All the Things We Never See

by Michael Kelly

Distilled through the occluded lens of weird fiction, Michael Kelly’s third collection of strange tales is a timely and cogent examination of grief, love, identity, abandonment, homelessness, and illness. All cut through with a curious, quiet menace and uncanny melancholy.

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Weird Fiction, Fiction

250 pages, Hardcover

First published June 21, 2019

About the author

Michael Kelly is the Series Editor for the Year's Best Weird Fiction, and author of Undertow and Other Laments, and Scratching the Surface; as well as co-author of the novel Ouroboros.

His short fiction has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including All Hallows, Best New Horror, Black Static, Dark Arts, the Hint Fiction Anthology, PostScripts, Space & Time, Supernatural Tales, Tesseracts 13, and Weird Fiction Review.

Michael is a World Fantasy Award, Shirley Jackson Award and British Fantasy Award Nominee.

Reviews

[Karl]

Contents:

011 - "The Face That Looks Back at You"
023 - "The Wounded Bird"
029 - "Bait"
041 - "Six Haiku"
045 - "A Crack In the Ceiling of the World"
051 - "October Dreams"
055 - "Desert of Sharp Sorrows"
067 - "Blink"
073 - "Midnight Carousel"
077 - "Some Other You"
087 - "Hark at the Wind"
091 - "Other Summers"
103 - "Another Knife-Gray Day"
107 - "Absolution"
111 - "All The Things We Never See"
123 - "Eight Haiku"
127 - "Different Skins"
139 - "Tears from an Eyeless Face"
143 - "The White-Face at Dawn"
153 - "Turn the Page"
157 - "A Guttering of Flickers"
165 - "Hungry, The Rain-God Awakens"
169 - "Conversations with the Dead"
181 - "The Beach"
189 - "Down the Rabbit Hole"
193 - "These White Sorrows"
201 - "This Red Night"
205 - "Pieces if Blackness"
219 - "A Quiet Axe"
223 - "The Woods"
231 - "One Final Breath"
243 - Acknowledgements
247 - About the Author

Cover by David Alvarez

[Bill Hsu · Rating 2 out of 5]

I enjoyed Kelly's Shadows and Tall Trees Vol 7 anthology, and was curious about his own fiction. Unfortunately, most of this didn't work for me at all.

I did enjoy most of "Conversations with the Dead". The interactions between the living and dead boys were nicely done, with a series of ambiguous and vaguely uneasy conversations. Can't say I'm a fan of the ending though.

I understand it's hard to pull off flash and poetry within genre conventions. But I also had troublesome moments with the prose in the longer pieces, such as (from "One Final Breath"):

On the small coffee table, under an inverted glass bowl, is a tiny yellow balloon, shriveled and pathetic like his heart.

And on the next page:

Time, like everything, is a construct.

I'm probably just in a particularly grumpy, heart-shriveling part of the lifecycle. So you guys should just trust the glowing blurbs from Brian Evenson, Paul Tremblay etc, and ignore me.

[Priya Sharma · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Conversations with the dead aren't so very different from conversations wtith the living"- Mike Kelly

Mike Kelly has the enviable skill of making typical horror tropes original. Here we have serial killers, ghosts and doppelgangers. We have fragments, short stories and Haiku. Kelly shows us just how short a good short story can be and still retain all the complexity it needs to live and breath.

The thing I took away from this collection was how transient, tiny and utterly alone we are in this big world, which is more chilling than cheap scares.

My personal favourites:
"Bait"
"October Dreams"
"Conversations with the Dead"
"Pieces of Blackness"
"Other Summers"- written with Ray Cluley. This is a bloody lovely homage to Ray Bradbury, as bittersweet as dandelion wine.

[Lou · Rating 5 out of 5]

A possible expansion of your reading radar with snippets of stories, small visions with a cast of characters, matters and things in lucid form, haunting ones, twisted and disturbing worlds, ones with pains, sorrows, and small joys.

My few words on a selection of notable tales.

The Face That Looks Back at You

Looking into mirror fearfully at what may look back at you, along with the marital troubles, trying to save things going south, a drive up north to a cabin, a little vacation, providing possible break in the dread with interlining terrors.

The Wounded Bird

Wounded bird brought indoors a man lonely friendship and there is bird chatter with twist of haunting.

Bait

Parents gone, staying with uncle near the sea, talk of bait, fishing, hunting and mermaids, it’s school holiday, been feeling like a pariah, curiosity over uncles locked cellar forms, secrets waiting to be released. One little short and disturbing tale.

A Crack in the Ceiling of the World

A crack in the world, a gateway, two worlds separated, one has Ezekiel and dragon and the other ...
A Intriguing and catastrophic situation.

“This was once the realm of memories. Memories were king. Memories were true. Deep in the bowels of this world, in the lightness mines, memories were all you had. Soon enough, even your memories succumbed to the terrible heat of the blast furnaces, the infernal machines that scorched everything.”

October dreams

Dreaming and that October feeling and things, that fleeting life before and now.

Desert of Sharp Sorrows with Jonathan William Hodges

Upon a journey, Myra In The desert, starkness and serenity, a woman ventures, walking, driving, encountering a mesquite tree, navigating to a future, needing and thinking, remembering an encounter with a mysterious man, feeling pains and sorrows strange encounters in the barren landscape with trees and figures.

Other Summers with Ray Cluley

Visceral forward into adventure and summer fun through night and the awakened, through dark carnival of the fair with summer fates dreams and melancholy.
If you liked Boys life by Robert R McCammon and Something Wicked this Way Comes by Ray Bradbury you will like this short tale.

Tears from an Eyeless Face

Nice poetic little tale of being with sight but feeling strange and human.


The White-Face at Dawn

“A scarlet dawn breaches the thick gloom of the apartment. Slender pink fingers of thin light rouse me from another restless night, plagued fever-dreams of dear Genevieve, and dreams of the curious tatter-king in yellow robes, a grey and gaunt being that clutches a sceptre of black onyx and wears a crown of tarnished jewels upon his thorny head. His is a face of dark cunning and sharp angles. Grave-worm tongue. It was he, I’m sure, who came for Genevieve.”

Poetic loss piece with a beloved gone.
A character upon a task attempting to create something more magnificent than the King in Yellow. In an discussion with another he learns of the tale of the sorrow spiders.
Psychological haunting Tale with spiders and other things that you won’t forget.

Review also @ More2read

[Regina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve been a fan of Michael Kelly’s writing for about 20 years now, and my only complaint is that there is not enough of it. So, I was incredibly happy to see this collection of his work.

The collection has all of the things a reader wants in a collection of dark, literary, weird fiction. The book contains 31 stories and poems ranging from flash fiction to short stories, haiku to free form poetry.

The title story warns: “Open your eyes or you will be, All the things we never see.” Michael Kelly uses sparse, evocative prose to elicit a variety of emotions, leaving the reader with a feeling that reality may be more skewed than we thought. In this book, Kelly shows us things we never see – or that we might prefer not to see. All of the works in this collection are above average, and most are too short to describe without giving something away. My favorites include The Wounded Bird, Six Haiku, Midnight Carousel, All the Things We Never See, Tears from an Eyeless Face, Conversations with the Dead, and The Woods.

[Chris Riley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection was really good. Very emotional stories, clear and concise prose, and impeccable editing. Very pleased with the read.

[Sam Edwards · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't always like comparing authors to other authors. Reading "All the Things We Never See," I couldn't help but think of figures like Thomas Ligotti and Brian Evenson. There's a bleakness and beauty in Kelly's word choice and sentence structure, a remarkable rhythm which somehow he never loses. A common reoccurring theme and motif throughout the collections is relationships, either between couples (married or dating) or (in one haunting story) father and child.

Throughout there are a few poems, which again reminded me of Ligotti. And the stories are quite short, so Kelly manages to pack in a lot of talent into his pages. And a lot of variety.

One thing that sets him apart, however, is something of a dedication to "the twist." The endings of his stories are often uncertain, but do give the reader a little wink that SOMETHING has occurred. Something supernatural or abnormal even.

One final note is that the book is expertly assembled. It's arranged in such away that stories echo each other without feeling repetitive, and I think this speaks as much to Kelly's abilities as an editor as a writer. This is a good one, I recommend it highly.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

On PIECES OF BLACKNESS, a story within this collection: Lurking just beneath the surface of your psyche, just out of sight, dwells a tiny demon comprised almost entirely of a warped and wicked mouth. This demon has a very limited, but a nonetheless puissant vocabulary, and it talks non-stop. Drilling through your ear canal it whispers, over and over again, “You are not good enough.” Some of us learn how to ignore this demon; a few of us can even temporarily silence it. Others, though—too many—succumb to its malice. Old, young, successful, it matters not. They succumb. Sometimes, you may not ever notice that they’ve given in. And other times, it is tragically obvious.

In Pieces of Blackness, a story found in weird fiction anthologizer and author Michael Kelly’s latest collection (ALL THE THINGS WE NEVER SEE) you’ll read of one man’s fight against that insidious foe. As the title suggests, this is a very dark story, suffused throughout with an almost overwhelming atmosphere of woe.

Read more at: https://miskatonicreview.wordpress.co...

[Wes · Rating 4 out of 5]

These stories are all very short, but incredibly effective. Kelly does a remarkable job of painting very detailed portraits with very few words. Horror aside, he writes with authority about loss and sorrow.

A few standouts:
The Wounded Bird
Bait
The Beach
Pieces of Blackness

[Truff · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF.

This book is not for everyone. Very weird.

[Terence DeToy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Michael Kelly’s unsettling 2019 short story collection "All the Things We Never See" doesn’t so much pull us out of reality as plunge us deeper into it. Like the stereoscopic glasses in John Carpenter's "They Live," these stories reveal the hidden menace embedded in our relationships and landscapes.

Many of these stories have this somber resonance. "All the Things We Never See" casts the individual into isolation and brings it into contrast with the indifference of the natural world. Through this prism of contrast, our need to build relationships becomes destructive.

There is a continual game of matching and mismatching in this collection: between the characters, between the characters and death, between the characters and the cruelties of the natural world, and even between the stories themselves.

Sparse and bleak like his landscapes, Kelly’s stories have this logic of cutting away and getting to the center. There is always something left menacingly unsaid. This is an eerie effect in dialogue, but for Kelly this is a guiding narrative principle.

Kelly makes a lot with a little. Broken sentences, fragments abound; images replace context. This jagged narrative style dislodges the reader. Even his longer sentences frequently are made up of terse phrases joined together. This style lends itself to the book’s enterprise. Kelly’s narrative voice somehow builds pace and yet seems to linger. “Absolution,” a gem of a prose poem, is wonderful example. I can’t quite put my finger on how he pulls this off.

On occasion, the reader comes upon an overcooked sentence. In “Some Other You,” a phone’s “incessant shrill ringing pulled Todd from a dream-plagued sleep.” This is a bit overwrought in my view. So much of Kelly’s power is in the slow build of details, not the over-saturation of sensations.

Whatever minor defects we find in the prose, "All the Things We Never See" remains a powerful and unnerving collection. At his best, Kelly offers a supple and complex vision of human relationships. These stories are steeped in melancholy, jealousy, desire, mistrust and self-destruction. With the expert guidance of the grim reaper, he brings us disconcertingly close to "All the Things We Never See."

[SARDON · Rating 2 out of 5]

(2 stars)

Goddamn, does Kelly's prose strain to be poetry in this book! Strangely, though his previous collections were nothing special, they didn't have this noticeably overworked quality; strange because overly poetic prose usually plagues a writer's earlier works.

The many throwaway vignettes which litter this book tiresomely reek of Bradbury's musty and seemingly all-pervading influence; expect plenty of sentimentality. Also, far too many stories here belabor the old thematic favorite of familial dysfunction, and "Pieces of Blackness"--formerly seen in a Ligotti tribute anthology--is the one that most effectively wrings some truly disturbing filth from that old rag of a theme.

"Tears from an Eyeless Face" and "Some Other You," though obvious takes on the obvious theme of identity crisis, feature plenty of ominously described objective correlatives which, unlike those employed in most of the other pieces, convey at least a minimum of true anguish if only because the crises go deeper than the platitudinous, Freudian crap weighing down the daddy-mommy-kiddy dramas which Kelly so greatly loves to write. As for his poetry, it is too amateurish to be worthy of a serious critique.

Reading a book such as this one makes me nostalgic for the days when it seemed easier to find horror luminaries who were equally skilled as authors and editors. Of course, I could be overlooking some contemporary examples, but Michael Kelly definitely is no Charles L Grant or Dennis Etchison. What I've just written about C.M. Muller, I will now write about Michael Kelly: read his anthologies instead!

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Michael Kelly is a Canadian? Editor and author of weird fiction and horror. I have read very many anthologies edited my him but this is the first of his fiction I have read. The nature of this collection is such that a lot of the pieces (of blackness) are very short and easily read in a couple of minutes. This helps ensure that the mood and atmosphere of these vignettes does not become stale. Obviously some of these stories worked better than others for me but Bait, Conversations with the Dead and The Woods were just some of my faves. As usual I have ranked the stories below for my personal reference. This doesn’t reflect the quality of the stories just how I responded to them.


The Face That Looks Back at You - 6
The Wounded Bird - 8
Bait - 8
Six Haiku - 7
October Dreams - 8
A Crack in the Ceiling of the World - 3
Desert of Sharp Sorrows - 5
Blink - 7
Midnight Carousel - 4
Some Other You - 7
Hark at the Wind - 7
Other Summers - 8
Another Knife Grey Day - 3
Absolution - 6
All the Things We Never See - 7
Eight Haiku - 4
Different Skins - 7
Tears From an Eyeless Face - 8
White Face at Dawn - 6
Turn the Page - 7
A Guttering of Flickers - 6
Conversations With the Dead - 8
The Beach - 8
Down the Rabbit Hole - 7
These White Sorrows - 7
This Red Night - 4
Pieces of Blackness - 6
A Quiet Axe - 5
The Woods - 8
One Final Breath - 8

[Jessica McDonough · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't know what happened there was a disconnect between this book and i. Everything I read seemed like very long and boring but also way too short at the same time and once on some of the stories I would get into them but it was very few but those few that I did get into I felt like okay and then what at the end and I don't love that feeling once I've read something I don't know if this was the wrong time for me to read this book but I probably won't go back and check I've had this problem with some short story books as of late perhaps I'm unfairly judging because I'm not in the mood for a short story but I've also listened to plenty of podcasts with short stories on them and enjoyed them so it may just be the book I can't decide. I rarely don't finish a book but this is one that I got 75% through and decided I'm not enjoying this I have to stop.

[Amanda · Rating 2 out of 5]

There is no joy in this book. These are stories about loneliness and they leave the reader feeling drained and depressed. I struggled with this volume for months and I am finally giving up. There are 31 stories here and I have read 16 of them. I felt as though all 16 stories we using the same tone (although with different themes) to deliver the same message.

[Margaret Young · Rating 2 out of 5]

meh

[Tony Ciak · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great collection , Loved Them!!!

[Lewis Housley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this collection.

[S.J. Townend · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some brilliant, powerful intense stories, some slow burners. If you are keen on mood, it's her in spades - put on those grey-tainted spectacles and kick back.

Recommend to fans of weird, haunting, dark fiction.

[Des Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is the greyest of blue skies. Or vice versa. Things in life most often come out of the blue. Good and bad things. And this book has many colours. Too many colours as gestalt might make a sludgy grey, yet this book manages its multiple interpretations well, interpretations of colours as well as of other leitmotifs. The better sort of books do. And books that have been considered great weird literature, like this one has, achieve an act of thought-radiating best of all. Be alert, though, until your final breath, because some great weird literature is not labelled such. You need to keep looking in unlikely places for the most lasting disarming strangenesses that dog or bless existence. Also all the things we never see, never seem. A quiet axiom.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.