Concerning Those Who Have Fallen Asleep
Ghost Stories
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
"Concerning Those Who Have Fallen Asleep is weird in all the best ways possible . . . These tales are plucked from bizarre worlds, from the blood of shadow creatures, from the tears of angels. Let them haunt you.” —Gabino Iglesias, author of The Devil Takes You Home
A collection of short stories moving through time and place, exploring the spaces where we haunt each other and ourselves through our choices, our institutions, and our dreams.
Adam Soto, author of the debut novel This Weightless World, which Robin Sloan called “The social novel for the 21st century,” returns with Concerning Those Who Have Fallen Asleep.
In the title story, a one-armed Harlem Hellfighter goes in search of his specially altered military uniform while Influenza ravages Philadelphia. In “Sleepy Things,” a man is bound to the bedside of his comatose girlfriend who haunts his mother’s dreams. In “Wren & Riley,” a couple travels to Wyoming to visit a childhood friend who killed her abusive husband. And in “The Vegetable Church,” a pair of Syrian sisters, refugees of the civil war, find themselves at a crossroads in the home of their European hosts while their dead father whispers to them words of comfort and guidance.
The stories in Concerning Those Who Have Fallen Asleep, strange and unsettling, explore the quiet spaces where the living and the dead alike haunt one another through their choices, dreams, and institutions.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Soto (The Weightless World) returns with an imaginative and otherworldly collection. In "Ocelots," a fatherless high school kid misses out on a party in the Indiana Dunes after his mother forces him to join her on a mysterious trip to Texas. In "YA," two bookish juniors at a magnet school in Chicago find their bond tested during their involvement in a literary AI project, which eventually writes a book about their lives. In the title story, a period piece set in Philadelphia on the eve of the 1918 flu epidemic, a 19-year-old domestic helper named Hanna Schröder works at an estate, where her father, Abel, is a tailor. Abel has lately been lying low because of the flu, and Bingham Tomlin, a WWI veteran who lost his arm in the war and is impatient to get back his mended uniform, breaks into Hanna and Abel's house when he thinks it's empty. In these well-crafted stories, Soto evocatively shows how the characters are at turns mystified by inexplicable experiences or haunted by burdensome pasts. Bingham, for example, becomes so trapped in memories of 1918 and WWI while visiting Hanna's father decades later that he must, as Soto writes, "run through the front door in search of 1941." Readers will be enriched by the way this work thoroughly investigates the human heart.
