Strange Folk You’ll Never Meet - A. A. Balaskovits
Product Details:
Paperback : 154 pages
ISBN: 9781951631130
About the Book:
This new collection of unusual, fabulist fiction leads you down strange paths for dark encounters with familiar fairy tales, odd people from history, and weirdos who may be living right next door. Among the characters in these bizarre stories, a starving beauty finds a beast who can save her village, a man eats everything in sight but is never full, a woman gives birth to bloody animal parts, and a daughter is forced to dance every night to the reenactment of her fathers’ murder. These tales invite you to spend time with people who, in the maddest of circumstances, chew their way forward. With elements of psychological horror, sly humor, and the fantastic, these stories will burrow under your skin, haunt your dreams, and make you wonder what worlds lie just beyond that tiny hole in the wall.
About the Author:
A.A. Balaskovits is the author of Magic for Unlucky Girls and Strange Folk You’ll Never Meet (SFWP). Her work has been published in Best Small Fictions, Indiana Review, The Missouri Review, Story and many others. Find her on Twitter @aabalaskovits and at aabalaskovits.com
“A fugue of hunger, consumption, and motherhood unites the 21 fabulist shorts in Balaskovits’s exquisite second collection (after Magic for Unlucky Girls). Balaskovits uses modern sensibilities and scarcity to subvert classic genre tropes, rendering them tenderly, brutally human: the anticapitalist “The Tale of a Hungry Beauty” offers a profound deconstruction of Beauty and the Beast in deceptively simple prose, and the ominous “Strange Folk” refracts the concept of a small-town haunting in a way that’s both heartrending and genuine. The carnivaleque historical fantasy “The Mad Monk’s Weeping Daughter” and the soft but fierce “Get Bent” examine women’s pain as a complex, changeable state that can be exploited—or reclaimed. Though repeated themes cause several of the shorter vignettes to blur together, Balaskovits’s prose never fails to impress, capturing the cadence of fairy tales while bringing a literary sense of detail and subtext to clearly loved genre tropes. This accomplished collection interlocks the horrific and the wondrous through deliciously dry humor, resulting in a unique must-read for fans of Angela Carter, Maria Dahvana Headley, and A.S. Byatt.”
“The stories in Strange Folk You’ll Never Meet are short, many just three to four pages long, but each one is viscerally resonant. There’s a sense of the corporeal in these retellings of fairy tales and unusual perspectives of historical figures, with many of the stories linking back to ideas of the physical body. Both hunger and pregnancy have thematic roles, as does the sometimes violent nature of children. Written with a darkly sparkling lyricism, Balaskovits’ collection is gory, gorgeous, and like nothing else you’ll read.”
“Filled with feminist subtext, Balaskovits explore issues relating to mothers and motherhood, domesticity, and familial relationships to reveal the darkest impulses of human behavior. I’m captivated by the surreal, unsettling, and at times frightening world of these horror fables. This is a daring collection.”
“In this weirdly wonderful collection, Balaskovits takes old, familiar archetypes and turns them on their heads, giving an extra spin for good measure. Not your great-grandmother’s fireside tales, these stories are slyly comedic one moment, viscerally horrifying the next, and evermore gorgeously eerie. ”
“Haunted by terrifying, strange children; gruesome moments of devouring dirt and blood; mothers grasping at straws and women seeking revenge...the gems in this collection make it worth a look for adult fantasy readers who enjoy fairy tale retellings that have a sprinkling of horror mixed in.”
“If you’re like me, and you always enjoy a good tale, you might guess that you’re going to have a clear sense of what you’ve got yourself into when you read, in a likely addictive way, the stories in A.A. Balaskovits’ new volume. But you will be wrong. Yes, these tellings cast their spell, but laughter won’t keep to the usual spots. In fact, nothing is really contained. People break out of their stories. Bodies slip and disengage. Words go free. You might get anything in the pages of this book. You might run into the kinds of things you’d have thought were consigned to the darkness of your unremembered dreams. If you’re like me, you’ll be wowing quietly after the reading is done. You’ll be going all evangelical here. Read this, people! Read!”