Carnal desires and inexplicable supernatural encounters abound in this seriously twisted collection.
Ten stories. One town. An abundance of corruption, taboo, and raw humanity.
Everything comes back to Salem, Virginia, a small Appalachian town populated by the dedicated worshippers of Crucible Church, the sinners on the outskirts of the church, and strange supernatural entities—the likes of mermaids, witches, demons, and aliens.
Each story in Signs of The Fall follows a character who is in some way connected to Salem. But Salem isn’t the only tie between these stories, as each takes on an unsettling undertone, with lustful characters hiding dark secrets, juxtaposed against the religious town and zealots. Hypocrisy is common, taboo is expected, and carnal desires pour through the pages.
Signs of The Fall has range: a female coder fighting for a place at her male-dominated job, a veteran who cannot shake the deeds of her past, a man who is drawn to a curious and magical well, and beyond. Some stories are more supernatural than others, like “Taken,” while others find eerie discomfort in realistic predators like “The Fall.”
This book is unafraid to stand out, not only in content but in form. Each story puts these characters under the microscope, bringing their oddities, their dark hopes, and their lustful desires into clarity—in both enticing prose and excruciatingly raw corruption. In form,itdeviates from the expected, including stories in second-person perspective, thoughts written in computer code, dialogue written in script, and context written via instant message.
There’s a certain kind of darkness here, including an eroticism that exists in reality but takes a strength to stomach. Many stories feature inappropriate and predatory relationships, those between minors and adults as well as cousins, and it can be quite explicit.
Author Sean M. Pricelures you in with his range of the strange, and his prose will keep you locked in. The world is atmospheric, be it in its eerie, autumnal woods or its terse office settings. And even when you want to look away from the corruption of the characters and the discomfort that arises from their choices, Price’s writing will keep you reading, like an accident you can’t turn away from—alarming and yet alluring.
“A childish fear that if I gazed into the pit, something down there might reach up and pull me into its bowels. It was the same fright one gets in the middle of the night, a fear of something evil lurking under the bed, a terror that a dark creature waited beneath the mattress to latch onto one’s feet as soon as they touched the floor.”
Signs of The Fall is like an R-rated trip into the twilight zone—an uncanny collection of interlinked short stories that will appeal to speculative short fiction fans and those who don’t usually read collections.
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