My Child is a Stranger

by Brandon W. Teigland

My Child is a Stranger shows us the voices of the alienated, strange or oblique pariahs of our community, even if we are unable to bear it. A criminal investigator’s insane interpretations of an esoteric neuropath and a journalist's equally insane reasoning about the myth of reverse racism. A minor character’s manic rambling about a childhood frenemy. A hermit nun imagining a Bosch-like triptych in her mind, while sitting on a chair of nails. An unwritten PHD thesis on the impossibility of language and hallucinogenic mushroom wine. The diasporic double consciousness of a poet laureate. Drunken tourists intruding into the sacred rituals of Japan. Contraband cheese smuggled from a monastery by an ex-CEO, sentenced to a future that never was. Petro-capitalism in the shadow of debased utopias. Surrealism in closed Russian cities. Guides on how to fail. Auto-crucifixion. The Methuselarity. Uppgivenhetssyndrom … Over these scenes and more, a message spreads, a message in their story and their existence which no one will ever understand, its comprehension, not intended for human beings.

190 pages, Paperback

Published March 8, 2025

About the author

Brandon W. Teigland is a Canadian speculative fiction writer and apocalyptic realist largely concerned with pioneering the posthuman as a neo-decadent literary phenomenon. He is the author of the novella Under a Collapsing Sky (2021), the novelette Metapatterning for Disconnection (2023), the novel Neuromachina (2024), and the fiction collection My Child is a Stranger (2025).

Reviews

[Rebecca Gransden]

With the short fiction collection My Child is a Stranger Brandon Teigland offers a close reading of possible futures. Teigland’s exploratory voracity lays the groundwork for an examination of impulse, whether towards the limits of art or the human. The realm of theory has to live in our very real, fleshy heads, at least for now, but what happens when assumptions break down?

Read my interview with the author at XRAY Literary Magazine

[Eurydice Roquentin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is, to me, Teigland’s best book and is one of my favourite collections of short stories.
The essence of this volume is that it’s an examination of indifference and unity in a great variety of vignettes and stories. In typical Teigland fashion, indifference and unity aren’t opposites, but exist in conjunction with and rely upon one another. The great strength of the book is its sheer variety in the ways it explores its central idea.
Some of the stories are grounded, others more experimental. There is sci-fi, naturalism, fantasy, one is a detective story, another a kafkaesque experience of a delivery man. Some stories are reminiscent of Borges or Kafka, others of Hemmingway or Murakami, my favourite story at times feels like the confessional poetry of Plath or Sexton. The ‘indifference’ part of the equation comes in the form of climate change, nature, the passage of time, bureaucracy, prejudice, active and passive nihilism; the ‘unity’ from symbiosis of and with nature, acceptance, community. Yet, no matter how the structure or subject or even the vocabulary changes, there is a continuity of prose that gives the entire book a level of unity. This is the great strength of the book and why I think everyone should read it.
Some of the stories are more straight-forward and about the experiences of refugees, workers, and ethnic minorities. These are handled with great care, empathy, and keen psychological insight.
There are moments, too, that are visually incredibly beautiful. My favourite of these is in the story ‘The Last Shape,’ where the protagonist dreams of being at one with a forest in a way that also symbolizes birth or rebirth. Another beautiful image is of an empty room, with the haunting presence of a university professor.
I should highlight once again what I’ve said was my favourite story, ‘Cathedral of Spiders.’ Here, an abstracted Teigland goes into confessional, using his own name. He talks about his own alienation and drives and motivation in a beautiful setting with incredible prose. As mentioned above, in places it gave the same impression as some of Sylvia’s Plath’s confessional poetry – to me, this is the greatest possible thing it could do. If the whole book was only these twenty pages, it would still be worth buying.
The one thing that hurts this book a little is the lack of an introduction. I know that these stories were written over a long period – some biographical information would be helpful to contextualize them a little. Even moreso considering some of the continuity between these stories, for example the group United By Hate reappearing in some of them. This is very cool, but it also leads to some confusion regarding how unified we should see these stories apart from the theme. Specifically, mushrooms recur throughout the book, and it’s difficult to tell whether they’re always the same symbol or unique in each case they’re used.
Overall, I think this is an amazing book for many reasons and everyone should give it a chance.

[Derek Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating read. In the beginning it feels like a collection of short stories, but it slowly morphs into something that I find undefinable, what I might call a body made of organs of human existential decay, a body made of different confrontations with void and death. Every story works together to form an unholy whole. The book gets progressively stronger as it moves forward, as the whole of it comes together. The Naysayer and Cathedral of Spiders were most impactful, and I also loved Ichi-go ichi-e, the weight of skin, uppgivenhetssyndrom, Retreat After Retreat. I connect many other media, and thoughts and feelings, with the experience of reading this book. Musically, this book felt so uncannily similar to the experience of listening to Lurker of Chalice’s self titled album, their only ever release. A cathedral of bizarreness and gloom and visions blurred by the impossibility of the future. There is a feeling of removal here from the actual feeling of depression that the book invests in, a vision from the outside, which is a strength.

There was this obscure funeral doom band Worship, who recorded one brilliant album of pure bludgeoning punishing grief, The Last Record Before Doomsday, and then after recording the band’s founder Mad Max Varnier promptly jumped off a bridge. The artist and the art inseparable, his suicide almost legible as the final act of the art project (he was clearly depressed as fuck, art or no art). Brandon Teigland's work does NOT remind me of this. Here, I can feel the removal, which is one of the book's strengths. Teigland an observer of a holistically rendered, universal torment, the impossibility of a future without death. Philosophically it's totally fascinating. Cathedral of Spiders is such a beautiful response to the plagues of autofiction. Anti autofiction. It reminds somewhat of Lara Mimosa Montes’ brilliant new book The Time of The Novel, about a narrator that desires to become a work of fiction herself, who disavows existence in the process. Also, and this may sound nuts, this book has been a wonderful companion piece to the other book I was reading before, Honor Levy’s My First Book, a mind scrubbing gen Z tik tok dime square kick in the balls of pure internet glitch vibes, which I absolutely (and totally unexpectedly) loved. The feeling of Teigland's and her book are about as opposite as it gets, but both are precisely jacked in to specific outlets of modernity. Existence is a motherfucker and they both know it, but they express it in wickedly opposite ways.

Dostoyevsky and Thomas Ligotti are here, as is Jacques Vaché, the surrealist obsessed with suicide. But he, like Mad Max of Worship, succumbed to his own project. Another way of thinking about it is that they were engaged in the project of self-unmaking, and couldn’t separate themselves from their art in order to actualize that project. I need to read The Naysayer again. It is the capstone monument of the book and is dripping with all kinds of black bile and reality. Fascinating stuff. Very excited for Neuromachina

[Tiffany Walsh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I happen to be reading Brandon W. Teigland’s new collection of short stories, "My Child is a Stranger," at the same time as I am reading "The Lost Writings," stories written over a hundred years ago by the iconic existential master Franz Kafka. I have been a big fan of Teigland’s bold prose for years, and have written that his use of language taps into some subterranean part of our psyche, like it’s being administered intravenously to unearth the brutal and strange beauty of our fragile human existence. But not until now, while reading these short pieces by Teigland and Kafka side-by-side, have I been so keenly aware of just how profoundly Teigland carries the Kafkaesque torch of existential angst into our present time and place! Like Kafka, Teigland’s short stories are told from the paranoid perspectives of the alienated, ranging from a hermit living “psychedelically” in a crumbling chapel in such complete solitude that they would not even recognize their own species, to a man forced to assist in his brother’s ritual suicide, to a father watching his daughter cope with resignation syndrome as the family faces deportation and likely torture, to a group of suicidal walruses who begin to act in ways unlike their kind ever has due to melting ice. And like Kafka’s characters, Teigland’s protagonists almost grow bored of their unique tragedies, depressions, and horrors because at the end of the day, the human (and walrus) condition is merely absurd! In "The Lost Writings," Kafka has a brilliant story just a few paragraphs long that starts off with the sentence, “[a] legend is an attempt to explain the inexplicable; emerging as it does from a basis of truth, it is bound to end in the inexplicable” (Kafka, "The Lost Writings", translated by M. Hofmann, New Directions, 2020). Teigland’s narratives in "My Child is a Stranger" amount to modern day legends that play with the absurd, existential truth of our human condition while resisting absolutes and allowing for the messy and awe-inspiring inexplicability of it all.

[Jesse Roode · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short stories made for the modern age; the words play like an Instagram reel that feels like the AI algorithm listening to your very thoughts and from that moment, catches your attention, pulling you from the inside out. Dopamine blasts, your attention span is shot, but this line your eyes quickly glance over has made you feel more than you have in weeks, “God’s suicide is the extinction of the human species.”

You’re left with an existential dread that only the material world can evoke, “Empty Comforts” jabs at our earthly habits, and “Shadow Population” reveals the limits we push to satisfy greed at the expense of others. While “The Last Shape” and “Continual Gehenna” coldly hold your hand, walking you into the void.

These stories encapsulate as an artifact the transitions of a world that is no longer habitable. “My Child is a Stranger” reads like a collection of odes. Each creature lamenting their struggles of suffering. Every perspective neatly, yet chaotically, coalesces the experience of what it’s like to be a living contradiction that is everything yet nothing. Allowing us to viscerally integrate the confusion and alienation that is part of the post-human condition.