Hey everyone, this is just to announce that Stone Gods, Adam Golaski’s new collection of strange and horrific stories that has been on pre-order for the last two months, officially releases on Tuesday, 1/30/24. I we I will be sending out the pre-orders on that date, any new orders from then will go out immediately. We received the shipment of books last week and they look great, I’m excited for them to make their way into the hands of readers.
If you don’t have your copy, you can buy one directly from NO at our homepage. If you’re a bookseller interested in carrying the book, reach out to me at john.w.thompson1986 (@) gmail.com, our terms are very favorable.
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’s hometown, 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.
Adam is an unsung master of the modern strange story, and I’m proud to be publishing this, his second collection of horror fiction. You can read an interview with Adam over at Plutonian Press, and conversations from the newsletters of David Surface and Christopher Slatsky. You can hear him read his story “Distant Signals”, from Mooncalves, over at The Outer Dark.
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 is an original… The strangeness of his fiction is palpable as we journey seamlessly from an ordinary world intensely described (dead wasps hanging by their stingers from your jeans, heels shining like cranberry candy) to hallucinogenic hells and then back again… These tales are masterful explorations into alienation and disconnection.
– Steve Rasnic Tem, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Ubo and The Man on the Ceiling (with Melanie Tem)
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