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Singing With All My Skin and Bone
Come, my love, and I'll tell you a tale.
Tell me about the times before the fires. Sit down beside me in the dust and tell me stories of empire. Tell me about the times before the stars were so bright.
Tell me about the times before the sun cracked. Tell me a fairy story, a story with heroes.
Tell me a story that isn't this story. I need you to tell it to me like stories still matter.
I need you to tell me a story so I can put it in me and carry it with me. Tell me. Tell me all of it, to my teeth and tongue and throat. Tell it to my belly, my heart. Tell me and I swear I'll believe you. Oh my best beloved, tell me the story and I'll believe in the light again.
Tell me. Tell me all of it.
"Sex, oddity, horror, transfiguration: Sunny Moraine's stories cut straight through to the heart of even the most complicated concepts, turning words inside out with truly offensive skill, wringing them for every last scrap of beautiful terror. They will make readers want to write and writers want to stop writing, on the grounds that any idea they might have has demonstrably been done before, and far better."
- Gemma Files, Author of Experimental Film
Tell me about the times before the fires. Sit down beside me in the dust and tell me stories of empire. Tell me about the times before the stars were so bright.
Tell me about the times before the sun cracked. Tell me a fairy story, a story with heroes.
Tell me a story that isn't this story. I need you to tell it to me like stories still matter.
I need you to tell me a story so I can put it in me and carry it with me. Tell me. Tell me all of it, to my teeth and tongue and throat. Tell it to my belly, my heart. Tell me and I swear I'll believe you. Oh my best beloved, tell me the story and I'll believe in the light again.
Tell me. Tell me all of it.
"Sex, oddity, horror, transfiguration: Sunny Moraine's stories cut straight through to the heart of even the most complicated concepts, turning words inside out with truly offensive skill, wringing them for every last scrap of beautiful terror. They will make readers want to write and writers want to stop writing, on the grounds that any idea they might have has demonstrably been done before, and far better."
- Gemma Files, Author of Experimental Film
194 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 22, 2016
18 people are currently reading
537 people want to read
About the author
Sunny Moraine
74 books243 followersSunny Moraine is—among many other things—the author of the novella Your Shadow Half Remains, published by Tor Nightfire. Their debut short fiction collection Singing With All My Skin and Bone was released in 2016 and their short stories have been published in Tor.com, Uncanny, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and Nightmare. An occasional podcaster/narrator/voice actor, they are the writer, producer, and lead actor of the serial horror drama podcast Gone, which wrapped up its first season in January 2018 and released a second season in 2022. For more info, please see their website at sunnymoraine.com.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
August 4, 2016
A few brief words of recommendation about this fantastic (in both senses) collection of short stories from Sunny Moraine. There's nineteen stories here, and they are all rich and satisfying and worth taking the time to savour. The tales in Singing With All My Skin & Bone are often in the first-person and often addressed to a "you" either inside or outside the tale. So they feel less like prose and more like the speech of someone who has to try and articulate the story of their life. Moraine’s characters are those society considers oddballs and outsiders, and their stories do not always have happy endings.
The style is an alluring combination of horror, magic realism and even science fiction. Many read like extended metaphors for our lives and how we form relationships now: the stripping back of a partner in Love In The Time Of Taxidermy; the finding of your own skull in Memento Mori; the social media suicide epidemic of Dispatches From A Hole In The World; the subterranean magic in the title tale. Sylvia Plath, I imagine, would be nodding her head in violent approval at Moraine's work.
Moraine's prose is typically lyrical and poetic, but gruesome where it needs to be too. A lot of the stories veer towards body-horror, but the body (as the collection's title alludes to) is a source of power too, a source of control over one's own fate.
And then there's Cold As The Moon which with one line (a 21st Century update of a very famous E.M. Forster quote) managed to break my heart, utterly and completely.
A superb collection and another brilliant title from Undertow.
The style is an alluring combination of horror, magic realism and even science fiction. Many read like extended metaphors for our lives and how we form relationships now: the stripping back of a partner in Love In The Time Of Taxidermy; the finding of your own skull in Memento Mori; the social media suicide epidemic of Dispatches From A Hole In The World; the subterranean magic in the title tale. Sylvia Plath, I imagine, would be nodding her head in violent approval at Moraine's work.
Moraine's prose is typically lyrical and poetic, but gruesome where it needs to be too. A lot of the stories veer towards body-horror, but the body (as the collection's title alludes to) is a source of power too, a source of control over one's own fate.
And then there's Cold As The Moon which with one line (a 21st Century update of a very famous E.M. Forster quote) managed to break my heart, utterly and completely.
A superb collection and another brilliant title from Undertow.
June 30, 2019
Review to follow...
July 15, 2022
I’m going to be kind and just say that I am definitely not the target audience for this.
August 19, 2022
A haunting collection of short stories that truly disturb me. Themes of gender identity, love, therapy, sympathy with the enemy, stories, suicide, recovering (or not) from tragedy, sex, revenge, death, and the search for meaning are explored through witches, A.I., the apocalypse, rips in the fabric of the universe, a carnivorous house, drones, prosthetic limbs, and more.
This review doesn't do it justice. If a term like "weird fiction" is meant for anything, it's this. Sunny Moraine is an utterly astonishing writer, and this is a must-read.
This review doesn't do it justice. If a term like "weird fiction" is meant for anything, it's this. Sunny Moraine is an utterly astonishing writer, and this is a must-read.
July 11, 2019
"Pain has a way of reordering the world." -- Sunny Moraine's collection is a really beautiful composition of imaginative stories that showcase a variety of beauty and pain, and how that pain can get into your blood and veins no matter your background or how you identify. Each story is written with gorgeous, poetic descriptions that reminded me a lot of prose poetry. The language is striking and fantastical, which I thoroughly enjoyed; so if you are into deeply poetic narratives, I think you'd enjoy this collection a lot.
There is a story in here that I think is titled after Richard Siken's poem "Scheherazade" (from his collection CRUSH, which you just have to read if you like Moraine's book because the stylistic approach is similar in its beautiful craft); the story is titled "Tell Me How All This (And Love Too) Will Ruin Us", which is a line from Siken's poem, so I really wish Moraine had mentioned that or given credit to Siken somewhere in the book (if it was there, I did not see it). Especially since anyone who enjoys this collection would love Siken's work, too.
Otherwise, the book is wonderful and I recommend it. A few stories got a little too lost in the "narrative I" voice for me, but each story really shows unique ideas and many of them have fantastic characters and storylines that made it hard for me to put the book down. I look forward to checking out more of Moraine's work!
There is a story in here that I think is titled after Richard Siken's poem "Scheherazade" (from his collection CRUSH, which you just have to read if you like Moraine's book because the stylistic approach is similar in its beautiful craft); the story is titled "Tell Me How All This (And Love Too) Will Ruin Us", which is a line from Siken's poem, so I really wish Moraine had mentioned that or given credit to Siken somewhere in the book (if it was there, I did not see it). Especially since anyone who enjoys this collection would love Siken's work, too.
Otherwise, the book is wonderful and I recommend it. A few stories got a little too lost in the "narrative I" voice for me, but each story really shows unique ideas and many of them have fantastic characters and storylines that made it hard for me to put the book down. I look forward to checking out more of Moraine's work!
August 15, 2016
Sunny Moraine is another author whose debut collection was released earlier this summer. Their fiction has appeared in Shimmer, Nightmare, and Lightspeed, which originally published “So Sharp That Blood Must Flow,” a pointed retelling of The Little Mermaid that was reprinted in The Year’s Best Weird Volume 2. Sharp is an apt descriptor for Moraine’s prose, too, showcased here in nineteen cleverly-crafted stories of dark, dark fantasy and science fiction.
“The line between truth and story is so thin,” Baba Yaga tells a miner carrying more than secrets from his old country in “Across the Seam.” Singing With All My Skin and Bone is a catalogue of small, sometimes terrible, sometimes transcendent, truths couched in ambitious genre-hopping fiction. While not every experiment succeeded for me—I wasn’t as emotionally invested in stories about drones or being liquid—I loved the flare of anger running through so many of these tales, the injustice in worlds like and not like our own, the prison of mortality. Moraine has a fantastic ear for a story’s rhythm, knowing how to hypnotize with their distinctive voice.
“The line between truth and story is so thin,” Baba Yaga tells a miner carrying more than secrets from his old country in “Across the Seam.” Singing With All My Skin and Bone is a catalogue of small, sometimes terrible, sometimes transcendent, truths couched in ambitious genre-hopping fiction. While not every experiment succeeded for me—I wasn’t as emotionally invested in stories about drones or being liquid—I loved the flare of anger running through so many of these tales, the injustice in worlds like and not like our own, the prison of mortality. Moraine has a fantastic ear for a story’s rhythm, knowing how to hypnotize with their distinctive voice.
February 7, 2017
I had the great good fortune to publish two of these stories in Shimmer Magazine, so it was wonderful when this collection was announced. Sunny's work walks a very fine line between the real world and how we perceive it; real life is always stranger than fiction, and these stories explore that intersection. They are dark, and dreamy, and lovely. Some of them are hard to read, because they are so honest, but they are all the sweeter for that.
October 1, 2017
Honestly some of the best most lyrical writing in contemporary speculative fiction. Not every story will suit everyone, but the writing is always phenomenal and worth the journey all on its own. Some of the strangest, darkest, and most beautiful stories I've ever read. Sometimes uncomfortable, but never shocking for the sake of shock.
January 23, 2017
I won this book in a Goodreads first-reads giveaway.
This book was unlike anything I've read before. Poetic in its imagery. Thought-provoking and surreal. Vivid and evocative.
This book was unlike anything I've read before. Poetic in its imagery. Thought-provoking and surreal. Vivid and evocative.
June 30, 2017
It's one of those collections that you could sit down and get sucked into and not move until you've flipped the last page. The author has a way of putting you directly in these different worlds, like popping up out of manhole onto the street of wildly different scenarios. Step out and look around, and get lost in the prose that is so lovely you often forget that the content of what you're reading is more haunting than comforting. Stand outs: Perdition of Salt, It Is Healing It Is Never Whole, Cold As the Moon, Dispatches From a Hole in the World, Love In the Time of Vivisection.
July 11, 2018
Singing With All My Skin and Bone was my introduction to the writing of Sunny Moraine and it left me impressed. I wasn't crazy about the rampant first-person POV in the collection, but I can't deny that it lent the stories a very unique voice. I really enjoyed the weirdness of these stories. 'The Throat is Deep and the Mouth is Wide', 'Dispatches From a Hole in the World', and 'Event Horizon' were my favorites. If you're looking for a new writer of great dark fiction, definitely give this collection a shot.
January 25, 2021
IT IS HEALING, IT IS NEVER WHOLE
“I should never have lifted the soul out of the net.
But I could never have done anything else.”
I feel like that with this amazing book.
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of its observations at the time of the review.
“I should never have lifted the soul out of the net.
But I could never have done anything else.”
I feel like that with this amazing book.
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of its observations at the time of the review.
May 6, 2018
Scary, haunting, and evocative. Sunny Moraine is marvelous at making you feel like words can steal your breath, flay you, break you, and mold you anew as you read. The impressions and feelings this short story collection inspires will stick in your gut for a while.
January 13, 2020
It took me an age to finish this because each story is so intense. The writing is indescribable, beautiful, still accessible - the language is plain, it's what it's saying that isn't. I'm floored. Will be rereading.
April 9, 2018
Such a fantastic, beautifully written collection! Sunny's stories are sharp little knives digging into your softest parts, leaving you breathless.
August 2, 2018
Beautifully written but very dark
March 9, 2020
A lot of short story collections are hit or miss, but this was one was definitely more hit. Some really vivid stuff here.
December 25, 2017
Beautiful Book
I've never read a book with imagery so vivid and a voice so intimate. This still has me hooked and wanting to come back for more.
I've never read a book with imagery so vivid and a voice so intimate. This still has me hooked and wanting to come back for more.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews