Ratings8
Average rating4
"I want to be like John Langan when I grow up, okay? He blends meticulously crafted traditional narratives with joyous genre-bending and narrative rule-breaking. His stories are fiercely smart, timely, timeless, heartbreaking, and of course, flat-out scary. Langan fearlessly commits to his monsters, his characters, his readers, to his vision of the horror story and the messed-up, broken, frightening world we inhabit. Wide, Carnivorous Sky, indeed."-Paul Tremblay, author of The Little Sleep and Swallowing a Donkey's Eye. John Langan has, in the last few years, established himself as one of the leading voices in contemporary horror literature. Gifted with a supple and mellifluous prose style, an imagination that can conjure up clutching terrors with seeming effortlessness, and a thorough knowledge of the rich heritage of weird fiction, Langan has already garnered his share of accolades. This new collection of nine substantial stories includes such masterworks as "Technicolor," an ingenious riff on Poe's "Masque of the Red Death"; "How the Day Runs Down," a gripping tale of the undead; and "The Shallows," a powerful tale of the Cthulhu Mythos. The capstone to the collection is a previously unpublished novella of supernatural terror, "Mother of Stone." With an introduction by Jeffrey Ford and an afterword by Laird Barron.
Reviews with the most likes.
Were dogs and vampires
dark academic research
crab, your new best friend.
Like every collection of short stories this was a bit up and down for me, but the highs vastly outweighed the lows, particularly the final story, Mother of Stone, the perfect mix of mythology, academia, body horror, and the uncanny that I didn't know I needed. John Langan's writing is lush and inventive and visceral, deliciously self-aware and very reminiscent of the horror I read and loved as a teenager in the nineties.
“This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, and not with a whimper, but with the bleak gusto of a low-budget horror movie.”
A couple of standout stories and great writing style.
Kids 3/5
How the Day Runs Down 2/5
Technicolor 3/5
The Wide, Carnivorous Sky 3/5
City of the Dog 5/5
The Shallows 3/5
The Revel 2/5
June, 1987. Hitchhiking. Mr. Norris. 3/5
Mother of Stone 4/5