Stone Gods

by Adam Golaski

Stone Gods features 15 stories of lives and places set askew, suffused with nightmarish dread somewhere between the literary horror of Lisa Tuttle or Ramsey Campbell, and the films of David Lynch. In "Stone Head", a man waiting for his family to return home finds his world and himself changed by the appearance of a strange monument in his backyard. In "The Great Blind God Passed Through Us," a girl visits her family's hometown, where justice demands the observance of old customs. In "Wild Dogs", strange animals stalk a man whose night on the town goes from bad to worse. In "Open Houses", a skater dares himself to ride through a cemetery, only to find within it a strange replica of his own home.

Praise for Stone Gods:
“Golaski’s exploration of the human experience through the supernatural is immersive and self-exploratory. The final story, ‘A Rainbow Summer,’ employs storytelling itself as a potent instrument. A father breathes life into the animals in Noah’s Ark, masterfully capturing the very essence of Stone Gods and what Golaski achieves within these memorable, sharply crafted stories.”
- Publishers Weekly (A BookLife Editor’s Pick)

“In measured prose, Golaski’s work recalls that of H.P. Lovecraft with surreal shades of Leonora Carrington’s or Silvina Ocampo’s work. Logic goes out the window in these atmospheric, symbolic tales. A celebration of the strange, cleverly told across stylistic forms.”
- Kirkus “Adam Golaski is an original… The strangeness of his fiction is palpable as we journey seamlessly from an ordinary world intensely described to hallucinogenic hells and then back again… These tales are masterful explorations into alienation and disconnection.”
— Steve Rasnic Tem, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Ubo and The Man on the Ceiling (with Melanie Tem)

“Adam Golaski’s Stone Gods is an essential entry into the modern canon of the strange story. With hypnotic prose and bold stylistic strokes, these stories poke holes through reality’s thin spaces, destabilizing the dream of normalcy and letting the unknowable peer inside. By turns unsettling, horrifying, and beguiling, there is no safe space inside these pages or — once you’ve read Stone Gods — outside of them either.”
– Gordon B. White, author of As Summer’s Mask Slips, And Other Disruptions

“Adam Golaski’s Stone Gods is a subversive distillation of literary dexterity and allegory, both personal and universal. By the time we notice one of life’s anomalies, readers will find that Golaski has already captured it, placed it under a cerebral bell jar, and altered his specimen into something both instructive and alchemically unconventional.”
— Clint Smith, author of The Skeleton Melodies

Genres: Horror, Short Stories

193 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 3, 2024

About the author

Adam Golaski is a husband and a father. Adam wrote Color Plates (Rose Metal Press, 2009). His translation of Sir Gawain & the Green Knight—"Green"—appears in installments on the critical site Open Letters. His poetry, fiction (horror and otherwise), and non-fiction has appeared in journals such as: word for/word, Supernatural Tales, McSweeney's, Sleepingfish, Conjunctions, and All Hallows. He is currently editing selected poetry of Paul Hannigan for Pressed Wafer, and co-edited for Flim Forum Press two anthologies of experimental poetry, Oh One Arrow (2007) and A Sing Economy (2008). Adam edits and publishes New Genre, a journal of horror and science fiction, now in its seventh year. He collaborates musically with Jeremy Withers as Outlet; their most recent single, "Why Worry Rosary," appeared on the multi-media compilation Schwa 10.

Reviews

[Steve Stred · Rating 4 out of 5]

*Huge thanks to John at NO Press for sending me a digital copy of this one!*

Recently I read Adam Golaski’s collection ‘Worse Than Myself’ which was released back in 2008 by Raw Dog Screaming Press. That collection was dark, mysterious and at times super weird, which, when done right, can really tick my boxes when it comes to short stories. Not long after I posted my review, John from NO Press contacted me to see if I’d be interested in reading Adam’s newest collection, which I readily agreed to. I’m always mystified by authors who have almost no social media presence other than readers sharing their books or the publisher posting about them. It feels like back before the internet was around and books came upon your reader radar organically and not algorithmically.

What would Golaski deliver this time? I had no idea, but I was game for whatever he was about to throw my way!

What I liked: Much like ‘Worse Than Myself,’ the stories within this collection can be described as Ligotti meets Lynch. Despondent, bleak, dreary and ultimately devoid of sun, throughout each story grew heavier and heavier, as though a block of cement was continuously added to my back as the collection progressed.

Stand outs for me were;

‘Hushed Will Be All Murmurs’ – the opening story in the collection was very close to my favorite one here. It follows two men, potentially at the end of the world, who row a boat out into the fog and slowly go crazy while one tells the other a story. As someone who has always been scared of fog, this one had me unnerved from the first paragraph.

‘Stone Head’ – my favorite story in the collection, a man comes home, ready to prepare dinner for his wife and child who are returning from a trip, when he discovers a large, stone head in his back yard. From there, madness consumes him, a dystopian jungle sprouts up all around him and things that may or may not be his wife and child come home. This one paired really well with my favorite story from ‘Worse Than Myself’ – ‘The Man From the Peak’ – in that nature played a large roll in the smoke screen over reality and the main character continually questioned his own sanity. Outstanding story.

‘Holy Ghost’ – this one, much like the other two I mentioned, featured a man going insane, but this one utilized a very different manner to have this occur. ‘Holy Ghost’ is a strange band that sporadically releases albums. It’s a cause for celebration and when our main character gets a call from his local record shop that a new ‘Holy Ghost’ CD has arrived and is on hold for him, he races down to grab it. Then he meets a woman, who at first he thinks he’s seducing, but also wonders if she’s seducing him. Until he’s sitting in his car, body paralyzed and his mind begins to break. Fantastic.

Golaski has a way of immediately unsettling the ready, of telling a story from the beginning as though through a funhouse mirror where even the sentences themselves appear wavy and the reader struggles to digest what’s being projected.

What I didn’t like: As is often the case, some stories just didn’t click with me. Some of that is down to the ‘weird’ elements, that cross very close into Bizarro territory, a genre that I either get or don’t, and some of the stories either started strongly before taking a strange turn or simply were weird from the start and stayed that way.

Why you should buy this: Golaski occupies a section of dark fiction storytelling where the prose and the delivery are masterful but are written for a very specific group of readers. Much like how Ligotti and Zelenyj craft their stories purposefully, the reader must consume them purposefully, and for that reason, Golaski surely must be considered one of the masters of that subsection.

Like a rain cloud that only remains over a singular person on a sunny day, ‘Stone Gods’ is dark, dismal and ultimately a collection that’ll leave a mark on every reader who consumes it.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adam Golaski is known as a writer of “strange” stories, but he is also a poet. That’s true, first of all, in the literal sense of the word––he’s published poems and edited anthologies featuring the kind of poetry that people sometimes call “experimental”. But it’s in his stories where Adam shows himself to be a poet in a deeper, truer sense of the word.

What makes a poem a poem is more than just pretty language with rhythm and rhyme––it’s the ability to make sudden, startling shifts in meaning and direction, and somehow make them pay off. Those thrilling and unexpected leaps on the page are a lot like what we feel watching a magician work his craft––that beautiful girl you’ve been looking at suddenly disappears before your eyes like someone switching off a light; a bouquet of flowers becomes a flock of birds that fly away, then turn to smoke. That’s very much what reading one of Adam Golaski’s stories can feel like.

By following his own unconventional and dreamlike path, Adam has become a revered figure in the weird fiction universe. His collection ‘Worse Than Myself’ has attained “cult classic” status, and has been called (by Slate magazine) “one of the scariest books ever written”––all without relying on the standard tropes of horror fiction.

The publication of his long-awaited second collection, Stone Gods, is an opportunity that other writers might have used to write something a little more recognizably “commercial”. Instead, Adam has doubled-down on “the strange” and consequently created a book that is powerfully disturbing, deeply personal, and profoundly moving, all while remaining true to his own unique vision.

Stone Gods is divided into three sections. The first, called simply “1” is a set of seven stories that range from the nightmarishly surreal to the weird suburban landscapes Golaski knows and writes so well. The last tales in this first section, ‘Wild Dogs’ and ‘A Night Piece (“yielding light”) are two very different pieces of writing that disturb our notions of reality in equally powerful ways.

In ‘Wild Dogs’, the narrator whose life has been knocked out-of-kilter by his girlfriend leaving him, rings up an old flame and the two of them go clubbing and engage in a strange cat-and-mouse game, flirting and positioning themselves for dominance. As the night wears on, the atmosphere in the club becomes more threatening and unreal, building to a climax of hallucinatory violence that feels both surreal and primal.

In ‘A Night Piece (“yielding light”), two young sisters find themselves facing doppelgänger-like versions of themselves in an altered world in which day and night coexist simultaneously. The narrative fractures midway-through, and we are with a father who is all alone in a parallel version of the world that the young girls inhabit. It’s the first of several stories in the collection that touch on the theme of family members literally losing touch with each other, by forgetting or vanishing.

The second section of the collection is called ‘Autobiography’ consists of seven stories that feature a main character called “Adam”. The title of this section and the name of the protagonist invite us to accept these stories as fragments of a true-life memoir, which is exactly what most of them seem to be at first––but Golaski’s conception of “true life” is not always the same as ours, and these narratives twist and bend into strange shapes that feel more like dreams than memoir. (Dream-memoir, perhaps).

It’s in these “autobiographical” stories where Golaski’s uncanny ability to mix the real with the imaginative feels less like a literary effect and more like a faithful depiction of certain real human experiences. For small children, the boundary between the real world and the imaginary one can be very thin indeed. A child’s belief in magical things is what allows him to see them, and Golaski’s writing communicates that relationship with reality more truly and beautifully––and more simply––than almost anything I’ve read.

The stories in the ‘Autobiography’ section also (not surprisingly) contain the most deeply moving moments in the book. In ‘Unfinished Houses’, a six-year-old boy named “Adam” has just begun to make friends with his best friend’s sister, and finds himself thinking about her a lot. There’s a scene in which he’s terrified by a threatening apparition he fears may be stalking him, and his instinctive reaction is to say this young girl’s name aloud, even though (or especially because) he is all alone.

I’ll tell you, I did not expect to be moved to tears by one of the stories in this book, but this one moment did that for me.

The third and final section of the collection called ‘[coda’] consists of a single story, ‘A Rainbow Summer’. Told affectingly in second-person voice, it’s a story about stories––specifically, the stories a father tells his son at bedtime. One night, the father reads his son the story of Noah and the great flood. When the son questions his father about the story, the father responds by making up his own strange story about Noah and his family and how they were challenged and changed by the great thing that happened to them. It’s a surreal and strangely moving kind of parable in which you can hear Golaski’s distinctive voice speaking through the father, leaving us (like the father) with this parting gift.

Stone Gods, like all Golaski’s work, is beautiful evidence of what happens when a writer gives full allegiance to imagination and emotion, and invites us to take that leap with him. The fact that it doesn’t always sound or look like “horror fiction” is because it’s something even better––these stories are like short, sharp bulletins from the deep place where horror begins. Or, as another strange and fine writer, L.P. Hartley once said, “They do things differently there.”