It’s been a long, weird road to get here, but Adam Golaski’s second collection of stories, Stone Gods, is now available for preorder at the NO home page: https://no-press.org.
NO Press would not have come to be had I not reached out to Adam about his extraordinary first collection, Worse Than Myself. I had never read anything quite like it. Through our correspondence, Mooncalves first took shape as an idea, and thus NO. I always had the notion that I would return to publish more of his work, and I’m profoundly proud and excited to do so.
Stone Gods comprises 15 stories over 224 pages. In “Stone Head”, a man waiting for his family to return home finds his world and himself changed by the appearance of a strange monument in his backyard. In “The Great Blind God Passed Through Us,” a girl visits her family in a village where justice demands the observance of old customs. In “Wild Dogs”, strange animals stalk a man whose night on the town goes from bad to worse. In “Open Houses”, a skater dares himself to ride through a cemetery, only to find within it a strange replica of his own home.
For me, the work in this collection strikes an uncanny balance between the most unnerving scenes of David Lynch and Robert Aickman’s tales of unaccountable disturbances affecting regular people.
Stone Gods is a first printing of 300 professionally printed, perfect-bound paperbacks, featuring cover art by the wonderful Anna MacLeod and design from HR Hegnauer, who also designed Mooncalves. This one comes with a luxury matte cover stock that is quite beautiful, if I can say so myself.
You can read an interview with Adam over at Plutonian Press. You can hear him read his story “Distant Signals”, from Mooncalves, over at The Outer Dark.
Some advance praise for Stone Gods:
“Golaski’s exploration of the human experience through the supernatural is immersive and self-exploratory. The final story, ‘A Rainbow Summer,’ employs storytelling itself as a potent instrument. A father breathes life into the animals in Noah’s Ark, masterfully capturing the very essence of Stone Gods and what Golaski achieves within these memorable, sharply crafted stories.”
– Publisher’s Weekly Booklife, “editor’s pick” review
“In measured prose, Golaski’s work recalls that of H.P. Lovecraft with surreal shades of Leonora Carrington’s or Silvina Ocampo’s work. Logic goes out the window in these atmospheric, symbolic tales. A celebration of the strange, cleverly told across stylistic forms.”
– Kirkus
“Adam Golaski’s Stone Gods is an essential entry into the modern canon of the strange story. With hypnotic prose and bold stylistic strokes, these stories poke holes through reality’s thin spaces, destabilizing the dream of normalcy and letting the unknowable peer inside. By turns unsettling, horrifying, and beguiling, there is no safe space inside these pages or — once you’ve read Stone Gods — outside of them either.”
– Gordon B. White, author of As Summer’s Mask Slips, And Other Disruptions
“Adam Golaski’s Stone Gods is a subversive distillation of literary dexterity and allegory, both personal and universal. By the time we notice one of life’s anomalies, readers will find that Golaski has already captured it, placed it under a cerebral bell jar, and altered his specimen into something both instructive and alchemically unconventional.”
—Clint Smith, author of The Skeleton Melodies
There will be a digitel edition eventually, right?
Yes! And a hardcover, probably in that order.