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A Gentle Hell
A Gentle Hell is comprised of four dark speculative stories of quiet tension and uncomfortable nostalgia, written for deformed children and girls that dream of demons.
In “They Promised Dreamless Death” a salesmen sells sleep with the promise of a better life, but what dreams lurk beneath the substrate of consciousness for those who take it are stranger than they ever imagined.
In “Your Demiurge is Dead,” while the world adjusts to the death of God and the new reign of the Triple Goddess, Charles hunts for an Oklahoma murderer and is forced to confront his religious ideals when he encounters a new prophet.
“The Dog That Bit Her,” is the story of a neurotic young woman who gains freedom from her co-dependent marriage with the bite of a rabid dog.
And in the semi-autobiographical “The Singing Grass,” the artist and the writer converge at a meadow haunted by a carnivorous deer and the burnt monsters that show them the consequences of an artistic life.
In “They Promised Dreamless Death” a salesmen sells sleep with the promise of a better life, but what dreams lurk beneath the substrate of consciousness for those who take it are stranger than they ever imagined.
In “Your Demiurge is Dead,” while the world adjusts to the death of God and the new reign of the Triple Goddess, Charles hunts for an Oklahoma murderer and is forced to confront his religious ideals when he encounters a new prophet.
“The Dog That Bit Her,” is the story of a neurotic young woman who gains freedom from her co-dependent marriage with the bite of a rabid dog.
And in the semi-autobiographical “The Singing Grass,” the artist and the writer converge at a meadow haunted by a carnivorous deer and the burnt monsters that show them the consequences of an artistic life.
61 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2012
1 person is currently reading
322 people want to read
About the author
Autumn Christian
15 books337 followersAutumn Christian is the author of the books "The Crooked God Machine," "We are Wormwood", and "Ecstatic Inferno," and has written for several video-games, including Battle Nations and State of Decay 2. When not writing, she is usually practicing her side kicks and running with dogs, or posting strange and existential Instagram selfies.
She's been a freelance writer, a game designer, a cheese producer, a haunted house actor, and a video game tester. She considers Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, Katie Jane Garside, the southern gothic, and dubstep, as main sources of inspiration.
She's been a freelance writer, a game designer, a cheese producer, a haunted house actor, and a video game tester. She considers Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, Katie Jane Garside, the southern gothic, and dubstep, as main sources of inspiration.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
January 8, 2014
It has been said that if you want to write, you must read. If you want to learn how to generate atmosphere, an atmosphere that is striking in its literary efficacy, then this book is a great place to start. These four stories are infused with abstract and thought-provoking similes. The descriptions go beyond transporting the reader in a visual capacity. You're going to feel this shit while you're reading.
You'll get deep insights about the world while reading as well. While some authors tend to take those insights and run with them, creating entire stories around introspection and philosophical musings, Autumn's characters drop these insights casually, like they come as easily as pressure on the bladder after drinking five glasses of water.
Suddenly it occurs to me that I really need to go to the bathroom . . .
Not many authors tread the bleak and macabre with this much grace, but you don't have to take my word for it. You can read most of the first story on Amazon without charge, so there's nothing to lose in checking this out.
You'll get deep insights about the world while reading as well. While some authors tend to take those insights and run with them, creating entire stories around introspection and philosophical musings, Autumn's characters drop these insights casually, like they come as easily as pressure on the bladder after drinking five glasses of water.
Suddenly it occurs to me that I really need to go to the bathroom . . .
Not many authors tread the bleak and macabre with this much grace, but you don't have to take my word for it. You can read most of the first story on Amazon without charge, so there's nothing to lose in checking this out.
January 28, 2012
Once again, the TALES OF DARKNESS AND DISMAY line up blows me away once again. Autumn Christian has the voice of one intelligent and colourful author. Some may argue that this isn’t horror, as you’ll be hard pushed to find splattered guts, cold blooded killers and monsters under the bed in this collection.
This is thought provoking stuff. Stories about relationships and the inner workings of character’s heads make up these tales. The first story is particularly engaging mentally and nicely poignant, with the author avoiding so many, many clichéd endings she could have used.
Christian’s horror comes in more like an after thought, as something that is just part of these characters’ lives now and they just have to adapt to it. For example, there is a werewolf story in this collection, but the emphasis is not on the transformation, silver bullets and howling at the moon. Far from it. The flavour of the story is all about the relationship and the leading lady’s mental state. You’re riveted by this complicated and intriguing dynamic before the lycanthropy is even mentioned. With scenes like the girl coming through the window from a tree, barefoot and in a white dress in her sweet yet unsettling mental state…there’s just so much poetry and beauty here.
Lovers of grue and big, sharp pointy things might turn their noses up, but I love all that stuff…and I loved this. She’s the Pinhead of writing: articulate and restrained, but powerful.
This is thought provoking stuff. Stories about relationships and the inner workings of character’s heads make up these tales. The first story is particularly engaging mentally and nicely poignant, with the author avoiding so many, many clichéd endings she could have used.
Christian’s horror comes in more like an after thought, as something that is just part of these characters’ lives now and they just have to adapt to it. For example, there is a werewolf story in this collection, but the emphasis is not on the transformation, silver bullets and howling at the moon. Far from it. The flavour of the story is all about the relationship and the leading lady’s mental state. You’re riveted by this complicated and intriguing dynamic before the lycanthropy is even mentioned. With scenes like the girl coming through the window from a tree, barefoot and in a white dress in her sweet yet unsettling mental state…there’s just so much poetry and beauty here.
Lovers of grue and big, sharp pointy things might turn their noses up, but I love all that stuff…and I loved this. She’s the Pinhead of writing: articulate and restrained, but powerful.
March 14, 2013
I won't say much about this except that it reminded me of who I was a writer and as a person. I think I've kinda lost track of it somewhere between high school graduation, the Army life and getting back to writing professionally. Because those are the only obstacles that partitioned me off from the darkly things that Autumn Christian, with "A Gentle Hell," has restored my belief in. I am not a commonplace author, and I am not a typical writer. Thanks, Christian, for that.
These are my favorite portions of each short story.
"They Promised Dreamless Death"
The machines had turned all of our heads into a landscape of dark eyes, sloping giants hills, shadows of the valley of death. Metaphysics told us the world didn't exist without being observed. Dead inside our heads, the machines chuk-chuk-chuking, the silent whir pressing the consciousness in the back, to a dreamless land, we were turning our world into a world for locusts. We were making the universe blind.
"Your Demiurge is Dead"
I crawled into Tuesday's faery hole and lay down in the hollow impression her body made. I pulled at the roots with my fists, scratched and scratched over her scared nails, this once-warm body hiked up to the hips, bled out, skull scuffed, silenced by the arm and ribs of the prophet of the true living Triple Goddess. The serial killer of the benevolent. The death of a girl who wanted to be married underneath the dogwood tree, but instead had the blossoms pushed into her mouth and spilled into her collapsed eyes.
"The Dog That Bit Her"
She looked like she crawled out of a dream, wild girl in the white dress, bra-less and bare-foot. I thought at any moment she'd detach herself from her limbs and metamorphose into a vine sticking straight out of my wall.
"The Singing Grass"
I'd never liked to watch people make art before, but I watched him paint because there was something alluring and impractically aesthetic about the way he moved, like an underwater machine. Even if I closed my eyes I'd still be able to feel his movement, the shadow of it, and all angles of him digging a hole into gravity.
A star subtracted due to "The Dog That Bit Her." It spent too long setting up and being there before it got to the meat of the matter, and it didn't even tie into the ending in any way, so I found the meandering start (and, therefore, overall length) needless in a collection of hard-hitting selections such as the others. My one gripe.
I'll be looking out for The Crooked God Machine to see if Christian's writing can hold its own in a more extensive, involved environment than a short story.
These are my favorite portions of each short story.
"They Promised Dreamless Death"
The machines had turned all of our heads into a landscape of dark eyes, sloping giants hills, shadows of the valley of death. Metaphysics told us the world didn't exist without being observed. Dead inside our heads, the machines chuk-chuk-chuking, the silent whir pressing the consciousness in the back, to a dreamless land, we were turning our world into a world for locusts. We were making the universe blind.
"Your Demiurge is Dead"
I crawled into Tuesday's faery hole and lay down in the hollow impression her body made. I pulled at the roots with my fists, scratched and scratched over her scared nails, this once-warm body hiked up to the hips, bled out, skull scuffed, silenced by the arm and ribs of the prophet of the true living Triple Goddess. The serial killer of the benevolent. The death of a girl who wanted to be married underneath the dogwood tree, but instead had the blossoms pushed into her mouth and spilled into her collapsed eyes.
"The Dog That Bit Her"
She looked like she crawled out of a dream, wild girl in the white dress, bra-less and bare-foot. I thought at any moment she'd detach herself from her limbs and metamorphose into a vine sticking straight out of my wall.
"The Singing Grass"
I'd never liked to watch people make art before, but I watched him paint because there was something alluring and impractically aesthetic about the way he moved, like an underwater machine. Even if I closed my eyes I'd still be able to feel his movement, the shadow of it, and all angles of him digging a hole into gravity.
A star subtracted due to "The Dog That Bit Her." It spent too long setting up and being there before it got to the meat of the matter, and it didn't even tie into the ending in any way, so I found the meandering start (and, therefore, overall length) needless in a collection of hard-hitting selections such as the others. My one gripe.
I'll be looking out for The Crooked God Machine to see if Christian's writing can hold its own in a more extensive, involved environment than a short story.
March 12, 2012
Lovers of dark, hypnotic and thoroughly surreal fiction need to sit up and take note of author Autumn Christian. A Gentle Hell is a superb collection of short fiction that she has brought out under Dark Continents Publishing’s Tales of Darkness and Dismay banner and she does not disappoint.
They Promised a Dreamless Death investigates our need to deaden our emotions and partake of a mainstream culture that results in the living dead. Or at least that’s how I saw it.
In Your Demiurge is Dead Christian plays upon themes of religious hypocrisy, as well as an investigation into the deaths of young people. The two are somehow linked in a gritty telling.
The star of the show is The Dog that Bit Her, which plays upon the theme of co-dependency in a relationship, as well as the age-old myth of the werewolf and moon madness.
The Singing Grass is perhaps the most difficult story to pin down, suggestive of an artist’s relationship with their muse and the exploration of the subconscious in order to create art.
In conclusion, I’ll state that most of these stories—in true surrealist fashion—are open to personal interpretation, and that to try define them would be to rob them of most of their beauty and mystery. Underpinning all of them is the uneasy relationship between man and woman, in an evocative and atmospheric dreamlike landscape that shifts as restlessly as the story that is being told.
Christian’s writing is pure magic and deserves all the success as a fresh voice in literary genre fiction. Her effortless prose whisks readers into a sometimes nightmarish reality that mirrors our own, with the aftertaste of a fever dream. I place her up there with greats such as William Burroughs, Philip K Dick and Ray Bradbury.
They Promised a Dreamless Death investigates our need to deaden our emotions and partake of a mainstream culture that results in the living dead. Or at least that’s how I saw it.
In Your Demiurge is Dead Christian plays upon themes of religious hypocrisy, as well as an investigation into the deaths of young people. The two are somehow linked in a gritty telling.
The star of the show is The Dog that Bit Her, which plays upon the theme of co-dependency in a relationship, as well as the age-old myth of the werewolf and moon madness.
The Singing Grass is perhaps the most difficult story to pin down, suggestive of an artist’s relationship with their muse and the exploration of the subconscious in order to create art.
In conclusion, I’ll state that most of these stories—in true surrealist fashion—are open to personal interpretation, and that to try define them would be to rob them of most of their beauty and mystery. Underpinning all of them is the uneasy relationship between man and woman, in an evocative and atmospheric dreamlike landscape that shifts as restlessly as the story that is being told.
Christian’s writing is pure magic and deserves all the success as a fresh voice in literary genre fiction. Her effortless prose whisks readers into a sometimes nightmarish reality that mirrors our own, with the aftertaste of a fever dream. I place her up there with greats such as William Burroughs, Philip K Dick and Ray Bradbury.
February 8, 2016
Deeply weird in a way that reminds me of the darkest bits of Neil Gaiman, especially Your Demiurge Is Dead. Shifts from cyberpunk-horror to fairyland-horror without a blink, with a background of Americana in decay. The third story is just plain beautiful.
I think probably reading this before bed was a bad idea.
I think probably reading this before bed was a bad idea.
March 10, 2012
Autumn writes of darker things that made me think. With her almost poetic prose and silken flow, it's easy to fall in love with her words. Brilliantly written stories, not a dud in the bunch as with some collections. I will be reading more of her works in the future, and so should you.
November 24, 2023
This book is so strange and beautiful. Every sentence reads like poetry. The atmospheres evoked and heavy and moody. I read We Are Wormwood quite a few years ago now and I still think about it a lot. The stories contained here are short, but they definitely have an impact.
September 27, 2012
If you're the kind of person who likes nicely delineated genres, then Autumn Christian is probably your worst nightmare - a writer of dark, vaguely philosophical, sometimes lyrical sometimes gruesome short stories. I guess, if you have a bookseller's mentality, you'd have to call this 'horror', but really Christian is one of those writers classified as 'horror' simply because they don't fit anywhere else...
A Gentle Hell is a collection of four stories, the first I've read by this author. Two of the stories were amazing - very original, very distinctive 'horror' stories. The other two were never less than interesting, contained much great writing, but also the odd flaw (to my mind).
The two great ones were Your Demiurge is Dead and The Dog That Bit Her. The first of these starts off with the body parts of the Old/New Testament God being washed up in bin-liners off the Mexico coast, and proceeds to get weirder from there on in. A new goddess, who seems more American politician than divine, appears, and with her new prophets. As well as telling of these events, the story is also about the disappearance of several children from a trailer-park family, and the cop investigating. The two elements come together in a compelling ending.
The Dog That Bit Her was if anything even better, the story of a relationship falling apart from the inside, about dependency and about independence. The supernatural element, which I won't specify, is gradually introduced, and dovetails wonderfully with the non-supernatural elements, being both pungently realistic and ambiguously metaphoric.
Of the weaker two stories, They Promised Dreamless Death had an interesting premise and much to commend in it, but it felt a bit too long to me, a bit too obvious in its 'message'. The Singing Grass is the most surreal story in the collection, and again has a lot of good points (some of the imagery being particularly memorable) but occasionally the prose seemed too aimless, the plot a bit too obtuse.
All four stories are certainly worth reading, and different readers may well have different opinions about their relative merits than me. Autumn Christian certainly seems a name to watch, an individual voice in amidst all the generic zombie stories and déjà-vu inducing vampire romances. Recommended.
A Gentle Hell is a collection of four stories, the first I've read by this author. Two of the stories were amazing - very original, very distinctive 'horror' stories. The other two were never less than interesting, contained much great writing, but also the odd flaw (to my mind).
The two great ones were Your Demiurge is Dead and The Dog That Bit Her. The first of these starts off with the body parts of the Old/New Testament God being washed up in bin-liners off the Mexico coast, and proceeds to get weirder from there on in. A new goddess, who seems more American politician than divine, appears, and with her new prophets. As well as telling of these events, the story is also about the disappearance of several children from a trailer-park family, and the cop investigating. The two elements come together in a compelling ending.
The Dog That Bit Her was if anything even better, the story of a relationship falling apart from the inside, about dependency and about independence. The supernatural element, which I won't specify, is gradually introduced, and dovetails wonderfully with the non-supernatural elements, being both pungently realistic and ambiguously metaphoric.
Of the weaker two stories, They Promised Dreamless Death had an interesting premise and much to commend in it, but it felt a bit too long to me, a bit too obvious in its 'message'. The Singing Grass is the most surreal story in the collection, and again has a lot of good points (some of the imagery being particularly memorable) but occasionally the prose seemed too aimless, the plot a bit too obtuse.
All four stories are certainly worth reading, and different readers may well have different opinions about their relative merits than me. Autumn Christian certainly seems a name to watch, an individual voice in amidst all the generic zombie stories and déjà-vu inducing vampire romances. Recommended.
April 10, 2014
Autumn Christian is my favorite female author currently working in fiction. She seamlessly fuses visceral vignettes and probing character studies with sharp dialogue full of grandiose statements and conviction. Autumn doesn't go anywhere in a story without her accessories: Style AND Substance! Here, we see her getting her feet wet with short stories just before she takes the plunge into full length novels a bit later with Crooked God Machine and We Are Wormwood (my favorite read from 2013). Familiar themes to watch for in Autumn's work include hints of chaos magic, Gnosticism, psychoanalysis, seduction, alienation, mysticism, strange entities that exist to accentuate the shortcomings of us humans, fragments of fairy tales rearranged as if by Burroughs' Cut Up Method. Most importantly, at the center of each of her books, she bares her soul, leaving it all on the page like a true artist. And that's the only traditional characteristic about her style, that she is fine with suffering for the vision.
January 30, 2012
A Gentle Hell by Autumn Christian is another in the Darkness and Dismay series put out by Dark Continents Publishing. It is yet another fine, fine piece of work. Christian's writing is enigmatic, yet crystal-clear. I suppose the best way to describe it would be "poetic". Her images are unusually constructed, but they are never nebulous. Her horror is definitely unsettling, but not necessarily gory. The horror in these stories comes from within the characters; a quiet desperation at the numb bare facts of human existence. After reading the stories in this collection, I found myself making plans to revisit it in a month or so, once I've had time to digest the first reading. Great stuff!
January 17, 2013
Autumn Christian's writing is like a dream, one of those dreams that makes perfect sense while you're in it but melts away fast in the sunlight. It is of crucial importance, yet indescribable; deep as an ocean, but opaque from the outside.
Take her hand, and let her pull you under.
Take her hand, and let her pull you under.
May 2, 2012
A lyrical prose that offers more than the typical horror novel. Very well done.
January 31, 2013
Perfect. I was thinking I liked the last two stories the most and I looked back and realized I loved it all. Watching Autumn grow has been a privilege and a joy.
March 21, 2012
First story was fantastic. The rest were all right.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews