Minotaur: stories

The author very kindly sent me an eARC to check out and I’m glad he did!

Here the author has presented a set of seven fantastically different stories. However, each showcases the author’s dexterity and writing know how. All throughout my reading I kept coming back to this singular thought, wow Hanson can write.

A terrible fire leaves nothing behind but the back door which mysteriously stands as a reminder of what was. A PhD student heads out for six weeks of study—a breakup day of leaves her feeling as if she needs something more, but is the trip worth it? A red lichenous plague spreads through the coasts creating a new kind of apocalypse—can they get to safety in time? The title story, Minotaur, tells the tale of a boy finding or perhaps losing his true self as he becomes one with the Labyrinthine basement under his stilted home. A grieving mother and a lost observer on a dead boat. A hole in the ground with mystifying properties to the water within. And the last is this sort of culty western feeling story with an abandoned mine that’s perhaps not so empty.

While none of the stories above are inked by any characters or plots, and most of these are kind of a general to speculative fiction, there is this kind of creeping, meandering undertone of horror that I felt throughout reading all of them. This made reading as a collection make so much sense to me, and the dread only built as I waited for something explosive to happen.

A great example of what the author is capable of, I definitely need to check out a full length novel next.