While the Black Stars Burn
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Lucy Snyder’s stories are the sort that carry you away to unusual places, usually dark ones, and this collection is a perfect example. As the follow-up to the Bram Stoker Award winning collection Soft Apocalypses, it contains plenty of darkly imaginative tales. Many of these stories, including the title piece, are heavily influenced by the work of H.P. Lovecraft and The King in Yellow mythos. They whisper madly among each other creating weird echoes. Like the black stars of theoretical astronomy they are dense entities born from polarization so strong that instead of collapsing into nothingness, a black hole, they instead form dark constellations burning dimly with spectral light.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Malevolent lineages and emotionally fraught familial relationships propel the plots of most of the 13 genre-spanning stories in Snyder's strong collection. In "Approaching Lavender," a woman paints a self-portrait according to her needy husband's instructions and finds that she has created a doppelganger who threatens her existence. In the diptych formed by "The Abomination of Fensmere" and "The Girl with the Star-Stained Soul," a young girl who visits her long-estranged family on her mother's side is appalled to learn that she's being groomed as a conduit for the liberation of Lovecraftian horrors. The title tale concerns a violinist who discovers that the sonatas written for her by her abusive father are tools for trapping her in a nightmarish otherworld. Snyder (Soft Apocalypses) excels in her depictions of characters struggling desperately and often futilely to extricate themselves from terrifying snares set by loved ones. Readers will find her stories a cut above most other tales of interpersonal and supernatural horror.
