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Peripheral Visions: The Collected Ghost Stories Volume 1
Peripheral visions is a unique reference collection that includes all of Robert Hood's 44 ghost stories to date, three of them especially written for this 2 volume series. These memorable tales display Hood's uncanny ability to make the fantastic real, to embrace weirdness and create human characters whose lives - both inner and outer - haunted by mortality, are laid bare and revealed to be our own worst nightmares. Ranging from melancholy reflection on life and death, through disquieting tales of dark humour and vengeance, to chilling visions of ghostly apocalypse. Hood's stories are sure to draw you into a terrifying world that in the end is revealed to be irrefutably our own. Though many of these stories draw on the traditions of the past, they are far from traditional in approach. As you turn each page remember not everything here is as it seems. There's always something more, barely glimpsed, out there on the periphery.
434 pages, Paperback
Published March 27, 2015
3 people want to read
About the author
Robert Hood
112 books36 followersRobert Hood has been a published writer for several decades, with a long list of short stories and a few novels to his name. Though focused on Australia, he publishes anywhere he can and currently has books and stories in the US and UK. His books include the short story collections Day-dreaming on Company Time, Immaterial Ghost Stories, Creeping in Reptile Flesh and the career-spanning ghost story collection Peripheral Visions: The Collected Ghost Stories. Novels include Backstreets and the epic dark fantasy novel Fragments of a Broken Land Valarl Undead. He also co-edited the award-winning anthology Daikaiju Giant Monster Tales and its sequels.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 22, 2020
(fractional rating: 4.5 stars)
The first half of Robert Hood's collected ghost stories should hit all intervals on anyone's spectrometer; from the melancholy to the malevolent--from the earthy to the ethereal--the author offers many interpretations of what a ghost story can be. To keep the sheer variety of concepts and themes from becoming too dizzyingly disorganized, the book has been divided into three sections: haunted places, haunted families, and haunted minds. The last of these sections is, for me, the most consistently impressive so I will first discuss its more notable entries.
While I cannot call Hood a prose-stylist in the sense that I would Joel Lane or Thomas Ligotti, his prose is remarkably descriptive when it needs to be. "Beware! The Pincushionman", centered on the troubled life of an amateur cartoonist and her growing obsession with a supposedly fictional entity, has such a great profusion of vividly macabre descriptions that I was gladly reminded of Clive Barker's early works; to the author's credit, he also manages to create enough pathos by the story's end that the story is as much about its violence as it is about the protagonist's deeply existential despair. The oxymoronically-titled "Monstrous Bright Tomorrows" which, even though it takes the desolate Australian backwoods for its setting, is classically mythological in its structure; this story of self-becoming involves both a descent into inner darkness and an ascent into light of knowledge, all accompanied by the effectively symbolic presence of cicadas and their cacophonous chorus. Concluding this section--and the book itself--is "Ground Underfoot", an apocalyptic tale driven by a plague which is enigmatically elusive in all but its disastrous effects. Atmosphere is as integral as ever here, with the emotional impact of human complicity only heightening the overall grimly revelatory thrust of this piece.
The first piece of the haunted families section, "Grandma and the Girls", probably is the strongest one. As another reviewer has mentioned, its theme of mysteriously oppressive matriarchy strongly recalls Aickman and its final scene of a family tradition's literal decay is powerful.
The haunted places section has what, in my opinion, could be the crown of the entire collection, "Rotten Times": a piece which, though it takes aging as its main theme, does not feature a single senior citizen. Rather than belaboring the more predictable trappings of this theme, Hood takes it into a darkly metaphysical direction which is cosmically pessimistic almost to a Ligottian degree. The fact that this story starts out with a scene of a middle-aged woman being jilted at a nightclub makes the depths of darkness within this story even more surprising. "Kulpunya" strongly demonstrates the author's familiarity with Aboriginal myth and Australian landscape, but, for all of the descriptiveness, is ultimately a tale of mere revenge with mythological padding. Then, there are very brief and ineffective pieces, such as "Nobody's Car" and "Touched", which suffer respectively from excessive obliquity and sentimentality.
This book--and bear in mind that this is only the first volume--is the kind of rarity which is a lifetime achievement of first-rate imagination, demonstrating inventiveness of concepts, versatility of voice, and richness of theme. Displaying passion and skill across the entire spectrum of spectral horrors--from quiet to gory, sometimes both at once--Hood's fiction often targets both the head and the heart of the reader. Without a doubt, I recommend this volume to all lovers of dark fiction, and I look forward to reading the second volume.
The first half of Robert Hood's collected ghost stories should hit all intervals on anyone's spectrometer; from the melancholy to the malevolent--from the earthy to the ethereal--the author offers many interpretations of what a ghost story can be. To keep the sheer variety of concepts and themes from becoming too dizzyingly disorganized, the book has been divided into three sections: haunted places, haunted families, and haunted minds. The last of these sections is, for me, the most consistently impressive so I will first discuss its more notable entries.
While I cannot call Hood a prose-stylist in the sense that I would Joel Lane or Thomas Ligotti, his prose is remarkably descriptive when it needs to be. "Beware! The Pincushionman", centered on the troubled life of an amateur cartoonist and her growing obsession with a supposedly fictional entity, has such a great profusion of vividly macabre descriptions that I was gladly reminded of Clive Barker's early works; to the author's credit, he also manages to create enough pathos by the story's end that the story is as much about its violence as it is about the protagonist's deeply existential despair. The oxymoronically-titled "Monstrous Bright Tomorrows" which, even though it takes the desolate Australian backwoods for its setting, is classically mythological in its structure; this story of self-becoming involves both a descent into inner darkness and an ascent into light of knowledge, all accompanied by the effectively symbolic presence of cicadas and their cacophonous chorus. Concluding this section--and the book itself--is "Ground Underfoot", an apocalyptic tale driven by a plague which is enigmatically elusive in all but its disastrous effects. Atmosphere is as integral as ever here, with the emotional impact of human complicity only heightening the overall grimly revelatory thrust of this piece.
The first piece of the haunted families section, "Grandma and the Girls", probably is the strongest one. As another reviewer has mentioned, its theme of mysteriously oppressive matriarchy strongly recalls Aickman and its final scene of a family tradition's literal decay is powerful.
The haunted places section has what, in my opinion, could be the crown of the entire collection, "Rotten Times": a piece which, though it takes aging as its main theme, does not feature a single senior citizen. Rather than belaboring the more predictable trappings of this theme, Hood takes it into a darkly metaphysical direction which is cosmically pessimistic almost to a Ligottian degree. The fact that this story starts out with a scene of a middle-aged woman being jilted at a nightclub makes the depths of darkness within this story even more surprising. "Kulpunya" strongly demonstrates the author's familiarity with Aboriginal myth and Australian landscape, but, for all of the descriptiveness, is ultimately a tale of mere revenge with mythological padding. Then, there are very brief and ineffective pieces, such as "Nobody's Car" and "Touched", which suffer respectively from excessive obliquity and sentimentality.
This book--and bear in mind that this is only the first volume--is the kind of rarity which is a lifetime achievement of first-rate imagination, demonstrating inventiveness of concepts, versatility of voice, and richness of theme. Displaying passion and skill across the entire spectrum of spectral horrors--from quiet to gory, sometimes both at once--Hood's fiction often targets both the head and the heart of the reader. Without a doubt, I recommend this volume to all lovers of dark fiction, and I look forward to reading the second volume.
Displaying 1 of 1 review