Thanatrauma: Stories

by Steve Rasnic Tem

“All my life I’ve dreamed of the dead.”

Thanatrauma: the dread of it erodes you, the shadows waiting at the end, the impending conclusion, the troubling dream from which you will not wake.

These 21 stories – four published here for the first time – explore some of our fundamental fears: death, loss, grief, and aging. In “Reflections in Black,” a man takes a phantasmagoric Halloween journey in search of a former love. In “The Parts Man,” a man enters a desperate contract with a sinister entity in a long, vintage automobile. The darkly beautiful “The Dead Outside My Door” is a haunting post-apocalyptic tale unlike any you’ve ever read. Other offerings include “Whatever You Want,” in which a Christmas wish has terrible consequences; “Torn,” a bizarre vision of a highly personalized hell; and “The Way Station,” a tribute to the legendary Stefan Grabinski. Also featured is a special bonus, “August Freeze,” from the lost, undistributed Winter 1985 issue of Weird Tales.

Steve Rasnic Tem has won the Bram Stoker, World Fantasy, and British Fantasy Awards and has established himself as one of today’s finest writers of horror and weird fiction. In this new collection, by turns chilling and thought-provoking, Tem is at his very best.

Genres: Horror, Short Stories

256 pages, Hardcover

Published October 1, 2021

About the author

Steve 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.

Reviews

[Char · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unsettling is the key word whenever Steve Rasnic Tem is the subject of discussion. In his latest release from Valancourt Books, unsettling seems too small a word. More on that later, right now I want to touch on just a few of the stories in this collection.

FIELD OF SHOES 2.5 pages of sheer disturbance. So short, yet so powerful.

A STAY AT THE SHORES Just a brief stay until the next ship arrives. If if arrives.

THE DEAD OUTSIDE MY DOOR How long before YOU are outside the door?

THE WALLS ARE TREMBLING In fact, the entire house is trembling.

SLEEPOVER That chilling final line. Will our children be mad at us for perpetuating and even escalating climage change?

Nearly all the tales here intrigued and disturbed me. Age old themes of... well, aging, grief and loss reside in these pages, as well as keen observations seen in a new light.

I’ve loved the writing of this man since I became a teenager and that will never change. His writing fascinated me during my teens and twenties, beguiled me in my thirties and forties, and now he’s unsettled the hell out of me again. Steve Rasnic Tem has been like family to me, (better, than some real family, to be honest), because he's been a part of my life for so long. Perhaps you should make him a part of yours?

My highest recommendation, especially to fans of dark, weird fiction!

Signed limited editions are available for pre-order here:https://www.valancourtbooks.com/thana...

*Thank you to Valancourt Books for this paperback ARC in exchange for my honest feedback,. This is it! I still pre-ordered my hard copy from them just the same.*

[Samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received my hardcover copy of Steve Rasnic Tem’s “Thanatrauma” - signed and numbered, last month. I am honoured to own an autographed book by Tem, a powerhouse of horror who can make you feel so much. And that cover? So beautifully detailed and overflowing with raw pain. I studied it often and showed everyone sitting in my vicinity on multiple occasions. It’s staggering.

Now for the contents of the book - just as staggering. I relish every word Tem writes. I devour everything slowly so that my imagination can bring to life the exquisite descriptions he had in mind. Man, it’s a ride. In one of the stories a character mentions that watching movies is almost as good as dreaming. That’s how I feel about reading Tem’s work.

My favourite stories were:

“Saudade” - This had a Ghost Ship feeling to it. It felt loving, sorrowful, and then suddenly terrifying.

“A Stay at the Shores” - Offered a sense of Purgatory disguised as a vacation retreat.

“Forwarded” - A look into the mind of a man who knows he’s not all there and that something dark lurks within him. This one really pulled me in.

“The Parts Man” - My absolute favourite story of the lot. A man drives from memory to memory, picking up the people he wronged in life while the Parts Man takes his due along the way. Stunning and very freaky.

“Sleepwalking with Angels” - A despairing look into someone losing who they are. It reads like you are watching yourself become overcome with dementia. It sent my heart and mind into a fit of agony.

This collection wrestles with ideas of life disintegrating, existentialism, death, the afterlife, and all of the possible horrors in between. Loss often plays a starring role in many of them too, which I interpreted to be some of Tem’s personal experiences leaking onto the page. I hope it was cathartic for him, because it was an unreservedly prodigious hit for me. You must read this collection.

[T.J. Price · Rating 4 out of 5]

A stunning, deceptively simple collection of stories that demands your attention and dictates the pace of your reading. Loosely themed around death, grief, and loss, the characters in these pieces are almost all older, towards the end of their lives, and suffering from divorce or the departure of a loved one. Dementia figures heavily in these pages—at least, symbolically—but so too does a heavy apocalyptic feeling. Monsters both real and imagined lurk beneath the surface, even as reality itself splinters and sags inward. Houses and domiciles of all varieties are the setting, too, and if a trope is used, it is twisted inside-out and made new by Tem's skilled and meticulous hand.

Some of the stories did not land for me, but even as they unspooled, I was drawn in by their relentless imagery and bizarre timelines. One of these, a longer piece, called "Torn," was a journey through a very personalized Hellscape. The piece telegraphs what it is at the beginning, but never really changes the expectation and lapses into Freudian combat with the father-figure in a thoroughly expected way. Despite this, the landscape of the story was arresting, populated by incessant tornadoes and grotesqueries—it was just that, by this point in the collection, I had come to expect more.

That story aside, by and large, this was a stellar collection. I loved "The Dead Outside My Door," which has to be one of the best takes on zombie literature I've read in a long time. "A Stay at the Shores" flawlessly married Aickman and Lovecraft to create something entirely new and hideous. "By the Sea" is definitely a new favorite, and the casually disturbing ambiguity of "The Way Station" brought to mind similarly-themed stories by Brian Evenson and Vladimir Sorokin.

Highly recommended—these are twisty, reality-splintering tales that grapple with chaos and disorder, leaving the reader questioning what the true definition of sanity could mean—and if the line where it lapses into the opposite is really all that clearly demarcated after all.

[Areeb Ahmad (Bankrupt_Bookworm) · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Some days the dead drifted: the ones empty of viscera, whose skeletons had worn wafer-thin, whose remaining skin was like parchment. They were as vague and insubstantial as memories imperfectly recalled. Sometimes the slightest breeze picked them up and tumbled them along the ground or flew them like kites. Jay suspected no one flew kites any more and he didn't have the words to express how sad this made him."

In all of Rasnic Tem's stories, there is a sense of deep wrongness, of things being off-kilter, of the world set askew, of humans loosely rooted to reality as though a strong gust of wind could blow them away. There is a lot of description of the mundane, a recounting of quotidian routine, and a procession of everyman characters who are dealing with trauma, the vagaries of age, or have been thrust into an alien situation where they cannot cope. It's as if Tem thrusts us into these isolated pocket realms where the usual laws of nature and do not quite seem to work.

Things lose their edge over time and gradually become insubstantial. Events are blurred as if witnessed through a misted glass pane. There is enough realism to ground you, to make you feel at ease, yet there is a creeping feeling of dread, of uneasiness, of madness taking hold. It is a refreshing take on horror, one that surely reenergizes the genre and moves it beyond the corporeality of monsters, the horrors possibly commonplace but not robbed of their powers. My favourite stories: "Saudade", "A Stay at the Shores", "August Freeze", and "Thanatrauma".



(I received a finished copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.)

[Becky Spratford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading in October 2021 issue of Library Journal: https://www.libraryjournal.com/?revie...


Three Words That Describe This Book: slightly askew, universal fears, unsettling

Draft Review:

Tem, an author today’s Horror creators regularly cite as their inspiration, shows off his captivating and unsettling style in this collection of 21 tales, including four new to this volume. Writing stories that are steeped in realism, focusing on universal fears like illness, storms, death, regret, and loss, Tem’s tales quickly and satisfyingly shift the plot askew, dropping speculative elements and roping in maximum unease and fear. Marked by a confident narrative voice and intriguing storylines, readers are easily drawn into the emotional situations and carefully crafted, intimate worlds. For example, the atmospheric “Heterocera,” is a moving portrait of aging, framed by a moth infestation, while “August Freeze” is a terrifying story of a troubled couple stuck in an unnaturally dangerous place, and “Reflections in Black” is a must read Halloween tale.

Verdict: Tem has won just about every major speculative fiction award, yet because his work does not fit neatly into established genre boxes, he has slipped through the mainstream cracks. Library workers can make up for this oversight by suggesting this collection with confidence to fans of authors of creepy, Weird Fiction like Carmen Maria Machado and John Langan.

[Curtis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I knew getting old would suck but Tem makes it sound like the worst is all still ahead of me lol. Can't wait to lose my mind and start stumbling around town in a dementia haze in a couple decades.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

So….

I mean…..

Well…..

Hmm.

In one of my reading status updates for this book, I wrote that I am not smart enough for Steve Rasnic Tem. I stand by this assessment. Reading Tem is an experience akin to watching Twin Peaks: The Return — it’s beautiful and unnerving and certainly means something greater than I can comprehend and wait a minute, it’s over?

Tem’s writing is gorgeous. The man can craft a sentence. I mean, listen to this:

The phone rings many times a day, but it is always someone pretending to be someone they are not. Sometimes you can barely hear them. They act as if they know you when they don’t know you at all. Sometimes when you answer no one is there but everyone is listening.

Amazing, right? And what does it mean? No clue!

Many of the stories spend much of their running time detailing normal, boring, real-life events that are suddenly, weirdly turned on their ears at the last possible second—often in the last paragraph, sort of like this (disclaimer: Tem did not write this. I did.):

Chuck stared out into the summer sun. It was a beautiful day, warm but not too warm, cool but not too cool, with a slight hint of the rain that would come later in the evening. Chuck sat on his back deck, looking at the lake behind his house. Although he was satisfied with his life, there was always an element of uncertainty in every decision he made.

This probably went back to his childhood. Although he couldn’t remember everything clearly, he knew that something terrible happened to him when he was five years old. He remembered talking to his imaginary friend, Charles, about it. He just couldn’t remember exactly what it was that he had said.

As the sun began to set and the rain began to fall, Chuck went back into his home. He thought he heard a noise like whistling outside, but he wasn’t sure. He looked out his window and saw nothing. No one was there.

As he entered the bathroom, he realized his face felt funny, like it had never felt before. He looked around for a mirror, but they had all disappeared. He reached up slowly, gingerly, and touched his face. There was nothing there.

Feel that WTF? That burning in your brain that insists you must have missed something? That’s essentially what it’s like to read the stories in this volume. So while I didn’t dislike them, it is unlikely that I’ll return to this book anytime soon. I just don’t think my brain works the way it needs to in order to enjoy them. I freely admit that I am very much in the minority, however, so what do I know?

(You may be thinking, “If you didn’t really enjoy or understand this, then why did you give it 4 stars?” Easy peasy, pal o’ mine: I’m at least smart enough to know when I’ve been outclassed.)

[Alex Budris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like Campbell or Etchison, Tem is definitely a 'writer's writer,' deftly utilizing all available tools to great effect. Every story is well crafted; all are successful. One of the author's strengths is his successful use of ambiguity, inciting fearful potentials without blurring things into senselessness. Many of these characters have suffered a great personal loss, or are else lonely to the point of despair. This grief and isolation are often components of their final doom. They are unhappy to the point of being unhinged, floundering helplessly in "the nameless emptiness we all, in our aloneness, ultimately contain" -just about every narrator in this book is hopelessly unreliable (and I love me a good unreliable narrator.) Even though it deserves four, I'm only allowing three stars to this book. Because... I think he can do better. Or, more likely, already has done better - This is the first book by this author I have read, my other encounters being in the pages of various anthologies. Like Lansdale, this author is so good I am going to have to rate him in comparison to himself so he doesn't run off with all the stars. My impression is that this eclectic and surprising collection is just another day at the office for Tem, and I'm saving my fourth star for something that is truly inspired. I'll let you know when I find it.

[Mistress of the Bleeding Sorrow · Rating 3 out of 5]

A weird little book.
I loved the author's writing style. It's dark, depressing, atmospheric and just beautiful. The only problem is that most stories are a bit vague or feel somewhat incomplete, leaving you wondering what happened. But I still enjoyed reading them.

[Barry Hill · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

4+ Stars! A very well done collection of shorts and short shorts.

I think I may need to read me some more Tem because the dude can write.

[Nikki in Niagara · Rating 2 out of 5]

A collection of underwhelming weird fiction.

[Mark Olowinski · Rating 2 out of 5]

Basically the same theme of weirdness and death in every short story. Maybe 2 or 3 were good.

[Cleo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some stories commit the cardinal sin of literary horror, being confusing & meandering rather than scary, but the good ones are some of the best I’ve read.