslinger, John Amos.” To me, his prose feels sluggish during the longer stories, but I realize that’s just a style preference.
If you like efficient prose in stories that move at a literary pace, and if you like fresh monster/ghost/dystopian ideas, you will like this collection.