Epeolatry Book Review: Only the Living are Lost by Simon Strantzas
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Title: Only the Living are Lost
Author: Simon Strantzas
Genre: Weird Horror
Publisher: Hippocampus Press
Release Date: 3rd November, 2023
Synopsis: A new collection of 11 stories from one of the leading luminaries of the current wave of new weird fiction. Canadian author Simon Strantzas has been acknowledged as a key writer in this evolving area, thanks to a succession of insidiously disturbing shorter stories. This compilation, his first in five years, shows why.
Avoid toxic relationships. Or you could find yourself sliced to pieces by vengeful doppelgangers of your wronged spouse. Or complicit in the hollowing-out of your daughter’s soul. Or pursued by something like a giant blood tick with the face of your murdered friend. Emotional trauma and psychological deterioration assume unsettling masks in this latest collection by Canadian author Simon Strantzas.
Strantzas put himself firmly on the map as one of the leading voices of the current generation of the New Weird. Not that the eleven tales of varying lengths in this new collection veer far from the horrific and unsettling. As the leadin suggests, most of these stories concern inexplicable and hideous phenomena that arise out of crushingly mundane and all too believable psychic traps. Few of the victims or protagonists are entirely innocent, but none of them deserve the nemeses that overwhelm them like a swarm of Kafka’s cockroaches. It’s hard to imagine who would be deserving. The objective correlatives that emerge to represent those psychic situations – or simply to allude to them cryptically – are certainly monstrous enough. And as with Kafka, there’s the sense of unreasonably extreme punishment and retribution for obscure and disproportionately trivial sins and failings. Even the most marginally positive tale – in terms of its outcome for the protagonist – the lacerating switchback ride through the haunted underbelly of Port Said (“the sort of between place that everybody without a home ends up in at one or another”) in “Clay Pigeons,” brings escape but little redemption. “Let’s for once pretend that we aren’t angry or scared or worried or unhappy,” says the lead figure in “Doused by Night” – and that’s before the really vile stuff rolls into view.
The eleven stories vary from very brief items to almost novelette length, like in the case of “Clay Pigeons” and they date from 2015 to 2021. All but that story have appeared previously in various venues – one as a chapbook – and hence might be familiar to avid aficionados of weird prose. Nonetheless, it’s great to have them brought together, especially since it’s been five years since Strantzas’s previous collection, Nothing is Everything. “Black Bequeathments,” the chapbook story, was shortlisted for a Shirley Jackson Award. Most are set within the circle of the family or a small group of friends or intimates; those that aren’t, like “Circle of Blood” or “Clay Pigeons,” tend to draw more on thriller prototypes. In past interviews, Strantzas cited both the classic ghost story tradition of Walter de la Mare, E.F. Benson and so on, and the noir legacy of Dashiel Hammett as inspirations. The deft transition from the everyday hurts and insufficiencies of these starting points into the unnatural and horrific is one of the pleasures of the collection.
There’s also an open-air setting for many of the stories, to a degree that might be classed as folk horror. “The King of Stones” and “Antripuu” particularly border this sub-genre. Strantzas has spoken in the past of his affinity to nature, which he links with his Canadian roots. This is definitely nature more in the sense of panic terror and mysterium tremendum than it is in pantheistic veneration.
This writer’s tale’s border on several genres while inhabiting their own space between. The author has also said in the past that he looks to evoke an air of awe or the ineffable in his renditions of the uncanny, but it’s fair to say that few of his conceptions would inspire a sense of wonderment rather than stark fear.
Strantzas has said that he won’t write any novels, preferring the crystalline focus of the short story, so his periodic output of short story collections is what fans have grown accustomed to. With one longer tale, it’s also a chance to sample his gifts at greater length. It’s certainly worth the wait. Hippocampus Press, the excellent independent house responsible for so much superb weird fiction, has done its sterling job of quality design and production. After this, fans and followers will be waiting with bated breath and more than a few shivers for the next exciting instalments.
/5
Available from Hippocampus Press, Bookshop, and amazon.
- About the Author
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Paul StJohn Mackintosh is a Scottish author, poet, journalist, games writer, and media professional. Born in 1961, he was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, has lived and worked in Asia and Central Europe, and currently lives in France near Geneva.
Paul’s first collection of short stories, Black Propaganda, appeared from H. Harksen Productions in 2016. His second story collection, The Echo of The Sea & other Strange War Stories, was published by Egaeus Press in 2017. His short novel The Three Books was published by Black Shuck Books in 2018. His short story “The People of the Island,” in Eldritch Horrors: Dark Tales, from H. Harksen Productions, received an Honorable Mention from Ellen Datlow in her Best Horror of the Year Volume Two list for 2009.
Paul’s acclaimed first poetry collection, The Golden Age, was published by Bellew Publishing in 1997, and reissued on Kindle in 2013. His second poetry collection, The Musical Box of Wonders, was published by H. Harksen Productions in 2011. His sonnet cycle The Great Arcana: Sonnets for the 22 Trumps of the Tarot, and his ballad cycle Black Ballads, based on traditional Scottish myths and legends, were both published in 2022.
Paul’s Lovecraftian and dark fiction, and criticism, has appeared in numerous formats and journals worldwide, including Occult Detective Magazine, Weirdbook, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Strange Horizons, the Financial Times, the UK Independent, the Times Literary Supplement, Arts of Asia, Strange Horizons, A Broad Scot, and elsewhere. His co-translations from the Japanese, done with Maki Sugiyama, include The Poems of Nakahara Chuya (1993) and Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids (1995) by the 1994 Nobel Prize-winner Kenzaburo Oe, which won a Japan Festival Award. He also co-translated Superstrings (2007) by Dinu Flamand from Romanian with Olga Dunca. Paul is a former Executive Committee member of the Translators Association of the Society of Authors of Great Britain. He was rated #1 of “The 12 Publishing Shakers You Should Be Following” by The Independent Publishing Magazine. He is also the official clan poet of Clan Mackintosh.
