Sing Your Sadness Deep

by Laura Mauro

British Fantasy Award-winning author, and Shirley Jackson Award finalist Laura Mauro, a leading voice in contemporary dark fiction, delivers a remarkable debut collection of startling short fiction. Human and humane tales of beauty, strangeness, and transformation told in prose as precise and sparing as a surgeon’s knife. A major new talent!

Featuring "Looking for Laika," winner of the British Fantasy Award, and "Sun Dogs," a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award.

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Fantasy, Fiction, Short Story Collection, Weird Fiction, Science Fiction

236 pages, Hardcover

First published June 9, 2019

About the author

Laura Mauro was born and raised in London and now lives in Oxfordshire. Their short story 'Looking for Laika' won the British Fantasy award for Best Short Fiction in 2018, and 'Sun Dogs' was shortlisted for the 2017 Shirley Jackson award in the Novelette category. In 2021, their debut collection Sing Your Sadness Deep won the British Fantasy Award for best collection, and short story 'The Pain-Eater's Daughter' won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction.

They are a former PhD candidate, whose research focused primarily on a theory of spectrality specific to Japanese horror fiction.

Laura likes Japanese ghosts (especially toilet ghosts), Finnish folklore and Russian space dogs. They blog (very) sporadically at lauramauro.com and can be found on bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/lauramauro.b...

Reviews

[Sadie Hartmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short story collections are my favorite way to get to know a new author. I find that there is always a variety of genres and styles represented, not unlike an artist's portfolio or listening to song samples from an album. You get the basic feel of the writer's skill set as well as what kind of storytelling voice they lean on.
Sing Your Sadness Deep is a debut short story collection from Laura Mauro. I've learned from this collection that Laura has an eye for details. She will turn a phrase that just sticks in your mind like a thorn and you'll likely think back on that exact phrase more than a few times. She has a literary presence that is revealed with every, single first line of each story. I noticed this right away, "Oh, this author has a knack for first lines."
Before I started my first read of this author's work, I learned that some of her short stories have been nominated for prestigious awards. I believe the first story and one of my favorites from the collection, SUN DOGS, was nominated for a Shirley Jackson award. It's easy to see why.
SUN DOGS is perhaps set in the not-too-distant future and maybe after some kind of world-changing event. The main character, Sadie, makes reference to her parents being early "preppers" and how nobody took that seriously until it was too late. Sadie encounters an odd situation on one of her encounters and has a surprise meeting of someone she calls, "you". I loved the narrating devices the author employs in this story. It gave the piece a sense of urgency and intimacy that resonated with me. It created an eagerness for more strange stories.
Another favorite was RED RABBIT. Over the years, my tastes have matured. I no longer need stories to have a linear design to them. They don't need to offer any explanations. They can be strange and unusual. The endings can be ambiguous. RED RABBIT is such a story-two people chasing red rabbits for no real reason. Something terrible happens. The end. It was weird and wonderful.
THE LOOKING GLASS GIRL is this dark, eerie tale about family secrets and a mysterious death. A woman's image trapped in the glass of a tiny hand mirror is the catalyst for learning the truth. I loved this one.
STRANGE AS ANGELS- some people are driving home from some kind of raging, drug party and they are really feeling the effects of it when their car hits something in the middle of the road. They go to inspect the injured "thing" and discover it to be something that looks like an angel. They bring it home. During conversations about the injured "thing," we discover that these two people have a complicated relationship. This angel thing grows and grows as does the complicated relationship and the tension. I read this story with my eyes frozen in shock and awe. Definitely one of the more memorable stories in the collection.
Almost all of these tales I could envision as full-blown novels or novellas with a little more meat added to the characters and some additional detailing and that made me excited to see what else Laura Mauro will write in the coming future.
I'll show up for it.
Not a full five star rating and only because a few of the stories just weren't for me. I skipped a couple after reading a few pages--they just didn't have the same magic or hook that the others did.
A special nod to Undertow Publications and Michael Kelly for being an amazing scout for new talent and for publishing beautiful editions of books to love and treasure.

[Lori · Rating 5 out of 5]

SING YOUR SADNESS DEEP is a force to be reckoned with. Not a bad story in the bunch. In fact, as I read each one I thought, ok, that was amazing, no way she can top that one. And then I'd read the next one and fuuuck me, she does. A must read for fans of strange stories that blur the lines of reality and fiction just enough to make you think "yeah, hell, that could kind of happen". Beautiful and brutal, these stories hit you like a thousand little gut punches, followed with a brief and tender kiss. They will haunt you long after you're done with them because they're not done with you.

[Karl]

Contents:

011 - "Sun Dogs"
033 - "Obsidian"
049 - "Red Rabbit"
057 - "Letters from Elodie"
069 - "The Grey Men"
081 - "Ptichka"
091 - "When Charlie Sleeps"
103 - "In the City of Bones" (New to this collection)
121 - "The Looking Glass Girl"
135 - "In the Marrow"
153 - "Looking for Laika "
185 - "Strange as Angels"
205 - "The Pain-Eater’s Daughter" (New to this collection)
233 - Acknowledgments
235 - About the Author

[uk · Rating 5 out of 5]

singing our sadness deep

in wondrous, wonderful tales of the weird, the bloody, the bizarre, the uncanny, the strange, the almost dead and the barely living, the horrific, the mythical, the monstrous, the compassionate, the sadness and the beauty of life.

in a clear, distinct, poetic voice.

self-assured and shining.

exceptional.

[Mafalda Fernandes · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5*

- "Sun Dogs" 4.5*
- "Obsidian" 4*
- "Red Rabbit" 3*
- "Letters from Elodie" 5*
- "The Grey Men" 4*
- "Ptichka" 3.5*
- "When Charlie Sleeps" 3*
- "In the City of Bones" 4.5*
- "The Looking Glass Girl" 4.5*
- "In the Marrow" 4*
- "Looking for Laika " 5*
- "Strange as Angels" 4*
- "The Pain-Eater’s Daughter" 4*

"Sun Dogs"
"and a framed cross-stitch on the wall: "Failure to Prepare Is Preparing to Fail." Pastel colours, delicate bluebell border; a portent of doom, handcrafted with love.'"
"It was as though after a life spent preparing fastidiously for a future that might never come, I had finally learned to absorb the present; you had taught me, somehow, that the sum total of my existence could not be pared down to numbers on a spreadsheet"
"Everything you were to me had been pieced together; you were a loose-stitched patchwork of intuition, of little stories and guesswork. And I loved you, somehow, despite your insubstantiality; you cast no shadow, left no footprints, but the warmth of your body and the salt taste of your skin mattered far more. I wrapped my arms around you, the curve of your skull delicate beneath my chin. Your hair smelled like gasoline. I wondered where you'd been. "I see you, June," I said, after a time. "I believe you.""
"We had no plan, no destination, and perhaps we would fail, but for now we would run, and it seemed to me - breathless, exhilarated - that nothing in my life had been as pure, as perfect as this singular moment of freedom."

"Red Rabbit"
"Look at us, (...) Three Alices, following the rabbit down the hole."

"Letters from Elodie"
"And in the dark, a black-eyed angel; a perfect creature for whom binary notions of sex seemed quaint and inadequate. Strange, that someone so straight should wear queer so well."
"Elodi was a forest fire, burning through men, consuming hearts and leaving them in ashes, but it was never about love, or sex. She was Narcissus, and she beheld her own reflection in the eyes of her lovers."
"I'd like alone in the dark at 3 am listening to her messages over and over, revelling in her vulnerability. I'd run her entrails gently through my fingers (...) I'd savour the anger and the loneliness in her voice, feel a warm thrill in my heart at every barely suppressed sob. (...) She gave me the means to destroy her and trusted that I would never do it. That's all love is, when you strip it down to the bare bones. A loaded gun to the temple with someone else's finger on the trigger."
"I'd listened to her messages enough times that I remembered entire monologues by heart, could quite her the way other people quoted beloved films."
"Cold water rushed to embrace me. I let it take my weight, cradling my skull, gentle as a lover. Filling my mouth and ears so that I might taste her, so that I might hear her. Her words carried on the current as clear and as eerie as whale song. Her voice in the water. Elodie's last letter."
"No signs of a life. As though she had only ever been visiting."
"I'de looked inside of her and seen nothing at all but bones couched in black rot; her magpie soul, pieced together out of the fragments she stole from other people, other lives, a ransom note assembled from newsprint. I could have destroyed her, if I'd wanted to. I could have ruined her. I could have."

"The Grey Men"
"But beneath it all, Adam sensed a cold, swirling undercurrent of real dread. He wanted to capture that feeling, to put it in a jar and hold it close to his chest. To feel the panicked flutter of a hundred frightened hearts and pretend it was his own."
"I know what it's like to be lost, (...) To be lost in the fog with no way out. I know how that feels. It feels like being dead must feel. It feels like nothing."

"Ptichka"
"She deletes her search history before she leaves. I'ts impossible to know who's watching, and it's better to be paranoid than stupid. People like her have been arrested for much less."
"There is salvation only for those who can afford to pay for it."

"In the City of Bones"
"Walls filled with people, with noise, with perpetual motion. The doorways and corridors which taught me object permanence, that people continue to exist even when you cannot see them. That the places you leave behind are not quietly swallowed by the world."
"Someday, when I am dead, someone will open this drawer and find these little scraps of praise, these paper ghosts, like transmissions heard once and never again."
"You live like islands out here, (...) Scattered up and down like there's miles of ocean between you and the rest of the world."
"I was kept away from the other children, though they too were defective, abandonded; they existed in my mind only as ghosts, as pale limbs behind half-closed doors."
"The road that leads here. That takes me home again. People call it the road of bones. It is built on the bodies of the dead. The people who constructed it. All of them, prisoners. Too much work to give them a proper burial, so they left them where they fell. (...) These are dead places. They are washed in the blood of those who built them."
"In the dark, my world is infinite; on those long, bright days there is no hiding how small it truly is, how sad."
"Emptiness, where there should be voices. The radio used to be alive with them; a cacophony of voices and melodies, like birdsong in spring."
"He has given me a purpose. When you grow up monstrous, the one who grants you your humanity is the closest thing there is to God."
"But the numbers are gone, and I think I finally understand why. They have served their purpose, and so have I."

"The Looking Glass Girl"
"There's an uncomfortable intimacy in sorting through the possessions of the dead. Running your fingers through their secrets, unearthing parts of them you were never supposed to discover. Things hidden for decades held up under a bright light for all to examine, thick with dust and, sometimes, with shame."
"I never did settle down, (...) You always said I was too obstinate for marriage. You knew me better than anyone, even at that age."
"A fierce wave of grief hits me like a slap in the face, twisting a knot in my gut."

"In the Marrow"
"(...) and though she was smiling Tara did not miss the sadness in her eyes, brief but definite, like a cloud that momentarily blots out the sun."

"Looking for Laika "
"When the attacks come, he puts on his headphones and presses 'play'. It doesn't matter what the song is; when his brain fills with sound it pushes the white noise of his panic aside, drowns it slowly under percussion and bass and wailing guitar. (...)And because the tapes belong to Mum, it almost feels as though she is the one comforting him."
"He has been a fool. There is no ritual powerful enough to stop the world."
"There is so little magic left in the world. There are no windmills with the power to ward off monsters, no trolls hiding under the bridges, no special rituals to ward off disaster."

"The Pain-Eater’s Daughter"
"His expression is so fond, so distant that Sara thinks he must be somewhere else in his mind. Somewhere where the sunshine heals instead of hurts, and the whole world is home, and she is a china-doll infant nestled in warm grass, beneath the wide blue sky."
"She finds the silence as unnerving as the dark; ominous things hide in there, concealed among all the nothing."
"Her father's blood makes her dirty, strange; her mother's blood makes her weak. She belongs nowhere, to nothing, and perhaps this is freedom too, of a sort, but it feels so lonely."

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a good collection! I just read it because of the cover but these went hard. My favorites were When Charlie Sleeps, Looking for Laika, Strange Like Angels, and The Pain Eaters Daughter!

[A · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection makes Laura Mauro an author to watch.

The way Mauro uses language makes you pay attention. Her phrasing would snag in my brain and make me think about the stories in a new way.

She isn’t afraid to go to surreal and weird places in her stories, and she doesn’t feel the need to hold the reader’s hand. It’s sink or swim and I felt gloriously in the middle, sometimes drowning, sometimes riding the wave. I loved the feeling of everything clicking together in a satisfied rush and alternately, I didn’t mind just being along for the weird ride, even if I wasn’t sure who was driving and where we were headed.

Favorites include:

“Sun Dogs”—nominated for a Shirley Jackson, this one surprised and delighted me. It has teeth, so watch out.

“Ptichka”—I read this one holding my breath; pregnancy-gone-wrong stories are always freaky, but this is on another level. You can sense the underlying creep of dread from the start.

“Strange as Angels”—a creature feature featuring the dissolution of a relationship.

“The Pain Eater’s Daughter”—a chilling rumination on death.

Undertow Publications is a press I'm going to keep my eye on. They are interested in new voices and aren’t afraid to take a chance on the strange and unusual. My thanks to Michael for my copy of this one to read and review.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

This review originally appeared in Black Static magazine in September 2019.

I find it much easier to write about something I don’t like rather than something I enjoy. Media I dislike can prick myriad sensitivities, creating so many angles within which I might unpick the subject matter, thinly disguising my impotent anger at work already created by systematically destroying its structure. When it comes to work I enjoy, appreciate, respect, however, it can be harder to define an appreciation: style, tone, language? Of course, but there’s then that nebulous substance that gut punches when reading something that’s just right. How am I supposed to define that? Particularly when that substance is carried like a flag – defiantly – throughout the work, daring you to compartmentalize, deconstruct, pigeonhole. Loving something – or someone – is much more of a challenge than hating. Which brings me to “Letters From Elodie” – one of my favourite stories in this collection – where Mauro writes: That’s all love is, when you strip it down to the bare bones. A loaded gun to the temple with someone else’s finger on the trigger. It is in that spirit that this review is written.

Many of you will be familiar with Laura Mauro’s stories. Two of the thirteen pieces here originally appeared in the pages of this magazine, and one – “Looking For Laika” – ran in the sister publication, Interzone. It also won last year’s British Fantasy Society Award. Mauro’s pieces trace fantasy with a realistic hand. Her prose is singular and effective, descriptions layered with meaning, characters sharply drawn. Yet the fantastical scenarios within which these stories are set are often shadows, delineations of our world but seen in the corner of an eye. Her outsider characters – as most tend to be – drift within the liminal states of such realities and fantasies, their anchors trailing on the ground, sometimes momentarily snagging before loosening again. This dislocation is strength: Mauro’s scenarios do not require understanding to succeed, but feeling.

So that “When Charlie Sleeps” reality spools back to safety, the unbecoming of civilization is temporarily halted. The female guardians in this story perform their role by happenstance. They are no heroic figures, simply ordinary people bound by a sense of duty, entrapped within their tasks, coerced to assume that the reality they are faced with must be true, however unlikely, even if not of their choosing. And in “Sun Dogs”, the probable apocalypse is barely a suggestion, our narrator’s survival mundane in a locally sketched aftermath. Our narrator is the interloper as much as her guest is an interloper. Is everyone an outsider once outside has become so strange?

Language is important to Mauro, as are portents, and her strengths are when these are woven together. Prose doesn’t simply function story, but is integral to it, like all good literary fiction. “Obsidian” is a marvelous piece about family sacrifice, about the weak who are strong replacing the strong who are weak. Set in Finland where a demon from the deep comes calling, Mauro beautifully foreshadows events with her prose: There is frost on the inside of the windowpane when Pihla gets up for school. She sits with the blankets puddled around her knees, tracing the ridges: an alien topography through which the moon still glows, white and bloated, like something drowned beneath the ice.

Mauro is a wrestling fan and whilst no-one similarly garbed makes an appearance in these stories, there are battles aplenty of the quieter kind. In “The Pain-Eater’s Daughter” Sara incrementally fights to understand her father’s profession across a piece which spans her teenage years, her development linked to drip-fed greater knowledge until, like many daughters, she takes the deer by the horns and demands the ultimate answers. And in “Strange Angels”, Frankie’s boyfriend Jimmy becomes the insolent aggressor in another headlight hitting story, when the object of a night-time collision is exactly what it appears to be, the story skirting the fantasy/reality divide once again as our characters assimilate the weird into the everyday, Mauro creating scraps of fantasy to hang a backdrop against which common domestic dramas are played. Her characters might win their fights, but they are proven to be bitter victories, reminders that life doesn’t wrap when the director says Cut and that there are consequences beyond the presenting dilemma.

As with any collection, there are some stories which resonate less for a reader, and in this I would include “Red Rabbit” and “The Grey Men”; however personal preference vs accomplished prose is a different kind of battle and other reviewers can be the judge of those. Occasionally, the story demands a rematch. I wasn’t keen on “Ptichka” when I read it on first appearance in the anthology, Horror Uncut, but placed here in context about a third of the way through the book, this story blooms as quintessential Mauro: an ordinary outsider citizen longing for normality but embracing extraordinary things, set against a background of obfuscation and frustration. Marta’s denial of the abnormality of her pregnancy is subsumed by motherly love, her willingness to endure expectation against the odds both poignant and terrifying, the final moments ambiguous and heartbreaking.

I’ve decided to finish the review with my favourite story in this collection: “In The Marrow”. A piece that tugged and triggered all my emotions and ticked all my preferences, a piece so brilliantly written that the joy of reading it was parallel to the joy of knowing that it existed. This rare gem is a possible changeling story of two twin sisters, one of whom becomes ill and the other who assumes malicious intent. The dichotomy between knowing/unknowing is beautifully balanced and the denouement so uplifting yet loaded with portent that I couldn’t define which emotions surged through me as I read the final words and the veil of ambiguity was raised: a more perfectly realized piece of fiction would be harder to find. I absolutely loved this piece and would happily return to it over and again.

In summary, it seems finding words to describe something you enjoy perhaps aren’t as difficult as I first thought. If there is a loaded gun with someone else’s finger on the trigger, then be aware that within “Sing Your Sadness Deep” none of the bullets are blanks and Laura Mauro just happens to be a markswoman.

[Maggie · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25 This is a bleak, grotesque, and magical tapestry of humanity. Almost every story hit a nerve, like a sharp stab of emotion being unearthed. Mauro's prose sinks deep into your bones: it is so heavy with detail that each story's setting leaves an imprint of authenticity that is unmatched. Some stories were very metaphorical or non-linear, others explored topics of grief utilizing magical realism as a way to face these harsh realities of life. Some stories challenged what defines a human, such as "The City of Bones" or "When Charlie Sleeps." Others were sorrowful, such as "The Pain-Eater's Daughter" or "The Looking Glass Girl." But almost all these stories will have some element that connects with readers.

For those who enjoyed Cursed Bunny, this collection is sure to satisfy. Highly recommend. I only took off one star because two stories were not for me, but these stories could definitely mesh well with other readers, so do not be deterred!

[James Everington · Rating 5 out of 5]

The debut collection from Laura Mauro was always going to be something special. Most readers of this blog have probably already read & admired some of the stories she's had published over the last few years (disclaimer, she wrote a wonderful tale for Imposter Syndrome, which is included here). Every story in Sing Your Sadness Deep is great, but if I had to chose some specific highlights, the stories 'When Charlie Sleeps', 'The Grey Men', 'Letters From Elodie' and especially the heartbreaking 'Ptichka' are as good as weird fiction gets.

[Priya Sharma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of us toil away for years, while writers like Laura Mauro seem to appear fully formed, creating original and startling work from the outset. She sings her sadness deep, with assured melodies, strange resonances and beautiful harmonies.

My personal favourites are the luminous "Sun Dogs", the skewed London of "When Charlie Sleeps", the dark fairy tale "In the Marrow", the award winning "Looking for Laika", and the closing story "The Pain-Eater's Daughter".

[Luke Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've known Laura online for several years so I've been looking forward to her first collection of short stories for months especially after enjoying her debut novella Naming The Bones. Putting aside our friendship, I can honestly say these stories are almost all excellent with only the odd one being a little too abstract for my personal taste (Red Rabbit and In The City Of Bones) while The Grey Men, Strange As Angels and Ptichka were pure class.
This is not anything like standard horror. This is horror that leaves its residue on your skin. I've got no doubt Laura will be one of the genre's stars very soon.

[Sam Edwards · Rating 5 out of 5]

(1) "Looking for Laika" made me feel emotions on a plane and that's NOT OKAY! I'm suing her. Good Lord, what a beautiful story.
(2) This is an incredible, tragic, fantastic weird collection. All the stories have emotional resonance, and I'm struck by Mauro's ability to so vividly capture so many settings. Deserts, Seas, Taigas. Favorites include "Laika," "Pitchka," "Looking Glass Girl" and "In the Marrow."
(3) Buy it. Review it. Nominate it for the things.

[Tracy · Rating 4 out of 5]

In her debut horror/speculative fiction collection, author Laura Mauro has joined my list of writers I cannot wait to read more from. Sing Your Sadness Deep is a riveting collection. It is one of the few I have read in which I adore both the first and the last story. I think it’s just a weird ME thing. Usually I like the first one or the last, never both. Well, that ends now. I also enjoyed the fact that I really did love so many of these stories; I will focus on my favorites for this review.

Sun Dog is the lead story, as it should be. The synopsis above mentions its nomination to the Shirley Jackson Awards and I absolutely see why. A brutal tale that sucked me in and left me jumping to get to the next stories.

There are other clear favorites. They include: Obsidian, Letters From Elodie, Strange As Angels, Ptichka, The Grey Men, and The Pain Eaters Daughter. These really connected with me for several reasons. First, almost all share similar themes/foci. Some deal with memory, loss, and grief, others with fascinating, other-worldly creatures. All of them, however, boast clear writing and a quiet sense of introspection. They enveloped me. Often I find myself jolted from story to story; these have a sweeping movement to them and I just let myself follow along.

It goes without saying that I will look for more from Laura Mauro. I believe she has a novella out as well and I need to get my hands on it. If you are looking for a good collection, you cannot go wrong with this one. I think everyone will find something for them within these pages.

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection was well written and enjoyable on the whole. It took me a while to get through since I haven't had a ton of time to read lately, but short stories are good for that; read one or two when you have free time. I tended to enjoy most the tales here which were more akin to weird fiction than horror in my eyes. A few favorites off the top of my head: Sun Dogs, The Grey Men, Looking for Laika, and Strange as Angels. This is definitely a new author to keep an eye on!

[Alicia · Rating 4 out of 5]

These stories are all bummers (as the title would suggest) in the best way. If you don't listen to certain songs or watch certain movies just to get a little tearduct action, then maybe stay away? Not to say this book made me cry, but it definitely made me feel like there's a lot to be gleaned from those feelings we shy away from- loneliness, sadness, pain.

[Jonathan Oliver · Rating 4 out of 5]

Laura's collection is beautifully written. A feast of the weird, rich with humanity and a certain dark poetry. These are stories from the heart - tales that look into the darkness to help lead us through it.

[Mary Zimmerle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes I feel self conscious about giving everything five stars but it’s honestly just that I don’t generally read past the first chapter or story if I’m not enjoying it.

Anyway, this was an aptly titled collection. Weird and heartbreaking. And beautiful.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

This truly might be the best collection of short stories I have ever read. I don’t recall there being any filler material or major differences in quality between the various stories. The author does a fantastic job of taking dark subject material and of making the stories feel very personal. This collection shows that horror and dark fiction can have a heart, emotional gravitas, and can be “serious” literature. This collection should appeal to all fans of short stories, not just horror and fantasy fans. I will definitely be reading any and all other published work by the author!

[Catherine McCarthy]

What an outstanding collection! I wish I had time to write a lengthy review, but I made so many notes and highlighted so many passages of exceptional prose it would take me all day. Suffice it to say, this collection jumped straight on to my 'Best Reads of 2022' shelf. Really, I can't recommend it highly enough. The writing is outstanding, the stories heart-breaking (as you might expect from a collection titled Sing Your Sadness Deep), and yet what struck me most was how beautiful yet brutal the language was.
Not a bit surprised this author is award-winning. Deservedly so!

[Jack Stark · Rating 4 out of 5]

A moving collection of short stories that explore the more sombre side of life.

Mauro writes engaging stories that are told on multiple levels, and many of them left me pensive. It wasn't a flawless reading experience, though. A couple of stories didn't connect with me, but that's a personal preference thing and those that did connect, were great. Overall, a wonderful collection of shorts that are gritty, poignant, and have a lot to say.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I read reviews of this book, the phrase "hauntingly beautiful comes up a lot," but it's also pretty accurate. As disturbingly beautiful as any fever dream.

[Adrian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't usually read short stories, and shy away from even a hint of the paranormal, but these stories were compelling in their strange clinical descriptions of the otherwise seemingly mundane. The first story particularly will stay with me a long time, and the only ones which I found a tad tedious,, ironically enough,, were those in which she chose to forego the supernatural in favour of rather cliched socio-political preaching
Nevertheless, a very impressive collection..

[Sheena Forsberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sad, bittersweet, uncanny, ambiguous (quite often a mix of all), and always supremely eloquent in its expression of relatable melancholy. This is my first time reading Mauro = color me impressed. The prose is lyrical without being flowery, and there are lines in every story that resonate long after you’ve turned the final page of the tale.
-I’m putting this down as another win for Undertow Press: I can still say that they haven’t steered me wrong.
As always, I’ve marked my favorites with a “*”. There’s not a single bad story, but there’s definitely some that resonated more with me than others.

-Sun Dogs:*
A chance encounter at night with an armed man on the hunt for a wild animal that killed a kid. An injured woman named June sneaking into loner and survivalist Sadie’s car. Sadie treats June at home and a deep relationship slowly forms, but then more men with guns show up.
The story about the constellation that came to be when a pack of coyotes chased a bear away tied it together nicely. A beautifully written and bittersweet shapeshifter love story.

-Obsidian:
Pihla finds her missing little sister, Aino, by the lake. Aino is said to suffer from absence seizures and waking dreams although she views herself more as an oracle. She says she went to the lake because she heard a song emanating from it and that the creature (vetehinen) in the lake is lonely.
Then Pihla starts hearing it too, and goes there in Aino’s place. A sweet (and somewhat) sad short story feat. Finnish folklore.

-Red Rabbit:
An ambiguous story which begins at the end and ends where it began; with Rina at a motel with a dead body.
-Rina gets picked up by strangers Sam & Alexei and spontaneously goes along with Sam’s crazed hunt for graffitied red rabbits.

-Letters from Elodie:
“She gave me the means to destroy her and trusted that I would never do it. That’s all love is, when you strip it down to the bare bones. A loaded gun to the temple with someone else’s finger on the trigger”.
-Ruth was in unrequited love with the mysterious (and according to Ruth; narcissistic) Elodie and reminisces about her life. Elodie recently walked into the sea with her pockets full of pebbles & used to leave Ruth voice mails which paints a strange picture. This short deals with denial; Ruth is denied Elodie’s love, Ruth denies that Elodie would have walked into the waters with her pockets full of pebbles & Elodie denied the men she bedded (and even her friends) entry into her private sphere (apartment and mind/heart), as well as she also denies people the chance to really get to know her. All except Ruth,; but only via (often drunk) voice mails.

-The Grey Men:*
“He shouldn’t have been able to see them in the dark but they were gathered overhead, a cluster of birds frozen in time”.
-A persistent fog appears in Adam’s town, and so do the grey men suspended from it. Harbingers of the end of days? God’s judgement? A stunt?
-Deals with negative affect (and the inability to roll with them); a story where fear,sadness & anger is made manifest.

-Ptichka:*
Marta is a Russian migrant who’s struggling to make ends meet when she learns she’s pregnant.
-Paints a picture of how it could be to be a migrant without any possibility of paying for much needed medical assistance when you need it the most (I couldn’t help but feel there was some postpartum psychosis featured in the story).

-When Charlie Sleeps:*
An infant-like monster which feeds on the city of London when it’s awake and angry, and the female squatters taking care of it and trying to get it to nap. Loved this quirky tale.


-In the City of Bones:
A woman with harlequin ichthyosis lives in a deserted mining town as one of only 2 inhabitants along with Matvei,a man who got her out of an orphanage and put her to work listening for digits/codes on the radio. She has no idea what these messages mean, but dutifully jots them down. There’s talk about them “living like islands, scattered up and down like there’s miles of ocean between them and the rest of the world” (and nothing growing there). Dren (the only other person she sees and who nurses her) refuses to crash for the night although the weather is turning bad and the drive back home is risky. Dren says the road up to the village is known as “the road of bones” due to it having been built on the body of the dead and that they think the village tainted by all the deaths. Soon Matvei has to go away for supplies and she’s left alone in this village in the middle of nowhere when she sees something (someone) outside, something that pulses.

-The Looking Glass Girl:*
Sara is sorting through her recently departed mum’s things when she finds a necklace and mirror which used to belong to her missing sister. Her sister disappeared many years ago and it was assumed that she was abducted by a Tunisian boy and drowned at sea.
Her mother and father mostly stuck to not mentioning her again, but something about the mirror tells Sara it is time to revisit her old home in Italy.

-In the Marrow:*
Tara and Hazel are twins at the cusp of adolescence when Tara suddenly feels poorly at their special place where they used to hunt for fairies. Tara is later diagnosed with leukemia & Hazel becomes convinced that Tara is a changeling. A story where fever dreams meet folklore.

-Looking for Laika:
A story rife with fear of nuclear war. Peter has anxiety issues and writes his survival plans in a notebook that he religiously reads every night; lest a bomb does go off. He also loves his little sister, Beverley, and tells her a reimagined story about how Laika the dog is still looking for a habitable planet for the Russians. Bev goes missing one night, and when found she insists she saw a small spaceship- one that could fit a dog (she also finds a dogtag with Russian writing on it). Then comes the last day of their vacation where they’re given news that will forever alter their lives.
Teeming with youthful magical thinking, anxieties and imagination, this is not a coming of age-story to be missed.

-Strange as Angels:*
Frankie hits a creature with her car. In their drugged up stupor, Frankie & Jimmy dub it an angel although it’s anything but. Frankie nurses it back to health and keeps it as a pet. As “the angel” grows stronger, so does she and she ends the toxic friendship with the pining and manipulative Jimmy.
The story deals nicely with themes of mental illness, abusive relationships/gas lighting, alienation, (even motherhood) and the need for companionship even if it is with an otherworldly creature with special appetites.

-The Pain-Eater’s Daughter:
A hard-hitting story about pain and loss.
Sara’s dad has an unconventional job that might see him suddenly gone from minutes to days. On these trips, he always brings a special suitcase with him which she’s not allowed to touch or open. Furthermore, he completely refuses to talk about what he actually does for a living. Sara also wonders if the mysterious physical defect of his and her grandfather’s hands might be passed on to her.
With grandpa ailing, her dad has no choice but bring her with him the next time and let her in on the family secret.
-I can’t remember having read any stories featuring Romani characters, and it was great to read one so touching.

[Dan Coxon · Rating 5 out of 5]

God this was good. I've been a fan of Laura Mauro's short stories for a while now - and, admittedly, had read a few of these before - but even bearing that in mind, this collection took my breath away. Beautifully written, underlined by a deep, aching sorrow, but shot through with moments of startling horror (both existential and visceral) - Sing Your Sadness Deep is one of the best collections I've read this year. Expect to see it on awards shortlists next year, and keep your eyes open for what Mauro does next. One to treasure, and one to watch.

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully written, moving, uncategorisable and transcendent collection of short stories; I can’t believe that Laura Mauro’s work is not better known, as this is genuinely one of the best books I have read in a long, long time. I am only giving this book 5 stars because GR won’t let me give it 10!

[Lou · Rating 4 out of 5]

Immersive tales, concise and eloquent, weird and wonderful creations I found these stories below from the collection.

Sun Dogs

You are immersed in a pasture of a strange weird future. There is something out there in this desert, a kind of animal running wild killing, there will be blood and love in this tale.
A ferocious terrible beauty tale laid down with splendid writing in a potent love ballad.
I can see why this was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson award, one of the best of the collection.

“The men came a few days later. They arrived in a rust-coloured station wagon, kicking up plumes of dust behind them like the tail of a comet.”

“A dry wind had picked up, casting fistfuls of sand like a spiteful child.”

“Every day I feared your absence less and less; you were like the tide, receding into the gloaming, returning again as the sun set. I had not planned for the eventuality that, someday, you might not come back; curiously, I had no desire to prepare for it. It was as though after a life spent preparing fastidiously for a future that might never come, I had finally learned to absorb the present; you had taught me, somehow, that the sum total of my existence could not be pared down to numbers on a spreadsheet: how many tins, how many bullets, how fast I could run, how many weeks I might survive.”

The Grey Men

To small-town Hertfordshire the Grey men cometh to a fog filled land what be they and what mystery they hold, one must find out by reading this weird tale.

“When the grey men came they were dark shapes, hanging still in the sky, formless at first but taking gradual shape: the curve of shoulders, the twin protuberances of dangling legs. Heads lowered, the mere suggestion of a cranial arc. As their silhouettes burned slowly through the mist, Adam thought that a few looked to be wearing hats, brims off-kilter, distorting their symmetry. They came one by one, and by the time evening fell the sky over town was filled with them, hanging like fruit from an unseen tree. The entire town was out in the street that evening, faces turned up in unison, speaking in hushed tones, as if the grey men might be listening. As if words might travel further in the strange quiet of the fog.”

The Looking Glass Girl

A character in conflict with a loss and the nostalgia of twenty-five years ago, there are bad things past needing set right with all the secrets and love that had been.
One sister is returning home on a haunting resolution, within the beauty of the island a secret withholding.

Strange As Angels

One cold evening in the woods a couple driving, one drunk, find something and take it home, care for and feed it hearts, mothering it. After time relationship troubles then as things fall apart new ground found and strength with a heavy price.
Weird and wonderfully creepy tale.

“I’m not drunk enough for this,” she’d muttered. The woods had seemed sinister then, dark and foreboding, the kind of place monsters might lurk. But drunkenness has a way of lending a certain fuzzy-edged perspective to things, and it seems to Frankie now that the trees are protecting them somehow. That it’s the world beyond them which is sinister.

The Pain-Eater’s Daughter

Legacy, death and pain, a fourteen year old daughter to learn from her father of a gift and a curse, dark and unique, and someone we may all need. Weird and wonderful creations again with great selection of words with the tasks of descriptiveness and evocation.

“He is quiet then. His expression is so fond, so distant that Sara thinks he must be somewhere else in his mind. Somewhere where the sunshine heals instead of hurts, and the whole world is home, and she is a china-doll infant nestled in warm grass, beneath the wide blue sky.”

“Chided, she turns her face silently to the window. Her face is an ellipse, an off-kilter moon reflected against the deep, marine blue of the oncoming night.”

Review also @ More2Read

[لوك النباتي Luke Daniels · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sun Dogs : 2/5
Obsidian : 5/5
Red Rabbit : 0/5
Letters From Elodie : 0/5
The Grey Men : 1/5
Ptichka : 1/5
When Charlie Sleeps : 1/5
In The City of Bones : 0/5

I appreciate fantasy. I appreciate weirdness and strangeness in books. I loved how the author introduced new ideas in the stories. However, I felt like the ideas alone are not enough to cover up for the lack of plot and events.
It felt like the stories start with a hook, then until right before the end of the story, all what’s there is unnecessary conversations and long descriptions of unimportant things.
Also something that really bothered me as I was reading, is when characters get into a conversation, and a character asks a question, then there is a big chunk of a paragraph before the other character answers that question! That was annoying. It’s better when the conversations are continuous and not cut with chunks of paragraphs.

The story I loved the most in the book is Obsidian. I liked the atmosphere of the story. I liked how coherent it was. I liked that it was creative, imaginative and beautiful. And what I liked the most is that there weren’t much rambling going on here like in the other stories. And I also liked the gentle and kind language in Obsidian.

With the other stories, although there are definitely good and unique ideas, but I felt like there was not much going on in term of events. And I also felt like there were not much conversations, and maybe because of this it felt like all the characters felt the same to me in all the stories. They all seemed to describe things in the same way which was odd.

To describe the feeling I got from the stories, I know it may be funny, but it’s like a meal that wasn’t cooked all the way. It’s like a boiled potato that’s being simmered on the lowest heat without being boiled all the way and without any salt or pepper or sauce. I felt like the potential in the stories was not going all the way. I just got bored of the same way that all the characters describe their surroundings. I lost interest to read the rest of the stories.

I do believe that Laura has some very interesting ideas, and I hope she’ll keep writing and release a new weird fantasy book! She just needs to focus on the ideas and maximise their potential to the fullest.

[Cate Gardner · Rating 5 out of 5]

So, I picked up Sing Your Sadness Deep in Derby at a Sledge or Edge-Lit, in a Premier Inn bedroom, at a special launch alongside Georgina Bruce's This House of Wounds (which I read last year). There was free wine and a huge group of wonderful people there to help Laura and George celebrate. An event I am so glad I didn't miss.

I'd read a lot of the stories before. I was happy to read them again.

The collection opens with Sun Dogs, a powerful story of unconventional love in the heat of the desert. In the surreal Red Rabbits we follow a trail of red rabbits etched onto the ground. The imagery in The Grey Men has stayed with me since first reading the story in Black Static. Sad, intriguing and desperate, the story of lost men hanging in the air and how you may belong among them.

Ptichka was the first story of Laura's I ever read. I knew I'd discovered an amazing new talent. This political story of a pregnant woman who cannot afford treatment in this new Britain, is still as powerful as on its first read.

A new story for me was The Looking Glass Girl, a fairy tale set in the 21st century. When her long-dead sister appears in a hand mirror, after their mother's death, the protagonist heads home where a dreadful secret waits.

The brilliant, iconic and original When Charlie Sleeps, where a monster controls the moods of London by an umbilical cord that runs through the sewers. This is a future classic. They'll teach this story in schools.

In the Marrow broke my heart for a second-time. Is she a changeling or is she a girl who is simply dying? I have a lump in my throat even now.

Then we have, Looking for Laika. An award-winning story and possibly the best of an already strong collection. A space dog, stories to keep away the nightmares, the fear of a nuclear attack, family. An absolutely beautiful, dreadful, sad sad story.

[Meliza · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5
another really solid anthology of creepy little stories. i’d definitely use the word creepy over horror for this one because a lot of these stories are pretty sweet even with their horror aspects, this aspect was sometimes a detriment to the stories but overall the author does a good job at juggling the spooky and the sweet.

the first two stories in this were great! it really starts with a bang! Sundogs and Obsidian are two of my favs because i’m a sucker for horror stories about love. the quality takes a bit of a dip after that for me with stories like Red Rabbit, Letters from Elodie, and The Grey Man, these stories have interesting concepts but are pretty straightforward and needed more of a twist to stand out. BUT then we’re back Ptichka and When Charlie Sleeps for some good old fashioned pregnancy horror. In the City of Bones is probably my favorite story from the collection because it’s so unique with its premise, an orphan girl with harlequin-type ichthyosis is put in charge of base following the spread of the zombie apocalypse but she doesn’t know that until the end. it’s a tragic and heartwarming story about community and acceptance and i wish it was longer. the rest of the stories after this are just okay with some cool concept like Strange like Angels and The Pain Eaters Daughter but none came close to my being my favorite. o also think some of the longer stories suffer a bit by reading like incomplete novels than they do proper short stories, Looking for Laika especially didn’t feel like it matched the other stories vibes and i wondered what it was doing in this collection at all.