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Onion Songs
Onion Songs is a collection of 42 short stories spanning the writing career of Steve Rasnic Tem, with an emphasis on the bizarre, the offbeat and the meditative. Here Tem confronts the big questions of human experience (aging, death, identity, relationships) like a collector digging deep in the clutter of an attic and pulling out only the most unexpected and most telling finds.
His style tersely poetic, Tem is able to give fine reproductions of the texture of everyday life while writing with all the invention of unrestrained nightmare. The mindscapes contained here, where circus clowns cling to meaningless office jobs, skeletons fall like snow, ‘true unicorns’ rummage in garbage piles, and fires are liable to break out at any moment, first engage us deeply where things ache most, then compel us to keep reading with a beauty that, for all its strangeness, we finally recognize as human.
***
“Tem lets his characters, their situations, and their emotions creep up slowly on the reader. His style is thoughtful and poetic, and the tension he builds effectively sustains well-crafted plots. He has found a perfect balance between the bizarre and the straight-forward…” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Consistent in quality and diverse in content, as impressive as it is impressionistic… Onion Songs is the strongest collection of short stories that I’ve read in the last year. – Peter Tennant in Black Static
“The 42 stories in this collection showcase the often bizarre, always enlightening works of one of the most distinctive voices in imaginative literature. Tem’s prose paints vivid and compelling images. His stories feature people who contemplate death, sanity, love, loss, and other human issues from original points of view.” –Library Journal
His style tersely poetic, Tem is able to give fine reproductions of the texture of everyday life while writing with all the invention of unrestrained nightmare. The mindscapes contained here, where circus clowns cling to meaningless office jobs, skeletons fall like snow, ‘true unicorns’ rummage in garbage piles, and fires are liable to break out at any moment, first engage us deeply where things ache most, then compel us to keep reading with a beauty that, for all its strangeness, we finally recognize as human.
***
“Tem lets his characters, their situations, and their emotions creep up slowly on the reader. His style is thoughtful and poetic, and the tension he builds effectively sustains well-crafted plots. He has found a perfect balance between the bizarre and the straight-forward…” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Consistent in quality and diverse in content, as impressive as it is impressionistic… Onion Songs is the strongest collection of short stories that I’ve read in the last year. – Peter Tennant in Black Static
“The 42 stories in this collection showcase the often bizarre, always enlightening works of one of the most distinctive voices in imaginative literature. Tem’s prose paints vivid and compelling images. His stories feature people who contemplate death, sanity, love, loss, and other human issues from original points of view.” –Library Journal
- GenresShort StoriesHorror
245 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 1, 2013
About the author
Steve Rasnic Tem
472 books315 followersSteve Rasnic Tem was born in Lee County Virginia in the heart of Appalachia. He is the author of over 350 published short stories and is a past winner of the Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy Awards. His story collections include City Fishing, The Far Side of the Lake, In Concert (with wife Melanie Tem), Ugly Behavior, Celestial Inventories, and Onion Songs. An audio collection, Invisible, is also available. His novels include Excavation, The Book of Days, Daughters, The Man In The Ceiling (with Melanie Tem), and the recent Deadfall Hotel.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 26, 2015
Surreal, often plotless meditations on the human condition. The best ones combine emotional resonance and disorientingly literalised metaphors, and even the more gnomic pieces have an element of imaginative play and narrative intensity that repays the effort.
January 18, 2021
The Green Dog
“He loved making the effort. He loved trying.”
I know I first published this story (in Null Immortalis: Nemonymous Ten), but, having just re-read it, in the context of this book, I genuinely believe it is (so far) the most poignant and the most central to the 'old man process', as I have begun to call it in this review. Also relevant to another theme of this book: ‘identity’. There is nothing sexist intended by me about the ‘old man process’ (semi-colon) it's just a frame of mind that only 'old men' of any age can have (but, of course, not all old men). A combination of anal-retentive, curmudgeonliness, a paradoxical spirituality and creativity deriving from that otherwise negativity-strewn oldmanness, often with a Ligottian cathricity, sporadically peppered with good intentions and, dare I say, love (often unrecognised). Well, who knows, that may just be me trying to make me into a class of many mes, to make me feel better!
This story has the 'miscegenation of souls' I mentioned about 'The Multiples of Sorrow' and seen, too, in 'Merry-Go-Round' via, here, a symbiosis between an old man and a green dog, the refraction and incidence of the lights in 'The Glare and the Glow', the state of human 'existence' represented by Charles in 'Charles', the 'inventing of holidays' from that earlier holiday in foreign UK, an aspirational love of one's family as well as the isolation beyond family and the irritation of the negative channels between family members, and much more, both negative and arguably positive.
'The Green Dog' has to be read at least once in your life.
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.
CAVEAT: I was the original publisher of the above story. Though the rest of this book was mainly new to me.
“He loved making the effort. He loved trying.”
I know I first published this story (in Null Immortalis: Nemonymous Ten), but, having just re-read it, in the context of this book, I genuinely believe it is (so far) the most poignant and the most central to the 'old man process', as I have begun to call it in this review. Also relevant to another theme of this book: ‘identity’. There is nothing sexist intended by me about the ‘old man process’ (semi-colon) it's just a frame of mind that only 'old men' of any age can have (but, of course, not all old men). A combination of anal-retentive, curmudgeonliness, a paradoxical spirituality and creativity deriving from that otherwise negativity-strewn oldmanness, often with a Ligottian cathricity, sporadically peppered with good intentions and, dare I say, love (often unrecognised). Well, who knows, that may just be me trying to make me into a class of many mes, to make me feel better!
This story has the 'miscegenation of souls' I mentioned about 'The Multiples of Sorrow' and seen, too, in 'Merry-Go-Round' via, here, a symbiosis between an old man and a green dog, the refraction and incidence of the lights in 'The Glare and the Glow', the state of human 'existence' represented by Charles in 'Charles', the 'inventing of holidays' from that earlier holiday in foreign UK, an aspirational love of one's family as well as the isolation beyond family and the irritation of the negative channels between family members, and much more, both negative and arguably positive.
'The Green Dog' has to be read at least once in your life.
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.
CAVEAT: I was the original publisher of the above story. Though the rest of this book was mainly new to me.
July 6, 2023
This striking collection of short stories, vignettes, and other more experimental short-form writings deals with themes of self-concept/identity, memory, time, possibility, loss, aging, mortality, impermanence, and related concerns. Warning: it’s a bit on the heavy-and-somber-with-little-comic-relief end of the literary spectrum. But if you’re looking to read something beautifully bleak and bleakly beautiful, consider giving this book a shot.
Oh, and to any and all of you authors out there engaged in the never-ending pursuit to craft the most stunning opening lines to a short story EVER to be crafted, just give it up right now. Seriously, hoss. Because I found those lines. Here they are, and they're from Steve Rasnic Tem’s “The Green Dog”:
Oh, and to any and all of you authors out there engaged in the never-ending pursuit to craft the most stunning opening lines to a short story EVER to be crafted, just give it up right now. Seriously, hoss. Because I found those lines. Here they are, and they're from Steve Rasnic Tem’s “The Green Dog”:
How strange it is to stare into the mirror and find that the one staring back at you is not at all whom you expected. Sometimes I think that toward the end of my life I will become an old green dog. Not that the dog would ever understand he was green.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews