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Carrion Men
Horror fiction is meant to push boundaries, shake up expectations, to travel into realms of the taboo and strange. In Carrion Men, you will find tales of sexual anomaly, disturbing mutations of the body, tales of loneliness and isolation. Carrion Men is an all-new collection from Jeffrey Thomas featuring original tales of unease and body horror and a selection of his greatest horror fiction. Put this on your shelf between Thomas Ligotti's Teatro Grottesco and J.G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition where it belongs.
221 pages, Paperback
Published December 30, 2020
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About the author
Jeffrey Thomas
247 books283 followersJeffrey Thomas is an American author of weird fiction, the creator of the acclaimed setting Punktown. Books in the Punktown universe include the short story collections Punktown, Voices from Punktown, Punktown: Shades of Grey (with his brother, Scott Thomas), and Ghosts of Punktown. Novels in that setting include Deadstock, Blue War, Monstrocity, Health Agent, Everybody Scream!, Red Cells, and The New God. Thomas’s other short story collections include The Unnamed Country, Gods of a Nameless Country, The Endless Fall, Haunted Worlds, Worship the Night, Thirteen Specimens, Nocturnal Emissions, Doomsdays, Terror Incognita, Unholy Dimensions, AAAIIIEEE!!!, Honey Is Sweeter Than Blood, Carrion Men, Voices from Hades, The Return of Enoch Coffin, and Entering Gosston. His other novels include The American, Boneland, Subject 11, Letters From Hades, The Fall of Hades, The Exploded Soul, The Nought, Thought Forms, Beyond the Door, Lost in Darkness, and A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Dealers.
His work has been reprinted in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII (editor Karl Edward Wagner), The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror #14 (editors Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling), and Year’s Best Weird Fiction #1 (editors Laird Barron and Michael Kelly). At NecronomiCon 2024 Thomas received the Robert Bloch Award for his contributions to weird fiction.
Though he considers Viet Nam his second home, Thomas lives in Massachusetts.
His work has been reprinted in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII (editor Karl Edward Wagner), The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror #14 (editors Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling), and Year’s Best Weird Fiction #1 (editors Laird Barron and Michael Kelly). At NecronomiCon 2024 Thomas received the Robert Bloch Award for his contributions to weird fiction.
Though he considers Viet Nam his second home, Thomas lives in Massachusetts.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 30, 2021
Plutonian Press has partially succeeded in gathering a small group of stories where the themes of melancholic alienation and bodily derangement intersect most dramatically in Thomas' fiction. "Carrion" and "The Tangible Universe," the first couple of stories, vividly display how loneliness and unfulfilled desire can insidiously build toward critical levels of perversity; the latter, in its fetishizing of the monstrously diseased, could offend many readers but is an undeniably unique piece of dark fiction which showcases the author's gift for aesthetically rendering physical monstrosity with unusually descriptive prose."The Prosthesis" takes the reader into dismal factory life which doubles as an unofficial entrance to the Uncanny Valley, unsurprisingly so, since this piece found its original publication in a tribute to Ligotti.
Beyond this point in the collection, the overall thematic tone becomes very muddled, especially in the two new pieces; "The Crying Boy" reads more like slightly idiosyncratic mainstream fiction wherein a man's arrested development, both artistically and sexually, yields a conclusion of predictably dramatic irony. Worse, "Last Cup of Sorrow" features vaguely vampiric creatures who feed on the residents of an anonymous town; this one might have fared better if it had been set in Punktown but probably would have been an inferior work in any case.
The only microfictional piece, "Scorpion Face," transposes Thomas' usual portraits of anomie and entropy to a parallel world in which nonhuman creatures live all too human lives. Finally the novella-length "Door 7" somewhat redeems the weak middle of this collection with its vision of possibly otherworldly corporate conspiracy unfolding within an abandoned factory complex which an emotionally damaged widower visits with increasing frequency. Thomas' ability to develop paranoid suspense through the accumulation of uncanny details is notable but I doubt that many readers will find the denouement's inevitable descent into madness to justify the narrative's genuinely slow pacing; it is, however, the second earliest of the reprints collected herein, and Thomas certainly has written more concise and effective stories since then.
As for the production of the book, the front cover collage, as well as the arid terrain wrapping toward the back, evocatively conveys the pervasive emotional emptiness and physical entropy present in these stories.
P.S. A misprint in the table of contents offsets each story after "The Prosthesis" by 20 pages; which is particularly unfortunate since, as far as I know, this book is currently available in print alone.
Beyond this point in the collection, the overall thematic tone becomes very muddled, especially in the two new pieces; "The Crying Boy" reads more like slightly idiosyncratic mainstream fiction wherein a man's arrested development, both artistically and sexually, yields a conclusion of predictably dramatic irony. Worse, "Last Cup of Sorrow" features vaguely vampiric creatures who feed on the residents of an anonymous town; this one might have fared better if it had been set in Punktown but probably would have been an inferior work in any case.
The only microfictional piece, "Scorpion Face," transposes Thomas' usual portraits of anomie and entropy to a parallel world in which nonhuman creatures live all too human lives. Finally the novella-length "Door 7" somewhat redeems the weak middle of this collection with its vision of possibly otherworldly corporate conspiracy unfolding within an abandoned factory complex which an emotionally damaged widower visits with increasing frequency. Thomas' ability to develop paranoid suspense through the accumulation of uncanny details is notable but I doubt that many readers will find the denouement's inevitable descent into madness to justify the narrative's genuinely slow pacing; it is, however, the second earliest of the reprints collected herein, and Thomas certainly has written more concise and effective stories since then.
As for the production of the book, the front cover collage, as well as the arid terrain wrapping toward the back, evocatively conveys the pervasive emotional emptiness and physical entropy present in these stories.
P.S. A misprint in the table of contents offsets each story after "The Prosthesis" by 20 pages; which is particularly unfortunate since, as far as I know, this book is currently available in print alone.
June 1, 2021
A collection of stories focusing on Thomas’ very familiar theme of lonely, desperate middle-aged men dealing with impossible events and fantastic horrors. Always intriguing and sad. Though I had encountered a few of these tales in previous releases, it was enjoyable to see them collected with similar works.
June 22, 2021
I am a big fan of a lot of Jeffrey Thomas' brilliant writing, but this collection for whatever reason didn't really capture me. I did love reading "Scorpion Face" again, though.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews