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The Ones That Got Away
These thirteen stories are our own lives, inside out.
A boy's summer romance doesn't end in that good kind of heartbreak, but in blood. A girl on a fishing trip makes a friend in the woods who's exactly what she needs, except then that friend follows her back to the city. A father hears a voice through his baby monitor that shouldn't be possible, but now he can't stop listening. A woman finds out that the shipwreck wasn't the disaster, but who she's shipwrecked with. A big brother learns just what he will, and won't, trade for one night of sleep.
From prison guards making unholy alliances to snake-oil men in the Old West doling out justice, these stories carve down into the body of the mind, into our most base fears and certainties, and there's no anesthetic. Turn the light on if you want, but that just makes for more shadows.
A boy's summer romance doesn't end in that good kind of heartbreak, but in blood. A girl on a fishing trip makes a friend in the woods who's exactly what she needs, except then that friend follows her back to the city. A father hears a voice through his baby monitor that shouldn't be possible, but now he can't stop listening. A woman finds out that the shipwreck wasn't the disaster, but who she's shipwrecked with. A big brother learns just what he will, and won't, trade for one night of sleep.
From prison guards making unholy alliances to snake-oil men in the Old West doling out justice, these stories carve down into the body of the mind, into our most base fears and certainties, and there's no anesthetic. Turn the light on if you want, but that just makes for more shadows.
256 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 15, 2010
299 people are currently reading
8151 people want to read
About the author
Stephen Graham Jones
236 books14.8k followersStephen Graham Jones is the NYT bestselling author thirty-five or so books. He really likes werewolves and slashers. Favorite novels change daily, but Valis and Love Medicine and Lonesome Dove and It and The Things They Carried are all usually up there somewhere. Stephen lives in Boulder, Colorado. It's a big change from the West Texas he grew up in.
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October 4, 2023
‘And then all of us forgot how to sleep.’
It is time to begin my favorite seasonal celebration: geek out with a bunch of spooky stories and then regret it in two weeks when they’ve gotten under my skin and everything is unsettling at night. Call it my pagan autumn ritual as I shake like a leaf, and I certainly will be now because Stephen Graham Jones is a modern master of horror and The Ones That Got Away, a collection of his early stories, is a frightfest of fun. Jones feels so at home in familiar realms of horror that he quickly rearranges the furniture and customizes the decor into something fresh that lets the fear inside in unexpected ways. These stories, predominantly featuring working class settings and characters, often are reflections back into childhood, pulling the reader back into that pure, primal terror born from the uninhibitated imaginations of children and examining moments that cast shadows even into the character’s adulthoods. Sinister and surprising, The Ones That Got Away is an intense collection that will keep you turning pages and checking under the bed.
‘When you’re twelve, your superstitions are pure like they’ll never be again,’ says one of Jones’ protagonists, and this idea is key to so much of the charm in these stories. In the notes section at the end of the book (which is honestly one of my favorite parts of the book and makes me just really enjoy the author as a person), Jones talks of an upbringing on Stephen King novels and the influence is evident though Jones does manage to make everything his own. Like the vibes from books like It or stories such as The Body, many of the stories here (most notably Monsters and Raphael) are immersed in a sense of nostalgia, reflecting back on the people and places of days lost to time such as ‘the hamburger joint that used to be the concession stand for the drive-in, when there’d been a drive-in,’ for example. I’ve always found stories set like this rather comforting as they do trigger nostalgia, though it is interesting to consider that the nostalgia is for reading books that utilize this nostalgia that are references to an era just before my own childhood—a feeling of nostalgia for someone else’s nostalgia, if you will. The sense of place is practically a side-character in these stories, an era dying away along with the loss of innocence that interrupts the stories.
It is precisely because of this cozy veneer that the creeping horror is able to be so shocking and alarming. Raphael opens with some fantastic coming-of-age narrative building with middle schoolers who band together while feeling themselves ‘invisible’ to the rest of society, all crushing on the one girl in their group and telling scary stories before a moment of terror changes their lives forever (well, those who still have a life after). Monsters, a favorite in the collection, is another cute coming-of-age framing around a summer fling between two young people where the tension about if they kiss or not to end the summer is dramatically and violently tossed aside when a vampire enters the picture. I love it. It’s hitting you with fear right in the most comforting of narratives, something I found Jones to do quite well in his novels and second short story collection.
‘What I was doing was willing myself to grow up.’
The moments of terror in many of these stories become the cautionary tale for the survivors, such as in the title story where the narrator admits without the death of his friend he may have continued to spiral down a path of drug and degredation. Childhood cool rarely translates into adjusted adult though there is something beautiful about when Jones describes those moments of coolness in the calm before the coming storms that would linger in the memory of bystanders, the self eternal in youth in their minds:
However, we find many of these characters instead wind up the reason to correct course and survive. ‘I might never have gone on to college without the warning he’d been,’ the narrator says in Til the Morning Comes, a shockingly effective tale about being scared of an uncle’s Grateful Dead posters as a child, or the repeated idea of survivors guilt that ‘It’s a good life. One I don’t deserve, one I’m stealing, but still, mine’. As most of the stories are told in the retrospective, such as the showstopper Raphael where the narrator recounts the possible stories of what happened on one violent and tragic day and realizes ‘the other story I told myself was that I could make up for it all,’ living his life as a great father in response to the abuse a friend had received from her own, and we see how the interjections of terror resonate across an entire lifetime. While these are scary stories, there is something so literary too them, something unique and engaging that make them feel almost like classics the first time you read them.
‘Isn’t that what fairy tales are, anyway? What we tell ourselves about ourselves, just in an indirect way, with elves and magic and monsters to make it all safe?’
There is a wide variety of stories here too, which adds to the fun because you are never quite sure what you will get next. A boy learns the lengths his father would go to help them survive, teen mean girls find a weight loss method that has deadly consequences, a snake-oil salesman faces off in a zombified wild west, a deadly rodeo bull might be the trapped soul of a serial killer, and even baby monitors and dolphins are used to instill fear. Jones is able to genre bend and blend in really interesting ways, and even when some of the stories fall flat it is still fun to see him experimenting. One particularly well-done story is Captain’s Lament, where a tale becomes the backstory to a well-known urban legend, but Jones navigates it so well that the surprise twist is when you connect it to what story he is referencing. I was impressed.
As most of these stories are collected from various magazine and anthology publications, there is a bit of repeated themes or techniques, though Jones is effective with them so it hardly matters. I do enjoy the way he often tells you what is coming before it happens, but without context so it registers more like a dire warning it is too late to heed. It is interesting, too, that the title of the collection is The Ones That Got Away though the story it references is titled Ones Who Got Away, but whatever. While I found After the People Lights Have Gone Off to be a slightly stronger collection, this was incredible fun and full of lots of spooky good times. These are stories that are certain to get under your skin.
3.75/5
‘I swallowed, my eyes full with what had happened, with who, or what, I’d led to Elaine, with what he might be picking from his teeth right now in whatever dark place he was holed up in for the daylight hours, and then, to make up for it, to start making up for it, I draped my new granddad’s arm across my shoulders, to help him up the hill, and understood a little even then, I think, about what it might be like to have spent your whole life alone, so that just one person reaching up to help you along could mean the world, and save your life, and make everything all right for a few moments.’
It is time to begin my favorite seasonal celebration: geek out with a bunch of spooky stories and then regret it in two weeks when they’ve gotten under my skin and everything is unsettling at night. Call it my pagan autumn ritual as I shake like a leaf, and I certainly will be now because Stephen Graham Jones is a modern master of horror and The Ones That Got Away, a collection of his early stories, is a frightfest of fun. Jones feels so at home in familiar realms of horror that he quickly rearranges the furniture and customizes the decor into something fresh that lets the fear inside in unexpected ways. These stories, predominantly featuring working class settings and characters, often are reflections back into childhood, pulling the reader back into that pure, primal terror born from the uninhibitated imaginations of children and examining moments that cast shadows even into the character’s adulthoods. Sinister and surprising, The Ones That Got Away is an intense collection that will keep you turning pages and checking under the bed.
‘When you’re twelve, your superstitions are pure like they’ll never be again,’ says one of Jones’ protagonists, and this idea is key to so much of the charm in these stories. In the notes section at the end of the book (which is honestly one of my favorite parts of the book and makes me just really enjoy the author as a person), Jones talks of an upbringing on Stephen King novels and the influence is evident though Jones does manage to make everything his own. Like the vibes from books like It or stories such as The Body, many of the stories here (most notably Monsters and Raphael) are immersed in a sense of nostalgia, reflecting back on the people and places of days lost to time such as ‘the hamburger joint that used to be the concession stand for the drive-in, when there’d been a drive-in,’ for example. I’ve always found stories set like this rather comforting as they do trigger nostalgia, though it is interesting to consider that the nostalgia is for reading books that utilize this nostalgia that are references to an era just before my own childhood—a feeling of nostalgia for someone else’s nostalgia, if you will. The sense of place is practically a side-character in these stories, an era dying away along with the loss of innocence that interrupts the stories.
It is precisely because of this cozy veneer that the creeping horror is able to be so shocking and alarming. Raphael opens with some fantastic coming-of-age narrative building with middle schoolers who band together while feeling themselves ‘invisible’ to the rest of society, all crushing on the one girl in their group and telling scary stories before a moment of terror changes their lives forever (well, those who still have a life after). Monsters, a favorite in the collection, is another cute coming-of-age framing around a summer fling between two young people where the tension about if they kiss or not to end the summer is dramatically and violently tossed aside when a vampire enters the picture. I love it. It’s hitting you with fear right in the most comforting of narratives, something I found Jones to do quite well in his novels and second short story collection.
‘What I was doing was willing myself to grow up.’
The moments of terror in many of these stories become the cautionary tale for the survivors, such as in the title story where the narrator admits without the death of his friend he may have continued to spiral down a path of drug and degredation. Childhood cool rarely translates into adjusted adult though there is something beautiful about when Jones describes those moments of coolness in the calm before the coming storms that would linger in the memory of bystanders, the self eternal in youth in their minds:
‘The girls we never married would still be talking about us. We’d be the standard they measure their husbands against now. The ones who got away.’
However, we find many of these characters instead wind up the reason to correct course and survive. ‘I might never have gone on to college without the warning he’d been,’ the narrator says in Til the Morning Comes, a shockingly effective tale about being scared of an uncle’s Grateful Dead posters as a child, or the repeated idea of survivors guilt that ‘It’s a good life. One I don’t deserve, one I’m stealing, but still, mine’. As most of the stories are told in the retrospective, such as the showstopper Raphael where the narrator recounts the possible stories of what happened on one violent and tragic day and realizes ‘the other story I told myself was that I could make up for it all,’ living his life as a great father in response to the abuse a friend had received from her own, and we see how the interjections of terror resonate across an entire lifetime. While these are scary stories, there is something so literary too them, something unique and engaging that make them feel almost like classics the first time you read them.
‘Isn’t that what fairy tales are, anyway? What we tell ourselves about ourselves, just in an indirect way, with elves and magic and monsters to make it all safe?’
There is a wide variety of stories here too, which adds to the fun because you are never quite sure what you will get next. A boy learns the lengths his father would go to help them survive, teen mean girls find a weight loss method that has deadly consequences, a snake-oil salesman faces off in a zombified wild west, a deadly rodeo bull might be the trapped soul of a serial killer, and even baby monitors and dolphins are used to instill fear. Jones is able to genre bend and blend in really interesting ways, and even when some of the stories fall flat it is still fun to see him experimenting. One particularly well-done story is Captain’s Lament, where a tale becomes the backstory to a well-known urban legend, but Jones navigates it so well that the surprise twist is when you connect it to what story he is referencing. I was impressed.
As most of these stories are collected from various magazine and anthology publications, there is a bit of repeated themes or techniques, though Jones is effective with them so it hardly matters. I do enjoy the way he often tells you what is coming before it happens, but without context so it registers more like a dire warning it is too late to heed. It is interesting, too, that the title of the collection is The Ones That Got Away though the story it references is titled Ones Who Got Away, but whatever. While I found After the People Lights Have Gone Off to be a slightly stronger collection, this was incredible fun and full of lots of spooky good times. These are stories that are certain to get under your skin.
3.75/5
‘I swallowed, my eyes full with what had happened, with who, or what, I’d led to Elaine, with what he might be picking from his teeth right now in whatever dark place he was holed up in for the daylight hours, and then, to make up for it, to start making up for it, I draped my new granddad’s arm across my shoulders, to help him up the hill, and understood a little even then, I think, about what it might be like to have spent your whole life alone, so that just one person reaching up to help you along could mean the world, and save your life, and make everything all right for a few moments.’
October 13, 2015
OH. MY. FUCKING. BRIGHT. SHOOTING. STARS.
This book was INTENSE! My head is still spinning and I will probably NOT turn off my bedroom light when I go to sleep. If, I fall asleep. These are some of the best short horror stories I have ever read. I wish all short story books could be this good. A must read for any horror fan.
This book was INTENSE! My head is still spinning and I will probably NOT turn off my bedroom light when I go to sleep. If, I fall asleep. These are some of the best short horror stories I have ever read. I wish all short story books could be this good. A must read for any horror fan.
April 15, 2011
Holy crap! This is maybe only the second book I ever read that was too intense, too brutal, that I had to stop partway through it and read something else for awhile before picking it back up.
Stephen Graham Jones writes just brilliant, brutal stories here that, though obviously not true, all feel true, with the undeniable credibility of a good urban legend. Even the one about a werewolf fighting a killer whale. Even that one.
They're harsh, disturbing stories, and some of the only stories to ever actually frighten me, to make me uncomfortable. I'd liken them to a sucker punch, but they feel too inevitable to be that, like a blow that you should have seen coming, if only you'd been paying better attention.
This one would've gotten five stars, except that it was so intense that it made it a little bit less pleasant to read.
Stephen Graham Jones writes just brilliant, brutal stories here that, though obviously not true, all feel true, with the undeniable credibility of a good urban legend. Even the one about a werewolf fighting a killer whale. Even that one.
They're harsh, disturbing stories, and some of the only stories to ever actually frighten me, to make me uncomfortable. I'd liken them to a sucker punch, but they feel too inevitable to be that, like a blow that you should have seen coming, if only you'd been paying better attention.
This one would've gotten five stars, except that it was so intense that it made it a little bit less pleasant to read.
September 26, 2018
This author is trying too hard. Struggling to keep each story all fuzzy so that the punchline will appear all sudden and shocking and everything. It's Boring. It's exhausting. It's short stories for crying out loud. At the second story in the book, I was already mega fagged out. The faceplams and the eye rolling out of that one were long. Life shouldn't be this difficult abeg. 😅
At the third story, I was just mega annoyed. Is THIS supposed to be horror or what?? It's just people puking their guts out and stumbling onto mystical secrets by freaking accident and not giving a rat's ass!
Damn. I never imagined horror could be boring. The author has this fixation with puke. At least the first 4 stories...
That fourth story with the high school girls, was that meant to be horror or puke-disgusting? I even had no idea what was going on. The author wanted us to fill in so many spaces. There was a girl with a pool boy with her towel missing. Oral sex? Coitus? Naked star gazing? Author didn't care to say.
By the fifth story, I just wanted the hassle done with, so, I speed-read through all hints the author kept on dropping about what was really going on, and, surprise surprise, it seems I finally got this one. Like, nah, it didn't get away. From me at least. I'm not sure if the bad guy got away, but, author being weirdo he is, he too doesn't know, neither does he care. Apparently someone was poisoning folks. How the poison came to be though...no one cares. Not that anyone should, I'm done with that snooze-fest.
In the sixth story, he kept on leaving all this hints that something horrible was about to happen (remembering when some folks still had their necks attached, remembering when some girl still had all her blood in her body). It was laughable.
Yeah, this one truly got away at 37% into the book, the middle of the 6th story. I've got more interesting books lined up to read. Bye bye.
At the third story, I was just mega annoyed. Is THIS supposed to be horror or what?? It's just people puking their guts out and stumbling onto mystical secrets by freaking accident and not giving a rat's ass!
Damn. I never imagined horror could be boring. The author has this fixation with puke. At least the first 4 stories...
That fourth story with the high school girls, was that meant to be horror or puke-disgusting? I even had no idea what was going on. The author wanted us to fill in so many spaces. There was a girl with a pool boy with her towel missing. Oral sex? Coitus? Naked star gazing? Author didn't care to say.
By the fifth story, I just wanted the hassle done with, so, I speed-read through all hints the author kept on dropping about what was really going on, and, surprise surprise, it seems I finally got this one. Like, nah, it didn't get away. From me at least. I'm not sure if the bad guy got away, but, author being weirdo he is, he too doesn't know, neither does he care. Apparently someone was poisoning folks. How the poison came to be though...no one cares. Not that anyone should, I'm done with that snooze-fest.
In the sixth story, he kept on leaving all this hints that something horrible was about to happen (remembering when some folks still had their necks attached, remembering when some girl still had all her blood in her body). It was laughable.
Yeah, this one truly got away at 37% into the book, the middle of the 6th story. I've got more interesting books lined up to read. Bye bye.
February 18, 2011
Story collections are like golf shots . . . if you run into a crap story, the next one could be the redeemer, so it keeps you interested start to finish. You run into a stinker of a novel, you're screwed for 300 pages, you know? But in reading the latest from Stephen Graham Jones, The Ones That Got Away, I'm reminded that it is still possible for a collection make me say, "Seriously, this next one cannot be better than this one. No way." And then delivers again. And again. And again.
I wasn't this giddy or delighted reading a stack of stories since I was 10 years old, mopping up King's Skeleton Crew, crapping my footie pajamas to "Survivor Type" and "The Jaunt."
Jones slam-banged me right out of the box with the very first story, "Father, Son, Holy Rabbit," about a stranded father and son who continue to eat a "magical" rabbit over and over again to stay alive. I was thinking about that story for days, and it has all the makings of a lifetimer for me, where I'll be sixty talking about that story to someone, probably my grandkids, who will laugh when I try to explain what a payphone was.
Bookending the collection is "Crawlspace," which, if you think a telepathic infant sounds creepy, wait until the guilt of our narrator's infidelity starts to get the best of him. The final page is unsettling.
Special thanks to the story "Raphael" for just existing. Wow. This one accomplished a rare feat in my reading exploits . . . there are two pages that just made me stop and reread them on the spot, then I finished the story, then read the whole thing again.
There's another story where the title itself can give you nightmares. Two words for you: "Meat Tree." Think about that.
King called his men's magazine stories that populated Night Shift and Skeleton Crew "screamers." Well, Jones takes the screamer mentality and deploys it full force, with an ability prod you along with sentences that are sharp enough to cut. Twisty and startling, the stories don't finish up in predictable "screamer" fashion many times . . . they just worm their way into you, make themselves at home, and you'll feel like your balance is off for a few days. You find yourself wanting a little extra sunshine, maybe a long shower. This effect is achieved largely through the use of childhood as a gateway to the horrors within the collection, and the close attention paid to who the horror happens to as opposed to how.
The story notes are a treasure trove for anyone interested in fiction, the author, or just loves having insight into these excellent stories. Better than that crap bonus material you find DVD's, that's for sure.
You want me to sit here and gush about every story? Just go out there and buy this book. Like, now.
I wasn't this giddy or delighted reading a stack of stories since I was 10 years old, mopping up King's Skeleton Crew, crapping my footie pajamas to "Survivor Type" and "The Jaunt."
Jones slam-banged me right out of the box with the very first story, "Father, Son, Holy Rabbit," about a stranded father and son who continue to eat a "magical" rabbit over and over again to stay alive. I was thinking about that story for days, and it has all the makings of a lifetimer for me, where I'll be sixty talking about that story to someone, probably my grandkids, who will laugh when I try to explain what a payphone was.
Bookending the collection is "Crawlspace," which, if you think a telepathic infant sounds creepy, wait until the guilt of our narrator's infidelity starts to get the best of him. The final page is unsettling.
Special thanks to the story "Raphael" for just existing. Wow. This one accomplished a rare feat in my reading exploits . . . there are two pages that just made me stop and reread them on the spot, then I finished the story, then read the whole thing again.
There's another story where the title itself can give you nightmares. Two words for you: "Meat Tree." Think about that.
King called his men's magazine stories that populated Night Shift and Skeleton Crew "screamers." Well, Jones takes the screamer mentality and deploys it full force, with an ability prod you along with sentences that are sharp enough to cut. Twisty and startling, the stories don't finish up in predictable "screamer" fashion many times . . . they just worm their way into you, make themselves at home, and you'll feel like your balance is off for a few days. You find yourself wanting a little extra sunshine, maybe a long shower. This effect is achieved largely through the use of childhood as a gateway to the horrors within the collection, and the close attention paid to who the horror happens to as opposed to how.
The story notes are a treasure trove for anyone interested in fiction, the author, or just loves having insight into these excellent stories. Better than that crap bonus material you find DVD's, that's for sure.
You want me to sit here and gush about every story? Just go out there and buy this book. Like, now.
March 4, 2022
Oh my, I can't believe this book has so many positive reviews. How did this happen? 🤔
Annoying writing style!!! Simply horrendous. 😓
Nothing is properly explained. I'm not even sure what I just read. Everything is just so vague and underdeveloped.
Atrocious dialogues.
Yeah... DNF.
Annoying writing style!!! Simply horrendous. 😓
Nothing is properly explained. I'm not even sure what I just read. Everything is just so vague and underdeveloped.
Atrocious dialogues.
Yeah... DNF.
November 16, 2025
An interesting little collection of weird fiction horror short stories, most of which left me completely in the dark in a way that I didn’t mind all that much. There were a few standouts in here with “Raphael” being my favorite. It’s very reminiscent of Tony Domenico’s work which is a style that a rarely see replicated. “The captain’s lament” was a super fun story that ties into a popular urban legend in a really interesting way that I was not expecting at all. The titular story was terrifying and something that I will be thinking about for a long time. This collection certainly isn’t for those who dislike confusing endings but there is enough material here to prompt hundreds of hours of discussion. Might have to make a video on a few of these stories.
September 8, 2020
Dark and grim short stories. There were some I really liked and some that I'm not entirely sure I understood. The writing itself is pretty flawless - a straight-up, nonfussy style inviting the inevitable comparison to the King. I mean, Stephen King is in a league of his own, but style-wise and even content-wise, Jones is up there.
My favorite stories:
"Lonegan's Luck" - I would love to see a movie of this... and a series of stories, which the author says was his original intention.
"Monsters" - heartbreaking
"Raphael"
"Captain's Lament" - my favorite, I saw the twist probably right when the author wanted me to, and it was delightful, if such word can be used here.
The ones I didn't really get: "Teeth" - I was reading it late at night, but I even went back a few pages to reread and still am not entirely sure what was going on, and "The Meat Tree".
I always read and appreciate author's notes, which are included here.
I apologize for the King comparison, but I don't read a lot of horror so he's pretty much the only reference I have.
My favorite stories:
"Lonegan's Luck" - I would love to see a movie of this... and a series of stories, which the author says was his original intention.
"Monsters" - heartbreaking
"Raphael"
"Captain's Lament" - my favorite, I saw the twist probably right when the author wanted me to, and it was delightful, if such word can be used here.
The ones I didn't really get: "Teeth" - I was reading it late at night, but I even went back a few pages to reread and still am not entirely sure what was going on, and "The Meat Tree".
I always read and appreciate author's notes, which are included here.
I apologize for the King comparison, but I don't read a lot of horror so he's pretty much the only reference I have.
September 30, 2022
Excellent extremely dark and visceral short stories. SGJ has a way of reminding the reader about how much we rely on the social contract. We assume that most people are pretty much okay, and this makes us feel secure. In these stories, we discover that any seemingly ordinary situation or person can morph into a nightmare which we can neither control nor escape. The author often incorporates moral weaknesses as both the driver of evil and the source for revenge.
The creepy factor is high, so you'll want to prepare yourself for this level of horror. I freely admit that I read these during the daytime, and took some breaks.
The creepy factor is high, so you'll want to prepare yourself for this level of horror. I freely admit that I read these during the daytime, and took some breaks.
October 28, 2023
Any story collection will be a mixed bag, but SGJ is consistently intriguing throughout. His stories are clever yet emotional, stylistically fresh yet fluid. This collection is from several years ago before his current prominence, but the evidence of his skill is clear on every page.
July 9, 2013
Dull, boring and forgettable. I feel like the only person in the room who doesn't get the joke. I was looking for some intelligent horror stories and I read this book on a recommendation but I found the stories so unemotional I just couldn't get involved in any of them. I tried reading the first four. The characters are so bland in most cases that they don't need names. These stories remind me of the kind of pointless fiction I remember reading in a similarly-lauded collection by Kelly Link years ago. I don't know what the problem is. Maybe I just don't like the writer's flat no-style style or how juvenile they seem or how they're "told" and seem to lack proper scenes that I can visualise or how this kind of phony fiction that pretends to mean something is so prevalent these days. There's nothing to grab hold of in these stories. It feels as if they could have been written by anyone about anything and still nothing would matter. Uugggh! Disappointing.
September 27, 2018
I'm guessing the author asked all the grade school kids to write the scariest stories they could think of and then compiled it into a book. It's the only thing that explains what I just read. Books are subjective, but this time I want to ask every person that gave this five stars if they're alright. THIS is what scared you? I'm cry 😢
May 29, 2023
Each time I finished a story I just went, “That’s it?” None of them wowed me, all of them just left me frustrated and wanting MORE. They felt empty.
Also, horror? Where? Some of them I saw it, most I didn’t.
I’m generally not the biggest short story person, but for all of them to fall flat? Hm.
Also, horror? Where? Some of them I saw it, most I didn’t.
I’m generally not the biggest short story person, but for all of them to fall flat? Hm.
May 4, 2022
The Audible credit that got away.
June 20, 2022
oh thank god it's done now
March 17, 2011
This review was originally published at The Nervous Breakdown:
The Ones That Got Away (Prime Books) tiptoes into the darkness, luring us deep into the woods, up into crawlspaces, and to distant islands, where the people, the sacrifices, the losses are our own, our universal fears come to life. You’d think that once he surprised me, once Dr. Jones pulled that old trick where you watch the left hand while the right hand does something else that I’d be prepared for more misdirection, watching the wolf when it was always going to be the dolphin. But it’s all there, it’s always right there, a tingling sensation that runs up your spine, an itch where it settles, burrowing in, a heat up your neck flushing with realization. It isn’t misdirection. It’s an adding up of information, the sum larger than the parts. It’s coming to your own conclusion before the story ends, whispering to yourself that it can’t be what you think it is. Please don’t let him go there. It’s not a trick, or a twist, and no God as machine descends from the sky. It’s what you knew all along, it’s what you feared could be true, it’s a stiff body standing in the corner of a musty basement, the camera on a tripod tipping over, and the evil revealing itself. And it’s how the everyday people in these tales deal with these revelations when they come home to roost.
From the very first story, there is no hesitation, no easing into these tales, these dark fables. This is no mistake, the way this collection of short stories starts. What could be more innocent than a bunny rabbit in the snow? A father and son lost in the woods, surely there will be an escape, a rescue, and everything will be fine in the end. But that’s all relative, isn’t it? The surprises start with this story, “Father, Son, Holy Rabbit,” and from the sentence, something isn’t quite right:
“By the third day they were eating snow. Years later it would come to the boy again, rush up to him at a job interview: his father spitting out pieces of seed or pine needle into his hand. Whatever had been in the snow. The boy had looked at the brown flecks in his father’s palm, then up to his father, who finally nodded, put them back in his mouth, turned his face away to swallow.”
One of the many things that Stephen Graham Jones does well is mix the reality of nature, of life, with the elusive presence of the horrific, the fantastic, the mythic:
“The next day, no helicopters came for them, no men on horseback, following dogs, no skiers poling their way home. For a few hours around what should have been lunch, the sun shone down, but all that did was make their dry spot under the tree wet. Then the wind started again.
‘Where’s that stick?’ the boy asked.
The father narrowed his eyes as if he hadn’t thought of that. ‘Your rabbit,’ he said after a few minutes.
The boy nodded, said, almost to himself, ‘It’ll come back.’
When he looked around to his father, his father was already looking at him. Studying him.
The rabbit’s skin was out in the snow, just past the tree. Buried hours ago.
The father nodded like this could maybe be true. That the rabbit would come back. Because they needed it to.”
The rabbit would come back, of course, because they did need it to, but not in any way that I anticipated. I guess at endings all the time, as many of us do, and I’m pretty good at getting it right. But with these stories, I only knew what was coming about half the time. And that’s no reward either, to know what’s coming, hardwired to fear the hidden beast, accidents already set in motion, or the horrible things we as human beings continue to do to each other.
Another strength of Stephen Graham Jones is a willingness to build stories on the classic myths of horror and fantasy. There are only so many things that go bump in the night. It’s man versus the machine, nature, the known, the unknown, the monster, the truth, himself. There are vampires and zombies and werewolves, of course. In “Wolf Island” he takes the werewolf story and turns it into something else completely. Out there in the wild it’s eat or be eaten, as you know:
“The bird was like an oversized gull. A tern, maybe. Definitely not a pelican.
After pulling all the feathers out there was hardly any meat.
Emma shook her head no about it anyway.
Ronald nodded that he understood, and peeled the stringy meat from the bone, had his eyes closed to eat it when Emma stopped him.
‘What?’ he said.
She took the meat, touching it with as little of her fingertips as possible, and walked to the water line, laid the meat in the wet sand.
Within thirty seconds, two large crabs and one smaller one were snipping at the meat.
‘Now,’ she said to Ronald, and he stepped forward, brought his foot down on one of the large crabs.
Its claws sliced the air uselessly, and then Ronald drove his bare foot deeper and the crab cracked, died.
Emma laughed nervously.
Ronald studied her, no real expression on his face.”
He sets us up, as we watch Emma and Ronald search for food on the deserted island. Until things start to change. Until Ronald changes, or really, stays the same, just revealing himself as something more beast than man.
Ronald slowly befriends a school of dolphins, seeking to connect, to divide up his loneliness and primal urges into manageable chunks of time. But in the end, much like the tale of the scorpion and the frog, his true nature rears its ugly head. And as the scorpion stings the frog there are other creatures sitting on the shore, eyeing that scorpion for their own little meal. As Vonnegut said, so it goes.
When you think maybe you’ve got him cornered, all smug that you get where he’s coming from, can see it coming now, Stephen Graham Jones morphs into a pair of shallow high school girls, a mixture of Heathers and Carrie, with his stamp of dark humor applied. “So Perfect” is funny in its portrayal of youth (always wasted on the young), their language and priorities stilted and full of entitlement. It has heat at times, the two young ladies slender and tan, unafraid to use their powers of persuasion. And it’s haunting how far these two will go to get thin, to stay on top, to remain the queens that they think they are. Tammy and Brianne, you’ve seen them before:
“‘And did you see her nametag?’
‘Don’t even start.’
‘Like I would be using somebody else’s credit card, though? Please.’
‘Shh, shh. She might be listening. Her dad’s got to be in prison or something, right? To let her work at a register like that?’
‘You’re making excuses for her.’
‘No. I just don’t want my car to get keyed.’”
And of course, like this:
“Two days later is a Friday. Tammy and Brianne are having a tanning contest on Brianne’s back porch. Her dad, home early from work, is washing the Irish setter. The dog’s name is Frederick.
Because it’s funny to her, Tammy keeps arranging her bikini so as to make Brianne’s dad have to look somewhere else.”
But this is all in good clean fun and nobody gets hurt. Until they do:
“On the other side of the classroom, hiding, is Joy. She isn’t lifting her head from her desk.
Tammy shrugs to Brianne about it and Brianne shrugs back, makes the eeek! shape with her mouth.
Halfway through class is when it happens, the thing that will spark an investigation that will span four high schools and never once interrogate either Tammy or Brianne, the real killers here.
All at once, in the middle of Mr. Connors taking up last night’s problems, Joy slings her head up from her desk. A line of vomit strings down from her lip. And there’s more coming.”
Expect the unexpected. In this collection of short stories, Stephen Graham Jones does all of the things that have come to be expected of him, and more. There are moments of terror, tension built up over time, an uneasy feeling creeping over you, your gut in knots, hesitating to turn the page. There are gestures of kindness and love, loss built on sacrifice, families protecting each other. There are histories from childhood that are buried deep, but sometimes not deep enough. And there are myths and legends that turn out to be true, awe paired with knowledge turned to fear. Be prepared for the nightfall, I’m warning you now. Laugh if you want to, it’s okay. Maybe you’re one of the lucky ones, your imagination held in check. Or maybe you’ll stare at the ceiling, listening to the scratching while you try to convince yourself that it’s just the squirrels in the attic. When the shadows slip across your bedroom walls, it’s from a car passing by, for sure. Just close your eyes, and drift off to sleep, there’s no weight sinking into the bed. It’s probably just the cat.
You do have a cat, don’t you?
NOTE: Since this review was written, The Ones That Got Away was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for the best in horror writing and has made the final ballot.
The Ones That Got Away (Prime Books) tiptoes into the darkness, luring us deep into the woods, up into crawlspaces, and to distant islands, where the people, the sacrifices, the losses are our own, our universal fears come to life. You’d think that once he surprised me, once Dr. Jones pulled that old trick where you watch the left hand while the right hand does something else that I’d be prepared for more misdirection, watching the wolf when it was always going to be the dolphin. But it’s all there, it’s always right there, a tingling sensation that runs up your spine, an itch where it settles, burrowing in, a heat up your neck flushing with realization. It isn’t misdirection. It’s an adding up of information, the sum larger than the parts. It’s coming to your own conclusion before the story ends, whispering to yourself that it can’t be what you think it is. Please don’t let him go there. It’s not a trick, or a twist, and no God as machine descends from the sky. It’s what you knew all along, it’s what you feared could be true, it’s a stiff body standing in the corner of a musty basement, the camera on a tripod tipping over, and the evil revealing itself. And it’s how the everyday people in these tales deal with these revelations when they come home to roost.
From the very first story, there is no hesitation, no easing into these tales, these dark fables. This is no mistake, the way this collection of short stories starts. What could be more innocent than a bunny rabbit in the snow? A father and son lost in the woods, surely there will be an escape, a rescue, and everything will be fine in the end. But that’s all relative, isn’t it? The surprises start with this story, “Father, Son, Holy Rabbit,” and from the sentence, something isn’t quite right:
“By the third day they were eating snow. Years later it would come to the boy again, rush up to him at a job interview: his father spitting out pieces of seed or pine needle into his hand. Whatever had been in the snow. The boy had looked at the brown flecks in his father’s palm, then up to his father, who finally nodded, put them back in his mouth, turned his face away to swallow.”
One of the many things that Stephen Graham Jones does well is mix the reality of nature, of life, with the elusive presence of the horrific, the fantastic, the mythic:
“The next day, no helicopters came for them, no men on horseback, following dogs, no skiers poling their way home. For a few hours around what should have been lunch, the sun shone down, but all that did was make their dry spot under the tree wet. Then the wind started again.
‘Where’s that stick?’ the boy asked.
The father narrowed his eyes as if he hadn’t thought of that. ‘Your rabbit,’ he said after a few minutes.
The boy nodded, said, almost to himself, ‘It’ll come back.’
When he looked around to his father, his father was already looking at him. Studying him.
The rabbit’s skin was out in the snow, just past the tree. Buried hours ago.
The father nodded like this could maybe be true. That the rabbit would come back. Because they needed it to.”
The rabbit would come back, of course, because they did need it to, but not in any way that I anticipated. I guess at endings all the time, as many of us do, and I’m pretty good at getting it right. But with these stories, I only knew what was coming about half the time. And that’s no reward either, to know what’s coming, hardwired to fear the hidden beast, accidents already set in motion, or the horrible things we as human beings continue to do to each other.
Another strength of Stephen Graham Jones is a willingness to build stories on the classic myths of horror and fantasy. There are only so many things that go bump in the night. It’s man versus the machine, nature, the known, the unknown, the monster, the truth, himself. There are vampires and zombies and werewolves, of course. In “Wolf Island” he takes the werewolf story and turns it into something else completely. Out there in the wild it’s eat or be eaten, as you know:
“The bird was like an oversized gull. A tern, maybe. Definitely not a pelican.
After pulling all the feathers out there was hardly any meat.
Emma shook her head no about it anyway.
Ronald nodded that he understood, and peeled the stringy meat from the bone, had his eyes closed to eat it when Emma stopped him.
‘What?’ he said.
She took the meat, touching it with as little of her fingertips as possible, and walked to the water line, laid the meat in the wet sand.
Within thirty seconds, two large crabs and one smaller one were snipping at the meat.
‘Now,’ she said to Ronald, and he stepped forward, brought his foot down on one of the large crabs.
Its claws sliced the air uselessly, and then Ronald drove his bare foot deeper and the crab cracked, died.
Emma laughed nervously.
Ronald studied her, no real expression on his face.”
He sets us up, as we watch Emma and Ronald search for food on the deserted island. Until things start to change. Until Ronald changes, or really, stays the same, just revealing himself as something more beast than man.
Ronald slowly befriends a school of dolphins, seeking to connect, to divide up his loneliness and primal urges into manageable chunks of time. But in the end, much like the tale of the scorpion and the frog, his true nature rears its ugly head. And as the scorpion stings the frog there are other creatures sitting on the shore, eyeing that scorpion for their own little meal. As Vonnegut said, so it goes.
When you think maybe you’ve got him cornered, all smug that you get where he’s coming from, can see it coming now, Stephen Graham Jones morphs into a pair of shallow high school girls, a mixture of Heathers and Carrie, with his stamp of dark humor applied. “So Perfect” is funny in its portrayal of youth (always wasted on the young), their language and priorities stilted and full of entitlement. It has heat at times, the two young ladies slender and tan, unafraid to use their powers of persuasion. And it’s haunting how far these two will go to get thin, to stay on top, to remain the queens that they think they are. Tammy and Brianne, you’ve seen them before:
“‘And did you see her nametag?’
‘Don’t even start.’
‘Like I would be using somebody else’s credit card, though? Please.’
‘Shh, shh. She might be listening. Her dad’s got to be in prison or something, right? To let her work at a register like that?’
‘You’re making excuses for her.’
‘No. I just don’t want my car to get keyed.’”
And of course, like this:
“Two days later is a Friday. Tammy and Brianne are having a tanning contest on Brianne’s back porch. Her dad, home early from work, is washing the Irish setter. The dog’s name is Frederick.
Because it’s funny to her, Tammy keeps arranging her bikini so as to make Brianne’s dad have to look somewhere else.”
But this is all in good clean fun and nobody gets hurt. Until they do:
“On the other side of the classroom, hiding, is Joy. She isn’t lifting her head from her desk.
Tammy shrugs to Brianne about it and Brianne shrugs back, makes the eeek! shape with her mouth.
Halfway through class is when it happens, the thing that will spark an investigation that will span four high schools and never once interrogate either Tammy or Brianne, the real killers here.
All at once, in the middle of Mr. Connors taking up last night’s problems, Joy slings her head up from her desk. A line of vomit strings down from her lip. And there’s more coming.”
Expect the unexpected. In this collection of short stories, Stephen Graham Jones does all of the things that have come to be expected of him, and more. There are moments of terror, tension built up over time, an uneasy feeling creeping over you, your gut in knots, hesitating to turn the page. There are gestures of kindness and love, loss built on sacrifice, families protecting each other. There are histories from childhood that are buried deep, but sometimes not deep enough. And there are myths and legends that turn out to be true, awe paired with knowledge turned to fear. Be prepared for the nightfall, I’m warning you now. Laugh if you want to, it’s okay. Maybe you’re one of the lucky ones, your imagination held in check. Or maybe you’ll stare at the ceiling, listening to the scratching while you try to convince yourself that it’s just the squirrels in the attic. When the shadows slip across your bedroom walls, it’s from a car passing by, for sure. Just close your eyes, and drift off to sleep, there’s no weight sinking into the bed. It’s probably just the cat.
You do have a cat, don’t you?
NOTE: Since this review was written, The Ones That Got Away was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for the best in horror writing and has made the final ballot.
July 27, 2013
Some mildly creepy short stories. The author tries too hard, using everything he learned in his creative writing classes.
May 16, 2024
I have tremendous respect for Stephen Graham Jones but I think short stories may not be his forte. Or maybe this collection just reflects earlier stages of his development into a great writer. Anyway these stories are super formulaic and they wear their influences on their sleeve.
“Teeth” was my favorite: It is intriguingly written, but it also shares so many similarities with Twin Peaks that it could be taking place in that same dream-world. Similarly, “Lonegan’s Luck” and “Raphael” read as a little too influenced by Stephen King’s stuff. I loved “Monsters” and “Till the Morning Comes” initially, but their endings were pretty disappointing. I found most other stories to be “meh” or worse: "So Perfect" felt a little mean-spirited, and “The Meat Tree” (maybe my least favorite one) and “Crawlspace” seemed to go on forever.
This collection definitely isn’t bad, but I wouldn't recommend it either. If you're looking for satisfying short horror fiction, I'd go with a different Stephen
“Teeth” was my favorite: It is intriguingly written, but it also shares so many similarities with Twin Peaks that it could be taking place in that same dream-world. Similarly, “Lonegan’s Luck” and “Raphael” read as a little too influenced by Stephen King’s stuff. I loved “Monsters” and “Till the Morning Comes” initially, but their endings were pretty disappointing. I found most other stories to be “meh” or worse: "So Perfect" felt a little mean-spirited, and “The Meat Tree” (maybe my least favorite one) and “Crawlspace” seemed to go on forever.
This collection definitely isn’t bad, but I wouldn't recommend it either. If you're looking for satisfying short horror fiction, I'd go with a different Stephen
January 31, 2014
Holy smokes! This was awesome. A high recommend for any fans of Stephen King and/or "House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danielewski. This was a collection of short stories by one of my new favorite authors, Stephen Graham Jones.
Father, Son, Holy Rabbit: A crazy story of a father and son on the run and a miraculous rabbit that provides them salvation but at a steep price. Incredibly spooky and sad.
Till the Morning Comes: A much scarier version of "The Boogeyman" by Stephen King.
The Sons of Billy Clay: Two prison guards talking about a murderous bull. Lots of twists and turns. Jones stayed two steps ahead of me the whole way!
So Perfect: Two horrible high school hotties (alliteration! yay!) get what they deserve and more. I love how you literally never know what great supernatural elements that Jones will throw into a story.
Monsters: A summer fling gets complicated (Vampires. It's complicated by vampires.)
Wolf Island: A ship wreak leaves a man and a woman trapped on an island with no supplies and no escape...and that's the least of their problems. Jones takes some old tropes, dusts them off, and makes them fresh and new here. Great stuff.
Teeth: A retiring and dying detective has one last case: body parts are being left all over town. Supremely disturbing and fantastic.
Raphael: A group of high school outcasts enjoy playing around with the unknown. They decide to tie up one of group and thrown her into a lake to see if she's a witch. It starts as a joke and takes an insane turn.
Captain's Lament: A very clever twist on an old urban legend.
The Meat Tree: Probably my least favorite of the bunch. A college drop out has the same name and looks like a boy who disappeared several years before the drop out was even born. He meets a girl who has her own messed up history regarding a childhood disappearance. A little too weird for its own good.
The Ones Who Got Away: Great, short, gut-punch of a story. A couple of thugs are supposed to rough someone up and get the wrong address. Boy, is it ever the wrong address. One minor quibble with either the title of the book or this story: Both should either be "The Ones Who Got Away" or "The Ones That Got Away." Stay consistent people!
Crawlspace: Dude sleeps with his best friend's wife. Oh, and his best friend and the best friend's son may be psychic. You just know this one's not going to end well...
This was a fantastic anthology from an author I'd never read before. The only downside is is that the book is pretty difficult to track down. But if you want some great scares and fantastic prose, look no further. I'm going to track down as much of this guys stuff as I can.
Father, Son, Holy Rabbit: A crazy story of a father and son on the run and a miraculous rabbit that provides them salvation but at a steep price. Incredibly spooky and sad.
Till the Morning Comes: A much scarier version of "The Boogeyman" by Stephen King.
The Sons of Billy Clay: Two prison guards talking about a murderous bull. Lots of twists and turns. Jones stayed two steps ahead of me the whole way!
So Perfect: Two horrible high school hotties (alliteration! yay!) get what they deserve and more. I love how you literally never know what great supernatural elements that Jones will throw into a story.
Monsters: A summer fling gets complicated (Vampires. It's complicated by vampires.)
Wolf Island: A ship wreak leaves a man and a woman trapped on an island with no supplies and no escape...and that's the least of their problems. Jones takes some old tropes, dusts them off, and makes them fresh and new here. Great stuff.
Teeth: A retiring and dying detective has one last case: body parts are being left all over town. Supremely disturbing and fantastic.
Raphael: A group of high school outcasts enjoy playing around with the unknown. They decide to tie up one of group and thrown her into a lake to see if she's a witch. It starts as a joke and takes an insane turn.
Captain's Lament: A very clever twist on an old urban legend.
The Meat Tree: Probably my least favorite of the bunch. A college drop out has the same name and looks like a boy who disappeared several years before the drop out was even born. He meets a girl who has her own messed up history regarding a childhood disappearance. A little too weird for its own good.
The Ones Who Got Away: Great, short, gut-punch of a story. A couple of thugs are supposed to rough someone up and get the wrong address. Boy, is it ever the wrong address. One minor quibble with either the title of the book or this story: Both should either be "The Ones Who Got Away" or "The Ones That Got Away." Stay consistent people!
Crawlspace: Dude sleeps with his best friend's wife. Oh, and his best friend and the best friend's son may be psychic. You just know this one's not going to end well...
This was a fantastic anthology from an author I'd never read before. The only downside is is that the book is pretty difficult to track down. But if you want some great scares and fantastic prose, look no further. I'm going to track down as much of this guys stuff as I can.
January 2, 2021
Thirteen stories by Stephen Graham Jones. Thirteen short stories, some of them more properly classified as novella's I suppose, between two hard covers. How bad could it be, right?
Stephen Graham Jones. I first picked up a book by him last year, Mongrels and followed it up immediately with The Only Good Indians. After that I decided I needed to read everything the man has ever written, and well, so far that has not been a mistake. The Ones That Got Away is perhaps the first true horror collection I have ever read. This book horrified me.
Reading "So Perfect", "Teeth", "Crawlspace" and "Father, Son, and Holy Rabbit" utterly horrified me. Those are just a few of the short stories that had me holding the book farther away from my face, peering at it as if it were something that could bite me. After reaching the end of "So Perfect" I had to set the book down and leave the room. Just breathe. Just calm down. Just try to forget the descriptions that story contained. That powerful. That disturbing. That good.
"Lonnegan's Luck" and "Monsters" were both stories that delighted me in a perverse kind of way. "Wolf Island" and "Captain's Lament" too. There was some humor there if you squinted, if you had the right kind of twisted mind. Jones is great at humor, great at writing things just because they're cool in his mind. "Raphael" to some degree, too, though that story quickly switched over into downright horrifying at just the right moment and scurried off to live in my head in a way that few other things have.
All of this is to say - man, this was a real horror collection, and I wasn't prepared for that when I first cracked it open and began reading it at night. I learned pretty quickly not to read it before sleeping. Don't want the monsters to get me.
Stephen Graham Jones. I first picked up a book by him last year, Mongrels and followed it up immediately with The Only Good Indians. After that I decided I needed to read everything the man has ever written, and well, so far that has not been a mistake. The Ones That Got Away is perhaps the first true horror collection I have ever read. This book horrified me.
Reading "So Perfect", "Teeth", "Crawlspace" and "Father, Son, and Holy Rabbit" utterly horrified me. Those are just a few of the short stories that had me holding the book farther away from my face, peering at it as if it were something that could bite me. After reaching the end of "So Perfect" I had to set the book down and leave the room. Just breathe. Just calm down. Just try to forget the descriptions that story contained. That powerful. That disturbing. That good.
"Lonnegan's Luck" and "Monsters" were both stories that delighted me in a perverse kind of way. "Wolf Island" and "Captain's Lament" too. There was some humor there if you squinted, if you had the right kind of twisted mind. Jones is great at humor, great at writing things just because they're cool in his mind. "Raphael" to some degree, too, though that story quickly switched over into downright horrifying at just the right moment and scurried off to live in my head in a way that few other things have.
All of this is to say - man, this was a real horror collection, and I wasn't prepared for that when I first cracked it open and began reading it at night. I learned pretty quickly not to read it before sleeping. Don't want the monsters to get me.
May 12, 2022
CONTENT WARNING: cannibalism, starvation, abandonment, violence, many mentions of unaliving oneself, prisoner abuse, mean girls, bullying, tons of vom, eating disorders, poisoning - accidental and purposeful, accidental overdose, TICKS, murders, teen sex, teen pregnancy, MORE TICKS, baby loss, cutting/surgery, tongue removal, SO MANY TICKS, zombies, animal abuse/death, child death, baby animal death, animal violence, body parts/bones, self-cannibalism, insanity…?, disability to the point of barely moving or speaking, hanging, mention of child abuse (s*xu*al), infidelity, and sleep deprivation.
This book of short stories knocked my socks off. It also scared me, horrified me, disgusted me, and made me feel all kinds of other emotions I won’t annoy you all with….. needless to say, it’s a wild ride!
Two or three of these stories (4?) may stay with me for a good, long time, too. One was a gut punch, and another seriously will give me nightmares for some time (ticks!). Man, I sure wasn’t happy to listen to all of that….. *shudders*
And yes, even with all this content, I still enjoyed the hell out of Jones, novel. As I always do ! He is seriously one of the few authors on this earth who has written something so visceral and shocking that I’m actually horrified. Like goosebumps, that shiver up your spine, and those scenes living rent free in your head for daaaayyyyys, kind of scary. 😱😱😱🤯
I’m dead serious about those content warnings. ‘So Perfect’ was SO disturbing, so creepy - and that ending..!! I wish I could say more, but I’m not giving you any spoilers. I thought ‘Father, son and Holy Rabbit’ was bad….! Jiminy Christmas….!!
It’s ok, I’ll be fine. And I certainly won’t blame Jones for my dreams, because I asked for this, in picking up this anthology. I just wish I’d had some kind of warning for those MOTHER FUCKING TICKS, so I didn’t have to run into them so much, in that story…. *intense shudders*
Want more info about these stories? Go read the ebook…!
I won’t go through every single story like some of the reviewers here are doing, but if you want a break down like this, my friends Joe and Sheena do this in their reviews -
Joe: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Sheena: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Rich Miller is the narrator for the audiobook version of this novel.
4 stars
This book of short stories knocked my socks off. It also scared me, horrified me, disgusted me, and made me feel all kinds of other emotions I won’t annoy you all with….. needless to say, it’s a wild ride!
Two or three of these stories (4?) may stay with me for a good, long time, too. One was a gut punch, and another seriously will give me nightmares for some time (ticks!). Man, I sure wasn’t happy to listen to all of that….. *shudders*
And yes, even with all this content, I still enjoyed the hell out of Jones, novel. As I always do ! He is seriously one of the few authors on this earth who has written something so visceral and shocking that I’m actually horrified. Like goosebumps, that shiver up your spine, and those scenes living rent free in your head for daaaayyyyys, kind of scary. 😱😱😱🤯
I’m dead serious about those content warnings. ‘So Perfect’ was SO disturbing, so creepy - and that ending..!! I wish I could say more, but I’m not giving you any spoilers. I thought ‘Father, son and Holy Rabbit’ was bad….! Jiminy Christmas….!!
It’s ok, I’ll be fine. And I certainly won’t blame Jones for my dreams, because I asked for this, in picking up this anthology. I just wish I’d had some kind of warning for those MOTHER FUCKING TICKS, so I didn’t have to run into them so much, in that story…. *intense shudders*
Want more info about these stories? Go read the ebook…!
I won’t go through every single story like some of the reviewers here are doing, but if you want a break down like this, my friends Joe and Sheena do this in their reviews -
Joe: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Sheena: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Rich Miller is the narrator for the audiobook version of this novel.
4 stars
January 21, 2023
Well, I gave SGJ a second chance. And I will admit that this time he managed to avoid going on at interminable length about fucking basketball. So that was nice.
On the other hand, it turns out that The Only Good Indian was not an unfortunate exception. It appears that SGJ hates women. And also has absolutely no understanding of them as people, with inner lives and feelings and an independent existence separate from men. (i.e him. Pretty much all the men in this book are him)
Also he has an annoyingly self-conscious macho style of writing that almost feels like a parody of a male horror writer. And the structure of his stories is not great: it‘s kinda like just being told a string of events, with little linking them and no reason to care.So I couldn’t even enjoy the bits between the misogyny.
The self-congratulatory author notes really were the icing on a very unappetising cake.
August 17, 2020
Well - a lot of the stories I didn't get the ending or I couldn't keep the characters straight. I don't think I'll remember any of the stories besides two of them. It was ok to read for something different but I don't know if I'd recommend this book. I'm sure there are better horror short stories out there.
January 31, 2020
A few very good stories here, as well some that were going well until they slipped into awkward
writing that lost me at the end. Rereading was no help for me. I see a lot of 5 star reviews so maybe it's me that doesn't quite "get it"?
writing that lost me at the end. Rereading was no help for me. I see a lot of 5 star reviews so maybe it's me that doesn't quite "get it"?
April 3, 2025
This is really a great collection of stories from Stephen Graham Jones. SGJ can be a little hit or miss for me so I had been putting this one off, but am glad I gave it a go because all the stories here are very good.
May 26, 2024
3.5 stars rounded up. I’m not sure if I would have liked this more or less if I had eye read it. The audio was well done and the narrator was great, but I feel like each of these stories ended a little ambiguously so I kept feeling like I missed some part of the explanation in the endings.
But, sometimes ambiguity really really works for me, and sometimes it doesn’t.
Endings aside, the truth is I was pretty invested in each of these stories. Jones caught me right off the bat with his Father, Son and Holy Rabbit. Not since King’s Survivor Type have I had such a visceral reaction to a story. (Oddly Jones compares a couple stories in the book to Survivor Type but not this one, which to me felt the most ST of all!)
The Tick one is horribly, horribly gross.
I liked the snake oil man one quite a bit, good twist on the end. And I liked Crawl Space even though it was a quieter sort of horror.
Jones is already one of my favorite authors. Will definitely keep reading everything he writes. I will probably even go back and reread a couple of these to see what I missed.
But, sometimes ambiguity really really works for me, and sometimes it doesn’t.
Endings aside, the truth is I was pretty invested in each of these stories. Jones caught me right off the bat with his Father, Son and Holy Rabbit. Not since King’s Survivor Type have I had such a visceral reaction to a story. (Oddly Jones compares a couple stories in the book to Survivor Type but not this one, which to me felt the most ST of all!)
The Tick one is horribly, horribly gross.
I liked the snake oil man one quite a bit, good twist on the end. And I liked Crawl Space even though it was a quieter sort of horror.
Jones is already one of my favorite authors. Will definitely keep reading everything he writes. I will probably even go back and reread a couple of these to see what I missed.
January 1, 2025
Another amazing short story collection by SGJ
July 12, 2025
I don’t know where to begin, well yeah I do… this book has many a stories with meat as a star… human meat, red meat, meat trees 😂 Many of the stories were gross and unsettling, so right up my alley! I’m not a short story girlie but I was on board with this one!
October 25, 2012
I've been hearing good things about Stephen Graham Jones for a while, but this is the first of his books I've actually bought and read. It won't be my last.
I've been reading for over fifty years. Taught myself to read at five (Green Eggs & Ham, of course). For reasons you might not expect, I became a bookworm. I read EVERYTHING. Even when I was homeless squatting in a burned out basement, I still had a stack of books to read by candle light. A eductaed myself on a combination of American Pulp and the Western Canon, without which I'd be a functional illiterate.
I digress into 'me me me' territory because I'm the kind of reader that no longer has patience with the mediocre. Time is a premium at my decrepit age. I've read the greatest words ever written, and if you don't get busy within the first paragraph -- well, I'll be catching a cab home with my mad monsy, so as not to walk all that way in my high heels.
Stephen brings the juice. His pacing is invariably spot on perfect, without a trace of artifice. His language is visceral, evocative, and unforced. He is fearless as a writer, and you'd better be as a reader if you intend to crack his pages.
He drags you down with him into the deep waters, further into the abyss than you'd ever counted on when you started. You end in stark places with him -- but there's alway a sense of deja vu when he lets go of your hand and you're standing alone in a place as familiar as it is hellish.
He's particularly good at conveying the surreal jumbling of reality a mind undergoes when under soul snapping stress -- the PIXELLATION of mentation you experience under severe enough trauma. Stephen has obviously been to the edge in his life, and it indelibly stains his writing.
The man is good, and writes in a graceful, comfortable tone that comes across more like a good friend spinning a yarn rather than a writer per se. His craftsmanship, however, is impeccable despite its naturalness.
I'm glad I discovered him, and I recommend Mr. Jones to anyone who insists on good writing in their books.
I've been reading for over fifty years. Taught myself to read at five (Green Eggs & Ham, of course). For reasons you might not expect, I became a bookworm. I read EVERYTHING. Even when I was homeless squatting in a burned out basement, I still had a stack of books to read by candle light. A eductaed myself on a combination of American Pulp and the Western Canon, without which I'd be a functional illiterate.
I digress into 'me me me' territory because I'm the kind of reader that no longer has patience with the mediocre. Time is a premium at my decrepit age. I've read the greatest words ever written, and if you don't get busy within the first paragraph -- well, I'll be catching a cab home with my mad monsy, so as not to walk all that way in my high heels.
Stephen brings the juice. His pacing is invariably spot on perfect, without a trace of artifice. His language is visceral, evocative, and unforced. He is fearless as a writer, and you'd better be as a reader if you intend to crack his pages.
He drags you down with him into the deep waters, further into the abyss than you'd ever counted on when you started. You end in stark places with him -- but there's alway a sense of deja vu when he lets go of your hand and you're standing alone in a place as familiar as it is hellish.
He's particularly good at conveying the surreal jumbling of reality a mind undergoes when under soul snapping stress -- the PIXELLATION of mentation you experience under severe enough trauma. Stephen has obviously been to the edge in his life, and it indelibly stains his writing.
The man is good, and writes in a graceful, comfortable tone that comes across more like a good friend spinning a yarn rather than a writer per se. His craftsmanship, however, is impeccable despite its naturalness.
I'm glad I discovered him, and I recommend Mr. Jones to anyone who insists on good writing in their books.
December 10, 2017
Visceral and heart-wrenching without pulling any punches for the horror. Sure, there were a couple endings that might have seemed a little vague, but the more I think about it the more I like it. Not everything has to be wrapped up tight to be effective. Do whatever you can to get your hands on this book because these stories worm into your brain. Raphael is easily one of the best short stories I've read in years, regardless of genre.
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