The End of All Our Exploring and Other Stories

by F. Brett Cox

The stories in F. Brett Cox’s debut collection move through multiple genres and many times and places, from the monsters of the 19th century to the future fields of war, from New England to the South to the American West, from the strange house at the top of the hill to the bottom of your childhood swimming pool. But whatever the time and place, and whether utterly fantastic or all too real, all of these remarkable fictions pose the fundamental question: what’s next? The End of All Our Exploring features 27 stories, and it also includes Cox’s unique historical notes.

Genres: Fantasy, Science Fiction, Short Stories, Horror

288 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 7, 2018

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

I blurbed this wide-varying, genre-bending collection of stories. Needless to say, I dug it.

[Karen Heuler · Rating 5 out of 5]

What thrills me about Cox’s writing is both the classic feeling—these stories have authority—and their ability to invoke and sidestep and incorporate suspense. I loved “What We Did On Our Vacation: My Whole World Lies Waiting,” about finding doors out in the open, and I wanted them to be portals. They are, but not in the way I expected. I didn’t go into a new, uncharged world, but what arrived at was thought-provoking. Many stories have an element of the unreal or fantastic as a casual inhabitant of our world, kind of peering in at us, observing us much as the sea serpent in “The Serpent and the Hatchet Gang” observes a woman standing on the shore. This infringement of the strange into the ordinary—not as something problematic but as something that co-exists—intrigues me, as does the nice anticipations that run through many of his stories.

For example, in “The Deep End” something is waiting in the drain in a swimming pool. It’s almost a perfect example of how something the reader knows influences what we see and what we expect, and the wait to meet what seems inevitable is wonderful. That drain is always in our mind as are the doors in the open in the other story. Our expectations shape the story we read, because we can’t be free of what we know is there.

The conversational, the everyday, keeps happening amidst these intrusions, and overall these stories remind me of Auden’s point in “Musee des Beaux Arts”—no matter how amazing what we saw was, we still sail calmly on.

[Misha · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a DNF. It's a collection or short stories and I read a number of them. It's notmy thing, too violent, not mostly SFF, and not worth any more of my time.

[Kim Ward · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brett’s ability to write from the heart of a character while writing haunting and driving stories is breathtaking. It’s about time he had a full collection here in the states!