Terrible Things

Product Description

Thirteen stories in which people reach the limits of their known worlds. Stories where ghosts take many forms, where the monsters are sometimes human, sometimes not. Stories where desperate people find out what they’re capable of, and husbands and wives traveling on dark roads discover how lost they truly are. Stories where the discoveries people make come at a cost, and crossing over into the unknown can be both liberating and terrifying.

Review

“Suffused with atmosphere, populated by horrors half-seen and then, in startling moments of revelation, seen all too clearly, David Surface’s stories stay firmly rooted in ghost story tradition. But where those oddly comforting classical terrors bubble up from grief or loss or regret or revenge, the menaces in ‘Terrible Things’ sprout from a disturbingly contemporary sense of bewilderment. These are the ghosts of lockdown drills and frayed marriages, identity confusion and forced retirement and that constant crackling hum of a world tilting out of true, and therefore new and now and terrifying all over again.” –Glen Hirshberg, author of the Motherless Children trilogy.
“Each of the stories contained within ‘Terrible Things’ is a small treasure to be marveled at. David Surface unpicks the seam of humanity to reveal the necrosis of our terrible secrets – the harms we visit upon one another, the lies we tell – but also that quiet hope that beneath it all there might still be something worth saving. Compassionate, astute and beautifully crafted, these are horror stories with soul.” –Laura Mauro, author of Sing Your Sadness Deep.
“David Surface is like no one else. His fiction has a precision of detail that is always unsettling, and often heart-breaking. One of our greatest contemporary writers.” –Ralph Robert Moore, author of Ghosters, As Dead as Me, and Father Figure.
David Surface knows home is an alien place and ‘Terrible Things’ is your expedition report – you’d do well to read it. –Adam Golaski, author of Color Plates and Worse Than Myself.
“Location, location, location. Or, to borrow M.R. James’ phrasing, places that are prolific in suggestion. One of the things I like about the stories collected in ‘Terrible Things’ – and I like many things about them – is the care David Surface has taken in what is sometimes called world-building. This is often taken to mean grand endeavours on a Game of Thrones scale, genealogies and maps and all the rest of it, but at its deftest and most effective, it is the delineation of place in a few well-chosen descriptive passages. Another of the things I like is that, having constructed these imaginary gardens, David proceeds to fill them with some all-too-real toads. Character and setting are two of the three pillars on which the weird story is established, so it’s pleasing to discover that the third pillar – let’s call it narrative enchantment – is also present, raising up some remarkable tales for your attention. If you feel at home in the October country of the imagination, you ought to enjoy these stories, in that complicated yet at the same time instinctive way we enjoy the best weird fiction. This is David’s first collection, and I’m happy to recommend it, on the strict understanding that he comes up with another, as soon as he likes.” –Steve Duffy, author of The Moment of Panic.