City Pier: Above and Below

by Paul Tremblay

Above: City is sprawling, technocratic, corrupt, and built hundreds of feet above a bay, resting upon the giant wooden shoulders of Pier. Below: Pier is a seemingly endless maze of stripped sequoia trees with trunks as thick as buildings, branches molded into a complex lattice of support beams and struts. Above and Below: The people. Weapons dealers and hired heavies with major Daddy-issues; a Pier-deported homeless man and a pistol packing priest trying to survive with each other and their terrible secrets; a librarian haunted by City's violent history, his family, and by Balloons; a flawed and shattered woman who wants to escape City no matter the cost. Their lives are a part of each other. Their lives are a part of City Pier.

Genres: Fiction

96 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2007

About the author

Paul Tremblay has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, the Sheridan Le Fanu, and Massachusetts Book awards and is the author of the New York Times bestselling Horror Movie, The Beast You, Are, The Pallbearers Club, Survivor Song, Growing Things, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, and the crime novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland. His novel The Cabin at the End of the World was adapted as the Universal Pictures film Knock at the Cabin. His short fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly online, and numerous year’s-best anthologies. He has a master’s degree in mathematics and lives outside Boston with his family. He is represented by Stephen Barbara, InkWell Management.

Reviews

[Megan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I need to read it again. I liked it but it left a lot of mystery.

[RL Bailey · Rating 4 out of 5]

While three of the four stories are in other Tremblay collections, reading them together is a must.

[Ryan Edmonds · Rating 5 out of 5]

This loosely connected set of short stories, though dark, was surprisingly hearfelt. I'd love another set of stories exploring this world.

[Jonathan Wood · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really great collection of four novellas that share a setting and which eventually twist around to connect in a surprising and moving way. A fine example of the literary weird.