"Angel skeletons! Parents that bite babies! Monster studies! If I sound effusive, it's because I am, terribly - what a fun and weird and creepy and delightfully sideways book Kyle Winkler has written, and how jealous I am of anyone else reading it for the first time." -- Amber Sparks, author of And I Do Not Forgive Stories and Other Revenges
" OH PAIN is a standout debut collection of weird fiction, in which Winkler displays his talents for both beautiful prose and unsettling themes. Whether these fictions concern mundane, everyday events or bizarre, otherworldly happenings, the tie that binds them together is the nagging, dread-inspiring sense that something (perhaps everything?) is off-kilter." -- Kev Harrison, author of Below and Paths Best Left Untrodden
“Winkler serves up Midwest weirdness and body horror unlike any I’ve encountered before. His characters, crafted with wit and compassion, lead fully dimensional lives on the page. There’s no denying that OH PAIN is an absolute pleasure.” -Eric Raglin, author of Nightmare Yearnings and the Cursed Morsels podcast
A new mother secretly bites her baby until the compulsion ruins her. An abandoned angel eats the trash of a small Ohio town. A woman spies on her neighbor's aging body for global security reasons. A scientist suffers horrible mutations to care for a radioactive orphan. A man graduates college only to labor in an underground bunker scrubbing a giant. In each of the twelve weird stories of this collection, human bodies are morphed, warped, and withered. Through love, desolation, or entropy.
Through motherhood, childhood, or disease. The settings for these stories of painful transformation are often the huddled corners of the uncanny Midwest, but the changes are always happening on the body in pain. From the author of the cosmic horror novella, The Nothing That Is , comes a collection of stories hovering between the everyday and the horrific. With four stories appearing in print for the first time, and line drawings for each story by Claudia Lundahl.
In OH PAIN, Kyle Winkler weaves together a series of wild and creative stories with themes of familial relationship, and as the title suggests, pain.
After reading The Nothing That Is I was excited to see Winkler's other creative works. OH PAIN combines elements of various genres including horror, transgressive fiction, bizarro, magical realism, and literary fiction. The majority of these stories feature some sort of family relationship with an emphasis on parent/child relationships. These stories are painted with a vivid and imaginative palette that reminds me of Neil Gaiman. In addition to familiar themes, Winkler explores the drudgery of daily work life. In several stories, he incorporates tales of magical items to express the transference of pain into physical objects. The stories, here, are emotive and memorable.
Like a salvo, the first story, Bite, bombards the reader with a sensory overload of details. This technique mirrors the mental state of the viewpoint character. In this story, I first observed a focus on the connection between objects and human emotions. During a lengthy passage describing childcare items, one gets the sense that the protagonist is searching for an ephemeral essence of "motherhood" in so many disposable plastic things. I read this story a month prior to finishing the collection, and it has remained in the forefront of my memory. The story has a desperate quality to it. This theme regarding objects appears again in Smudge the Head which remains one of my favorite stories in the collection. In this story, a blackboard opens up a doorway to an imaginative and horrifying world. I got a strong connection between art, emotion, and grief.
In Geshmak, this theme hit me the hardest. The story focuses on guns. There's a subtle line in which Winkler shows the way power shifts the moment a gun is present, even when an act of violence is not happening. The story uses bizarro fiction to illustrate the way that the fear and pain of gun violence becomes internalized, in this case by a teenager. Perhaps I'm biased by my own fatigue and exhaustion with the ever-present dread of gun violence in the US. But this story had the greatest emotional impact on me.
The Slow Work, And Lo! It was Thursday in Ohio, and Every Day You Will Get up and Go to Work all focus on the loss of the self to work. Winkler injects a morbid humor into these stories that helps with the dour themes. I loved And Lo!, which was another highlight from the collection.
Beehunter was subtler in regards to weird elements. The story stood out in the collection. It was quieter, but had a lasting emotional impact.
This collection has an eerie quality. Though the stories don't evoke traditional horror, they provide an insurmountable feeling of dread. The pain in these stories was so palpable. I think these stories approach a different dimension of horror than classic works.
OH PAIN has managed to wiggle it’s way into my top five short fiction books. I was not expecting such a weird, melancholic and bizarre read, but I’m absolutely wowed by the effort that Winkler has put into this book.
There’s twelve extremely well written and vastly different stories in this collection. The thing with a collection of short stories, personally, is that some are a huge hit or miss, or some really fall flat. Not with this book. This book had such engaging plots, ideas that I would never have dreamed of, and I’m impressed with how much imagination has gone into them.
There were three particular stories in this series that I honestly want full novels on. - And Lo! It Was Thursday In Ohio - Teratology - Smudge the Head
Teratology was probably my favourite out of all of them. I don’t put spoilers in my review, but this is a story you really don’t want to miss. I read it twice before continuing with the other stories because I was absolutely infatuated with it. It was beautifully harrowing. It managed to hit my morbid fascination with humans who become monstrous, and I don’t mean humans who do evil things and become classed as ‘monsters.’
Kyle Winkler is an author I’ve had on my list to read for a while now and I’m shook at his writing and the ability to pull you into his works so quickly. I recommend every story in this collection, which is rare for me, but damn, this is a brilliant series of weird fiction and I’ll be praising this to the trash angels for a good while.
Thank you to Kyle for sending me a copy for an honest review.
I really don't know how many times I can say it. Kyle Winkler is an important writer, with a seemingly unlimited imagination. The weirdness of these stories is not there for the sake of weirdness, though it is fun, and nutty, and surreal, but it is also hooked to the emotional lives of the people in these stories. It's a special writer who can create a character in your mind within the first few lines of a story (Homebody), or tackle the brutality of our time without falling into sentimentality or preaching (Geshmak). My favorite story here is the mysterious, wildy imaginative, sorrowful Last Night With Cicely. But really, each of these tales offers their own glowing satisfaction. If you're coming here for the weird, you won't be disappointed, and you might be frightened or freaked. But there's real pain in OH PAIN, and real life.
Beautifully sad, yet perverse and hilarious--this is a hard thing to balance yet this does it easily. It's also deeply reflective about motherhood and mothers in general. Everything comes from the heart, it just sometimes gets a little f---ed up the process.
A brew of strange, sometimes haunting stories from the author of the excellent novella, The Nothing That Is. I especially liked "Bite," "Geshmak" & most of all, "Beehunter," which reminded me of Shirley Jackson at her most inexplicable and menacing.
OH PAIN is a different kind of horror. While not a traditional horror, this book will sit with you in a dread-filled silence. The atmosphere is thick and uneasy. There is definitely body horror in here, and it is unique body horror. I haven’t really read any stories like these and I loved them for there dread-inducing, twisted, uniqueness. There is also a feeling of downright sadness with a few of these. I felt so many emotions that I’m not used to feeling with a “horror” book. Don’t go into this one thinking it will be your typical horror because you won’t appreciate it then. Go into this read with an open mind and the knowledge that there is just so much that makes ‘OH PAIN’ a unique book with some very dark twists.
I had a feeling that I’d enjoy this short story collection. Well, I ended up fucking LOVING it. Kyle gives us some of the most unique stories you could fathom in this tight 212 page collection. The creative minds really seem to thrive with short stories because they get to hit us with whatever whacky ideas they want, and his imagination is on full display with this collection. I found myself constantly wondering two things: - How does he come up with this shit? - What’s next?
After reading The Nothing That Is and reading some brief descriptions of the stories involved I thought I knew what was coming here. But even with that preparation I still wasn’t ready for the outrageous topics covered. A new mother gets carried away with her baby-nibbles, college graduate gets a job scrubbing a giant, trash eating angels, a neck hole big enough to smuggle shit, and so much more. This collection was bizarre and I couldn’t get enough. These stories wouldn’t have worked as well as they did without Kyle’s storytelling ability and his sense of humour. He took these ideas and did his thing with them by rounding them out nicely and involving whole and complete characters - some likeable and some you couldn’t stand - in each one. A number of these tales were so engrossing that I wanted more from them. If he announced tomorrow that he’s expanding them all into novellas I would tell him to shut up and take my fucking money. He also does a fantastic job of sprinkling in his sense of humour here and there throughout this collection. It’s very sharp and subtle and if you’ve read his words or heard him speak in the past it’s what you come to expect. One moment that stood out was in Geshmak when a character said “His breath smelled like tonsillitis,” obviously referring to another character’s unpleasant breath. It could’ve easily been described as rotten or foul, but Kyle put his own unique touch on it by saying it smelled like tonsillitis. These descriptions are part of what stand out to me as a reader and make me go back and read the sequence another time or two.
Now I can’t go without mentioning the serious and emotional side of this book. The pain of OH PAIN. Along with the humour, Kyle also sprinkled, or in some cases, dumped the pain into these stories. Each story had feeling, and the emotions were heavy in Beehunter in particular. This was a story that I absolutely loved. It seemed like he put his entire heart into these characters as well as the story itself. Beehunter was both powerful and sad, and will likely stick with me for some time. I wasn’t surprised to discover what the inspiration was for it after the fact, and that it was the most personal and difficult to write story of the collection.
Along with Beehunter four other favourites were: - Teratology - And Lo! It Was Thursday in Ohio - Last Night with Cicely - Every Day You’ll Get Up and Go To Work
I’ve gotta wrap this thing up. I’ll just say that I think everyone needs to get to know Kyle Winkler. Go buy this collection and The Nothing That Is. Just do it.
This collection was truly incredible, so much so that I started reading the ebook but ended up not only buying a paperback for my bookshelf, but one as a Christmas present for a fellow dark weird fiction lover as well.
These stories have more heart than almost any short story collection I've read. The theme of motherhood/our relationships with mothers is woven expertly throughout the collection, and the way Winkler blends the bleak and heartbreaking with the strange and beautiful is beyond inspiring.
The opening story "Bite" floored me with its depiction of postpartum depression, something I am intimately familiar with, and this story made mine ache again like an old broken bone. "Smudge the Head" is painfully honest and had me crying almost the entire story, and in my opinion, is the crown jewel of the collection. "Beehunter" also totally blew me away, reminding me of Flannery O'Connor at her best. The final story, "Every Day You'll Get Up and Go To Work," was so different from the others and yet somehow was the perfect story to end. These stories stood out the most to me, but there isn't a single story that didn't break my heart in the best way and leave me reeling. I cannot wait to see what else Kyle Winkler has in store for us and will definitely be buying his next book.
A short summary of my favorites from this collection
Bite: They say lead with what you know, and Kyle winkler must have know what a banger he had with this story to start the collection off with it. Easily my favorite in the collection. Summarized briefly: A mother’s compulsion to bite her infant consumes her until… well…use your imagination.
Teratology: two parents’ overwhelming love for their radioactive daughter sends THEM over the edge… consequences be damned smudge the head: I love the idea of childhood creativity knowing no bounds, but throw the creepy filter on it and you’ve got yourself a damned good story.
Homebody: much like the film the number 23… but with cartography. Absolutely excellent.
Bee hunter: maybe there is something to age old superstitions…. Or something sinister for refusing to entertain them….
Geshmak: I’m convinced in order to turn this story into a body horror masterpiece, winkler imagined a world in which a select few women might realize the ability of their purses to carry an unlimited amount of items… and then was like “but WAIT. Let’s make it a giant hole in their necks instead…”. With great power comes great responsibility…
Oh Pain! Oh Mr. Winkler! What a fantastic read, Kyle has done it again! The care and detail with which he wrote "Bite" (one of my favorite stories in this collection) were akin to the care Emily takes in biting her baby. Gentle and twisted and just *chef's kiss. The story also features a giant laundry list of items that "room was needed for" that was clearly compiled by a veteran of parenting and it made me laugh out loud as a father of 2 I think I still have every one of those items somewhere in my house long devoid of "room." From trash angels to ominous voids inside of hidden neck holes, Oh Pain! is Americana and high strangeness under a very twisted microscope that only Kyle Winkler is capable of looking through and capturing with incredible prose. It exists somewhere between Black Mirror and the Twilight Zone but at the same time is entirely unique. I will forever, fervently recommend this book to anyone that will listen.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
I realized I enjoy Winkler's writing style after finishing The Nothing That Is, so this one was a journey into seeing how creative he could be with plot and character development in the short story format. I wasn't disappointed. His stories are always witty, emotional, dark, thought provoking, and drum roll please...painful. The pain he deals with is very human, very universal. From a new Mother who fights the constant urge to bite/swallow her newborn, to the folks trying to understand the angel that eats their garbage, to the new employee procedure manual on how to care for...well, not going to spoil it. Needless to say, Winkler knows how to do a lot with little words. It's easy to underestimate what is being communicated, but it does dig deep into the reader and stays for awhile.
This collection of weird short fiction, by Kyle Winkler, is one of the best of its kind that I've ever read. The first sentence of the first story sets the tone, and it just gets weirder as you progress. I am blown away by the insanely brilliant mind of this writer. My notes are filled with expletives. And oh f*¿king hell the writing. Damn. This book is candy for someone like me. I loved every story, all of them, but I've chosen five favourites...
~The Slow Work (LOVE) ~Nutrition ( the writing in this one is incredible) ~Smudge the Head (🤯) ~Last Night With Cicely (blown a way) ~Beehunter (really? what?! damn)
A mother secretly nibbles and bites her baby. A neck hole that swallows guns, people, and a Nefesh. A typeface argument that gets ugly. The world of weird stories in Kyle Winkler’s Oh Pain takes unique twists to the bizarre and a left turn down the road to unease. And I, for one, am grateful for the ride. Bravo
I really do struggle with short fiction lol. This had some great body horror, is insanely imaginative, and I adored the two stories above, but I ultimately had trouble engaging with most of the stories here.
I love the acknowledgments when Winkler writes, "Writing stories is hard for me." Same!
A weird little collection that gave me unexpected and vivid nightmares—not from ghosts or creepy drawings on the wall, but from confronting the horror of dealing with aging parents and the crushing weight of never feeling successful enough to make them proud (“Beehunter”).
I loved the ideas in “Homebody” and would totally read a novella set in this alternate (or actual?) near future.