In That Endlessness, Our End

By: Gemma Files

Narrated by: Deanna Anthony, Neil Hellegers, Steven Jay Cohen, Bronson Pinchot, Andi Arndt, Chelsea Stephens, Zura Johnson, Sarah Beth Pfeifer

Come closer, friend. Let me tell you a story.

Heard the one about the Airbnb that eats your dreams or the iron-crowned king who preys on his own bloodline from the air, still smoldering centuries after being burnt alive? How about the cloudy antique bottle you can wish your excess rage inside, or that crooked alley down which something waits to replace your disappointing child with a far more pleasant facsimile? We all know the truth, especially in times like these—in an anxiety-ridden, sleepless world such as ours, it’s only ever our very worst dreams that come true. Here streets empty out and people pull themselves apart like amoebas, breeding murderous doppelgangers from their own flesh; houses haunt, ideas possess, and a cold and alien moon stares down, whispering that it’s time to spawn. New myths rise and ancient evils descend. From the seemingly mundane terrors of a city just like yours to all the most dark and distant places of a truly terrible universe, nothing is as it seems … not even that dimly-recalled cinematic memory you’ve been chasing all these years, the one you think might be just something you stumbled upon while flipping through channels after midnight. The one that still disturbs you enough to raise a cold sweat all over your body, whenever you try to will its details clear.

Hot on the heels of her 2018 This Is Horror Award–winning short story collection Spectral Evidence, critically horror author Gemma Files compiles fifteen more of her most startling recent nightmares—a creepily seductive downward spiral of dark poetry and existential dread, entirely suitable to the slow apocalypse going on all around us. So take your mind off your troubles and send it somewhere the rules still operate, if only to punish those who violate them.

©2021 Grimscribe Press (P)2023 Blackstone Publishing

Solid collection, if a bit repetitive

I enjoyed this collection quite a bit, it generally maintains a high quality and I enjoy the author's distinct voice in writing. My main complaint was that the stories often felt like they were treading similar ground in their content, and often fell into similarly abrupt ambiguous endings. These aren't problems for the stories on their own, it's just something that starts to stick out while reading them back to back.

Another small gripe was in the narration - most of them are ok, but I feel like I've heard stronger performances from the readers I recognized. And I felt like there was one bad choice on the production end, where a character spends their entire story using a vocal modifier of some sort. The production carried that through to the narration, so the reader spends the entire story using a grating characteristic that's just unpleasant to listen to. I'd rather just sacrifice some "realism" and have them read it normally.

Oh well, those are minor complaints, it's a good collection overall and a solid recommend.

Another Great Collection

While I keep hoping Files will produce another novel, she keeps writing and releasing excellent short stories. There’s something about her dry, laconic tone coving themes of desperation, defeat, and bleak acceptance that really makes her stories hit hard. “Cut Frame” and “The Church in the Mountains” return to the subject of Canadian film, “Look Up” is a great mix of social anxiety and bewildered horror, and “Cuckoo” ends the collection with biting anger. If you’ve never tried Files, a couple of her stories should be available on the podcast Pseudopod, which may spark your interest.

Good ideas, not-great stories

As the title here suggests, there were a lot of good ideas, but the telling of the stories just doesn’t do it. Instead of actually seeing the characters, I see someone sitting on her laptop writing them, if that makes any sense. The first narrator is… not good. There’s way too much “performance” going on there. The wobbly voice on the second story just grates at you. I understand that the text says that the character distorted her voice, but it also says this is a transcript, so… not necessary and doesn’t add anything useful. Overall, you can skip this one. Read descriptions of the stories, they’ll give you about as much as the stories themselves.