Out of Water

by Sarah Read

THIS IS AN INVITATION TO DROWNING.

These are the stories of things out of water—of sea bed deserts choked with ghosts; of the lonely, roving children of the fen. Here your garden grows belowground. You will be born into a cradle of your own bones, shadows will burst from your eyes, and your mouth will fill with thorns. Storms will twist inside you, and the ghosts of your past will follow you and chart your future.

Here, things are out of place—ectopic and unviable—and you will mourn the unborn, those underwater things out of water.

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Fantasy, Collections, Short Story Collection, Dark

242 pages, Paperback

First published October 25, 2019

Reviews

[Sadie Hartmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Originally published in Black Static Magazine Black Static #72 (Nov-Dec 2019)

A collection of short stories, OUT OF WATER by Sarah Read is a grim buffet set with a variety of offerings for horror readers to feast upon; something to satisfy every appetite.
Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of reading Sarah’s first novel, THE BONE WEAVER’S ORCHARD. The connection I felt with Read’s storytelling voice was immediate and intense. Her style is painstakingly detailed, richly atmospheric and compelling. It’s those carefully crafted and intentional details that spark a familiarity between the author and the reader-a formative trust developed instantaneously. This opens the door for Read to present even the most painful of subjects to her audience and they will graciously subject their hearts to it.
One of my favorite books of 2019. As soon as I heard about a short story collection, I began to anticipate it with a rabid need-truly a writer’s skill set shines the brightest in a collection of short stories.

OUT OF WATER is aptly named. It’s as if to tell these stories, Read recklessly drew them up out of strange murky depths against their will and pressed them into words on pages.
Perhaps these stories didn’t want to be told. Perhaps they desired to remain hidden and secret.
I’m thinking of one in particular, MAGNIFYING GLASS. This tale felt like an intrusion on an intimate time a lonely mother set aside for herself and her grown son to spend together. The reader will feel like an unwanted guest peering in on their awkward interactions and broken relationship. You will bear witness to the horrifying events that take place and it will destroy you. That story still haunts me.
Here you will encounter relatable characters committing hideous, shameful acts done in secret. You, the reader will feel complicit in the atrocities because you know what Sarah Read’s characters are denied--the truth.
UNDERWATER THING is the story of a man who wrecks his step-daughter’s life, hides his evil deeds, disposes of the truth and then casually returns to his life completely unhindered by guilt. But Read shows us that the murky depths won’t hold a man’s secrets forever.
Of particular note is how fastidious some of Read’s characters tend to be. It’s fascinating to read about an archaeologist as she examines the contents of a clay jar that has never been opened. Or a painter as he goes above and beyond to capture the most authentic, botanical still life.
OUT OF WATER collectively explores the idea that curiosity can take an individual further than they originally wanted to go- a terrifying experience often ending in catastrophic tragedy.
Considering Read’s first novel and now this collection, it is this reader’s conclusion that I will forever stand in line for anything she publishes now and in the future. Undeniably talented and unmistakably original in the art of horror fiction.

[Regina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sarah writes wonderfully Gothic tales and I have been lucky to read so many of them over the past couple of years. She writes tales that make one uncomfortable to read but like a bad accident, you find yourself unable to stop. You need to see it through. Sara doesn't need to write a happy ending for you to be satisfied; chills and an uneasy sense of dread are just as good. Influenced by the original faerie tales that were meant to scare the shit out of you and teach you a lesson, HP Lovecraft, Angela Carter, and Shirley Jackson, she writes original stories that leave you thinking.

Read her stories. Just do it.

[Kimberly · Rating 4 out of 5]

OUT OF WATER is a collection of stories from Sarah Read. As I previously read her novel THE BONE WEAVER'S ORCHARD, I couldn't wait to try out some of her other tales.

These ranged all over in theme, from poignant, loss, revenge, and more obscure issues. The writing was lyrical--poetic in cases--and each story had a beauty all of its own.

In regards to the individual tales--which ranged in length as well as topic--my personal ratings were between 3 and 5 stars, in general; therefore the 4 star rating.

An excellent way to discover the writing of a great new talent on the scene.

Recommended.

[Yolanda Sfetsos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Originally posted at Kendall Reviews.


I always enjoy reading anthologies and author short story collections, and this one really caught my eye. Not just because of the lovely cover, but also because I was interested in checking out this author’s writing.

Here’s what I thought of each story:

ENDOSKELETAL: Everyone loves a good and creepy story about finding weird archaeological relics inside a cave. Even though we all know it’s a bad idea, human curiosity always wins and the character/s do something stupid. As expected, things don’t go as expected in this freaky situation.

MAKING MONSTERS: I love how Miss Ricky’s story starts out simple but a few paragraphs in, totally throws you. And keeps doing that all the way to the end. This is a wicked little tale about a person who looks good on the outside, but is totally rotten on the inside. Oh, and it’s also a lot of fun!

DEAD MAN’S CURVE: This tale about two men chasing a Winnebago and burying things left me feeling hollow. I couldn’t connect with either of them, or the story. I even got lost a few times, and it wasn’t because of the unfamiliar roads. LOL.

IN TONGUES: Holy shit, that was totally messed up! It repulsed me and made me angry, but I loved it. Religious zealots are such hateful creatures who push their self-righteous bullshit onto others, and this was a horrid example. Ugh.

I really liked Miranda, and felt so bad for her. But I did appreciate her one act of rebellion against these assholes.

THE EYES OF SALTON SEA: A very atmospheric tale about the day the sea decided to turn its back on people and the treasure hunters determined to dive into its depth. But things aren’t as they seem, and when the truth is revealed it’s wickedly awesome.

UNDERWATERTHING: This is one messed up story about a horrid character, abuse, a sea monster and the ultimate revenge. While it’s a great story, it’s also a very uncomfortable one to read.

TALL GRASS, SHALLOW WATER: Very dark story that comes full circle and is very well written. Really enjoyed the vivid imagery and the surreal, wet feel of it. Plus, I loved the last line.

INTERSECT: This is a short but definitely not sweet nightmare about a woman’s sad wonderings about a life that is happier, where she hasn’t lost everything and everyone.

GRAVE MOTHER: Another sad story about motherhood and loss, told in a way where every word paints a very sad picture.

HORN TONGUE: The interesting and strange journey of a mother that never-was and never-should-have-been. Strange and melodic, so full of poison that my mind was bubbling with it.

THROUGH GRAVEL: Oh wow. I loved this one! Ever wondered why flowers and patches of grass grow in concrete paths and brick walls? I have. I always take notice, and that’s why I enjoyed the hell out of this. You see, there are Kindred living in the understreets and they have their own ways and customs. But when one particular little girl arrives, she changes everything. Such an awesome story.

STILL LIFE WITH NATALIE: I started reading this and realised I’d already read it in an anthology. It’s nicely written, but this one was too predictable and cruel in an unappealing way.

GOLDEN AVERY: A very uncomfortable and quite gross story about the scars bullying leave behind and just how toxic friendship can become. Not to mention obsession with being skinny and getting rid of fat in the most gruesome way possible. Wicked.

SCAVENGERS: Interesting tale about a housemaid who works in a very strange school for young ladies. And proves that everyone is a scavenger in their own way. Very clever and bizarre.

THE EYE LIARS: Another surreal and quite gross story about illness and shadows, featuring a bunch of not-so nice guys. The narrator was especially annoying.

MAGNIFYING GLASS: Yikes. This was something. And unexpected, because although I suspected what was going on, where the story ends up is quite disturbing.

CROSSWIND: Tumultuous story about storms, greed and ambition. Liked the storm personifications and how it ends.

RENOVATION: Haunting tale about two sisters, an old house, big dreams, fresh starts and the awful memories that threaten to destroy them both.

Well, that was quite the collection! Although each one deals with a different bunch of characters and varying situations, they all had one thing in common: their surreal and nightmarish quality. Each of these tales threw me headfirst into the middle of so many lives, and took me on wild and vivid rides full of grotesque imagery.

Some are hard to read because the characters are awful or problematic. Others feature characters I felt sorry for. There are vengeful tales that had me cheering, and others that made me sad. But they were all intriguing and beautifully written. I also think many of the stories are quietly feminist, deal with a lot of issues girls and women face but aren’t supposed to be talked about. There’s no better way to show some of these than by the beauty of horror.

Out of Water is a great collection that uses lyrical words to paint some lovely and quite ugly pictures. Sarah Read’s writing pulled me so deeply into each tale that I felt like I was slipping from one waking nightmare and into another.

This is definitely a book anyone who enjoys the art of a good short story should check out.

[Bill Hsu · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought this was pretty uneven, despite all the enthusiastic ratings. Read works mostly with classic horror tropes (frost, revenants etc). Her language can be a bit overwrought for my taste, though I do appreciate that, for the most part, she doesn't spell out what's going on behind the scenes.

My favorite is "Thorn Tongue", a dark, distorted, and ambiguous fairy tale that invites multiple interpretations. Read handles body horror here better than in the other stories:

Heather drew the long thorns out of her wrist and palm. Her skin swelled around their venom, sealing the pinprick holes shut so no blood flowed.

This kind of writing is hard to sustain (see the Cronenberg tribute anthology, sigh). But I was drawn into the all-consuming quest, and the cryptic conversations with enigmatic magical characters. There are more questions than answers in the ending.

[Sara Tantlinger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sarah Read's short story collection is simply captivating. Each story transported me into its unique world, yet they all held threads of grief, of hope, of otherworldliness that helped everything feel just connected enough to make this collection perfectly comprised. It's hard to pick favorites, but I think "Through Gravel", "The Eyes of Salton Sea", "Renovation", and "Scavengers" might be my top 4. However, each story offers something powerful that I know will stay with me -- like the utter grief yet importance of "Underwater Thing"; the beautiful depiction of how one cannot tame a storm in "Crosswind"; and that ending for "In Tongues" -- ah! So good. Read is a powerhouse of a short story writer, and this collection certainly highlights her ability to write beautiful prose that pierces through your skin and makes no apologies as it drowns you beneath its sea salt charm.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are many lessons to be gleaned from this collection. Never trust the fae. Never trust your body. The lovely “Endoskeletal” is chock full of disturbed funerary sites and poetic body horror. It is inhabited by well-drawn characters and tense pacing. “Still Life with Natalie” makes a valiant call to revitalize our traditions of visiting old cemeteries, but maybe we shouldn’t try to recreate them.

So many of these deal with motherhood and the water, and this intersection is particularly effective with “Tall Grass, Shallow Water” and the lure of Genny Greenteeth. “Intersect” and “Grave Mother” work together as a flash couplet attempting to deal with the wreckage caused by pregnancies that don’t make it to term. While “Renovation” veered more into metaphor than haunting, I really would love to read a full-on haunting story by Sarah.

[Zen Ghost Bookworm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read has a way of drawing you in with beautiful imagery and well crafted sentences, and before you know it, you are smacked with a deeply disturbing conclusion. LOVE that about her.

This was my second book of Read's, as I prepare for the Fox Cities Book Festival, and I enjoyed this as much as her longer work. Each story is a little snippet of darkness, ranging from terribly realistic to deeply mythical and magical. It is a great mix of content, all threaded together with the same hypnotic style.

You will find your own favorites, but mine were "Magnifying Glass", "Thorn Tongue", and "Underwater Thing".

[Eva · Rating 5 out of 5]

*** Review copy received from the publisher in exchange for an honest review ***

The tremendously talented Gemma Files sets up Sarah Read’s new short story collection, Out of Water. It is highly and justifiably praiseworthy in its analysis of why Sarah’s collection is so important and should be very widely read.

With this collection, Sarah Read weaves a web so intricate and so divine that one would not blame Athena for turning her attention away from exacting revenge on Arachne to take notice of these stories.

“Endoskeletal” is the first story. It establishes a protagonist who has charted an expedition to explore particular cave drawings but has to deal with condescending colleagues the entire time.

There are skulls here that have bricks shoved into their mouths, which made me think of the old superstition of burying corpses who were suspected of being vampires. The bricks were thought to prevent them from hunting or attacking villagers when they came back from the dead. But Read reminds us we’re dealing with Paleolithic funerary rites here.

With vivid and visceral transformations, this excellent story ended on a gruesome note and set a perfect tone for the rest of the collection.

Trigger warning: violence against women. “In Tongues” starts off with a pregnant teen being shamed by a pastor in front of a congregation. It had a huge impact on me. It’s about sin and survival. It’s definitely not for the faint of heart. I can’t really say much more about it without spoiling the entire story, so all I will say is that it’s definitely one of the most affecting pieces in the collection and very sad.

Trigger warning: violence against women. In “Underwater Thing,” I wanted to maim the character Tyler for what he did, and most readers will, too. It’s a tale of things that come back as a reminder that not all crimes can be erased so easily.

“Tall Grass, Shallow Water” calls to mind one of the recurring themes in this collection, which is, as the title states, water horror, which Read executes with extreme skill and precision. There are also stories of flower horror (for lack of a better term) and death is, of course, unsurprisingly a dominant subject throughout. Again, I can’t mention more details about the story without giving it away, so instead I will emphasize the strong emotions that run through each of the pieces in this collection—undercurrents of loss, of revenge, or longing, of hunger and thirst, and of primal emotions.

Read’s stories are rich and settle in heavily on the reader, impacting them with a slow burn that eventually leads to a combustible crescendo.

Other stories I enjoyed included the devastating “Intersect,” the vines and flowers that wrapped around my heart from “Thorn Tongue,” and the graveyard-laden “Still Life with Natalie.”

Another story, “Golden Avery,” hurt my heart as it will with the harshness women in particular have endured for centuries over weight issues.

Each of the stories is like an unfolding flower that contains a different message. There is a suffusion of sorrow and pain that courses through the veins of this collection. It is powerful indeed. Read is another author whose work embodies the ethos of ‘beautiful horror’ as charted out by D. Alexander Ward and Doug Murano in their anthology, Gutted.

If you want to know what to read next and you have enjoyed the works of Gwendolyn Kiste, Gemma Files, and Damien Angelica Walters, look no further than your next queen of darkness, Sarah Read.

[Lou · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tales with creeping insidiousness and monstrosities of many kinds await.
From the collection these tales worked for me:

Endoskeletal

Subterranean, a deep chasm awaits, crafted evocatively with creeping insidiousness.

“There wasn’t much known about Paleolithic funerary rites. Because sites like this were never found.”

“A dozen skeletal remains filled shallow alcoves that lined the walls beneath the drawings. Beyond the alcoves, two narrow openings split the back of the cave. One led to nothing but a cavernous sinkhole. The other led to the much-trafficked cave chamber containing the remains of several cave bears. No one had known that the loose rubble wall of the cave bear room had concealed the entrance to another chamber. No one had wanted to disturb the stones and risk a cave-in. But with temperatures rising, the ice on the opposite slope had melted away, and the true entrance to the cave had opened its dark eye over the valley below.”

Making Monsters

Monsters and wilderness smell in the air and cows...there was once an era with talk of aliens now in the present of the narrative what more can one find in the redness and bleakness. Visceral telling with monstrosities.

“In the East, they call them monsters. In the South, it’s devils. In the West, they all just assume it’s people from Portland. But here in the Southwest, it’s always aliens.”

In Tongues

Living life as a blessing and curse in this tale. Bad humans subjecting another to terrible words and actions and then... an unholy delirium and stupor of wickedness awaits.

Underwaterthing

The past is never dead would be a suiting title, secrets, crimes, and some haunting justice.

Review also @ More2Read

[Gareth · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great collection of short stories, which I very much enjoyed reading.

[Katy Dailey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like all books of short stories, some were better than others. “Renovation” is the best one.

[Michael Gladish · Rating 4 out of 5]

Remarkably inventive, literary horror/speculative fiction. Can't wait to read her next collection.

[Deborah Goulding · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Jon Von · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful and poetic collection of weird horror stories with a decidedly feminine edge. Aquatic and avian. A gothic ossuary of tales about bodies, and reproduction and the quiet horror of existence. Got off to a little bit of a slow start for me, but once I got a handle on what the stories were doing I was absolutely along for the ride. Look forward to more books from the writer.

[Tell Tale Books · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Out Of Water” by Sarah Read, was an eclectic collection of chilling short stories, fantasy pieces, and thrillers. The writing felt very aural an unrestrained, allowing the grit of human nature and darkness slip through the cracks that gave you a small glimpse into the sinister and supernatural mixed with very human imperfection. Though dark in some places you can get a sense of hope and justice in the overall feel of the collection, which was a good balance of heavy and light reading.

My top three short stories in this collection are “Dead Man’s Curve”, “Through Gravel” and “Cross Wind”.

“Dead Man’s Curve” is about a ghost rider truck that has a habit of running people off a steep ridge to feed a cloud of murderous birds that trails behind it, and the two sheriffs who trail the ghost truck trying to solve its mystery while also trying not to be bird food.

“Cross Wind” depicts the story of a storm chaser who works for a news station and recently lost his partner/significant other to a cyclone. As he chases the most recent ravaging storm to fill the void of his loss with his career he discovers that the storm is a being called Tempest. He traps her and demands the ability to predict storms better to get higher ratings, only to realize he has become a sort of storm of his own.

“Through Gravel” was a fantasy piece. It was quite heartwarming with a thoughtful, bright, and young female protagonist literally bringing light into a dark place. While reading it one gets a sense of dark mystery contrasted with innocent hopefulness, which may remind one of the tone of “Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh”. The people of this underground system use tiny bright flowers as lures to bring people to their realm beneath the streets, but they only keep the special ones who notice such tiny flowers in the natural cracks of the pavement. But when they lure our protagonist, they get more than what they bargained for. Their traditional way of living is turned upside down with her ideas and innovations challenging theirs.

The most original story was “Thorn Tongues” in which a fairy-like plant-based being named Heather seeks out those who have been keeping and hiding her daughter away from her. The writing style of this story is similar to the whimsy of Lewis Carrol. The being, nicknamed Thorn-Tongue, encounters obstacles of nature in a violent and demanding search for her daughter. Using every thorn in nature to seek out her lost daughter, Estella, knowing that it is unlikely she will survive the trials. Poetic dialog and natural imagery make this a nice read.

My least favorites in this collection were “Intersect”, “Underwater Thing”, and “Grave Mother”.

“Intersect” was a seemingly thoughtless rambling of crazy from the perceptions of an alcoholic woman as her life spirals downward. It’s quite short and not the most interesting way of portraying a persons imaginings of how things could be different if there were an alternate. One may be a bit disappointed since there is a lot of potential with this kind of concept both philosophically and metaphysically alone, not to mention from a sci-fi or fantasy standpoint. Could have been something better with a little more exploration.

“Underwater Thing” is a sexual assault victim trigger. It was about a pedophile former teacher raping his step-daughter, getting her pregnant, trying to kill her by drowning her before the baby is born, and her dead drown corpse or possibly the child-gone-monster of her womb (was not entirely clear on which) returning for revenge/to avenge the death. The dialog was a little weak and the story was fairly predictable, however the end was satisfying for this type of story.

“Grave Mother” was another extremely short rambling about either an abortion or someone losing their unborn child. Hard to say which. It’s not a very coherent one, but somewhat poetic in its rambling. Not a very impactful piece for its subject matter, and it leaves one unsure if that was the point?

3 out of 5 stars. Would recommend with caution because of sensitive content.
-Emily Schmidt

[Marco Wolf · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow! What a fantastic debut! Do yourself a favor and grab a copy.