The Unyielding

by Gary J. Shipley

Something is horribly wrong with my wife. She doesn't move anymore. When I try to lift her I can't. It's like she's glued to the floor, or impaled on something. But her body keeps randomly appearing around the house in contorted positions: facedown in the hallway, at the end of our daughter's bed, and on the ceiling of the main room, her feet, hands and backside flat to the plaster.

There is a cold translucent slime coating her skin. The scent of her is intense and repugnant, and yet I am finding myself increasingly drawn to her. I have a desire to merge with her. The children, too, want to be near her. Sitting on top of her brings them comfort as they stare at their tablets and phones. We stop going to work and to school. We feed from her. We begin to change. And we are not the only ones...

The Unyielding is a darkly surreal tale that details what happens to a family when one of its members becomes an immovable: an entity that while corpse-like is also spatially-inconstant, oddly nutritious, and excessively seductive to surrounding humans. If you've ever wondered what philosophical pessimism looks like in the flesh, it looks like this.

Genres: Horror, Fiction, Novels

100 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2017

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Gary J. Shipley is a writer and philosopher based in the UK. He has published work in various philosophy journals and literary journals.

Reviews

[Janie · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unnerving dissection of the uncertainty posed within our expectations of our own existence. Even when existence itself becomes too painful to look upon, it continues and mutates. In this narrative, the juxtaposition of extreme isolation and complete dependence upon a host is both ironic and thought provoking.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of all the things we could have found to fear we still feared the same discharging of identity, that same icky nowhere of ourselves, the lie of everything and the certainty of nothing and the conditions necessary to suffer it.

What happens when your dependence on your wife's dead body for sustenance—both emotional and physical—becomes normal for both you and your children. You go online and find a discussion forum for people experiencing the same phenomenon. You get caught up in this—finding out about the incremental phases and posting your own experiences. Then you get distracted. You and your kids retreat to your own devices—each fixating on different increasingly distanced subject matter. Everything becomes observation interrupted only by feeding, when you even remember. Is it really so different from how you live now?

[B.R. Yeager · Rating 5 out of 5]

A feverish and viscerally accurate depiction of sentient existence becoming unthinkable. At once grisly and resigned, Shipley's narrative details the shifting of matter from one state to another, to another, and to another, ad infinitum. The Unyielding is a brief yet dense Ballardian nightmare, occupying space both surreal and utterly familiar.

[Maggie Siebert · Rating 4 out of 5]

interesting to think of as a thematic prequel to terminal park. i’d recommend reading them back to back in any order. shipley continues to be one of the few who well and truly frighten me

[Christian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I still think about this book all the time.
Some things I love:

Melancholic and bleak atmosphere ✅
Personal weird apocalypse/private hell ✅
Body horror ✅
Ambiguity ✅
Surrealism ✅
Nameless characters in a nameless place ✅
Very smart and unhackneyed employment of the internet (forums specifically) and smart devices ✅

Highest recommendation for fans of surreal horror/weird fiction.

[Barry Paul Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Icky! 🖤

[Horror DNA · Rating 5 out of 5]

When authors talk about transcending narrative, they’re bullshitting 99% of the time. At the top of the other 1% is an author who just does it without talking about it: Gary J. Shipley. Brave, unique, new, extremely bizarre; call it what you will, no one else is producing the type of uncanny, poetic, philosophical, extreme fiction that Shipley keeps delivering. His latest novel, The Unyielding, is a narrative that manages to be all of that while also approximating a standard novel in terms of characters battling/experiencing something and possessing a somewhat linear/chronological progression. Aside from that, it’s a hardcore body horror novella unlike anything you’ve ever read.

You can read Gabino's full review at Horror DNA by clicking here.

[Autumn Christian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deeply disturbing weird horror - amorphous and unresolved. The feelings of grief become manifest in a body that will not move, and the family that takes nourishment from its decay.

[Alex Delogu · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lyrical descent into humanity undone. An allegory of deadened attachment led through a mirror-maze of debilitating hyper-awareness. Told through the lens of a father whose wife becomes unmovable, overflowing her own death. The book is a catalogue of slimy decline.

[Mike Benoit · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yuck. 😞

[Lloyd Grady · Rating 5 out of 5]

I never want to read this again.

[Jose Cruz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Novela de terror surrealista de 160 páginas, publicada en 2017. Si bien la premisa es buena y la pluma del autor exquisita, pronto la trama se estanca y, ni el hilo argumental avanza, ni el misterio se trata de resolver. Al contrario, el resto de personajes toman decisiones extrañas e incoherentes. Mezcla de gore y escenas grotescas que desdibujan la premisa inicial de ciencia ficción tan interesante. Una lástima y una decepción. No recomiendo esta lectura.

[Joseph Barber · Rating 2 out of 5]

I try to always write a review for the books I read.

This one had me bored and I kept falling asleep. I had to back track and read over because I was not sure what I read. It did not keep my interest.

Not even going to attempt to talk about the story itself. Just wasn’t there for me.

Absurdist horror, you can say that again!

[Luke Pajowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

The 2nd book of Shipley's I have read. Has similair themes to Terminal Park but also manages to stand outside of the sandbox all the other writers of horror are playing in. It take on an almost philosophical route ala Ligotti. I cannot wait to read more of this man's work for he has managed to crawl under my skin and leave me unsettled at not just the images he conjures up but the ideas he transmits.

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Instead of "healthily" transitioning to mourning (in the Freudian sense), this short novel doubles down on melancholy and its mysterious resources for (non-)survival: "More than anything I wanted the nothing I was promised."

[Thelonius · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am about ten percent too stupid for this book

[José Pascual · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cuando la vida es lo extraño.

Se habla de lo extraño con ligereza. El género de terror y fantástico se han caracterizado desde siempre por la introducción de elementos imposibles o irracionales dentro de nuestro día a día. Este recurso es, no cabe duda, uno de los más utilizados por todo tipo de creadores cuya intención se base en generar incomodidad en el receptor, ya sea este lector, espectador u oyente. En literatura, estamos inmersos en una corriente que apela a lo estrambótico y a lo extravagante como medio para epatar. Es tal la aceptación del weird, que autores de «alta literatura» lo han fagocitado en sus propias obras. Sin embargo, nadie lo hace como el británico Gary J. Shipley. Créanme. Nadie escribe como Gary J. Shipley.

La extrañeza lo abarca todo en Los inamovibles. La trama nos presenta a un hombre (el narrador) que, junto a sus dos hijos, han de lidiar con el cadáver de su mujer-madre en casa. El cadáver está bocabajo en el pasillo y nadie es capaz de moverlo. Con el paso de las horas y los días, asistimos a los cambios que se van produciendo en el cuerpo y en los propios personajes. Ellos lo detallan todo en un chat de internet llamado «Los inamovibles», donde una comunidad de usuarios comparten la misma experiencia.
Desde el lento pero continuado discurrir de la trama hasta el comportamiento de los personajes, el autor nos sitúa en un microuniverso cuya racionalidad es distinta a lo que conocemos. El término alienígena empasta bien con esta obra. Sin embargo, resulta curioso que algo tan chocante, tan poco común a nuestra cotidianidad, describa tan fielmente la naturaleza humana...

Reseña completa en «Dentro del Monolito»: https://dentrodelmonolito.com/2023/10...

[Joseph (Kevin) Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first attempt at weird or bizarro fiction and I loved it. Also, my first Gary Shipley (a philosophy professor, writer) and not my last. Having said that, I feel someone needs to teach a class on it to help me understand all the depth of it all. There are a few strings of sanity I held on to that helped me through, but after each paragraph (no chapters, headings, etc. in this book) I did have to stop and consider, mull over...contemplate what just happened. The 97 page story is presented by the husband (characters have no names) as he chronicles, with much restrained precision and to its utmost absurd conclusion, what transpires once he finds his wife lying in their hallway...dead!? The deadness of his wife is obviously important, but the absurd main theme of the novel is that the wife-mother cannot be moved. Definitely one to check out even if it's to mark of reading something in the genre.

[Pablo Pelluch · Rating 4 out of 5]

He empezado de manera bastante apasionada esta historia tan weird sobre un tipo narrándonos qué sucede cuando encuentra el ¿cadáver? de su mujer tirado en casa. Un cadáver, sí, inamovible.

Qué pasa con sus hijos. Con sus conocidos. Cómo les transforma esto. Qué dicen en su foro de referencia en cuanto a este tema.

Pero claro, al final, pese a que es sugerente, casi parecido a poesía porque sencillamente crea imágenes que nos cuesta casar con una narrativa que se desarrolla en nuestro universo, parece que valga todo. Y da un poco igual y se desinfla, qué más darán 140 páginas que 100 o 180. Querría haber encontrado la lógica interna de la noveleta, pero no he sido capaz y por ello el final se me ha hecho cuesta arriba.

Los otros textos que acompañan al libro, tirando a infumables, por suerte, cortos. Pero la impresión es positiva por ese arrollador comienzo cuando aún no sabí a lo que venía.

[Pablo Concha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Este es uno de los libros más extremos e interesantes que he leído este año. Algo inolvidable que entra en la lista de favoritos del años. Por aquí una nota al respecto:

https://revistamundodiners.com/litera...

[Stijn · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 Unique way of approaching the weird. In style, layout, atmosphere, neverending neverconcluding story. The readability or repetition was sometimes a bit lacking, but maybe that's nitpicking. Great addition to the weird legacy.

[Elijah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heartwarming tale of a post-modern family unit.

Nothing occurs.

[Scurvinewelsh · Rating 4 out of 5]

This pops back into my head quite regularly. So grotesque without necessarily being gory, very firmly in the realm of body horror. I love how dreamlike it feels as the "plot" unfolds.