All Your Friends are Here
ByPublisher Description
"Explores the unnerving and grotesque with glee. Shaw's style suits the stories like a glove."
- Publishers Weekly
"Unforgettable, ominous, and provocative. Shaw is a voice to watch in Weird fiction."
- Library Journal, starred review
"A surreal reading experience, humorous and creepy in equal measure. An exciting new voice [that] delivers a fresh take on horror and will appeal to fans of T. Kingfisher, Grady Hendrix, and Jason Pargin."
- Booklist
Your new favorite assortment of New Weird Lit stories about car-vampires; fascist deer; memory-devouring tree gods; and the torment matrix; from Wonderland Award-winning author M.Shaw (One Hand to Hold, One Hand to Carve).
At last we can confirm what you've always dreamed of: All your friends are here!
Why leave your apartment ever again? All your friends are here.
Why go to outer space? All your friends are here.
Why grow, or dream? Why take that vacation you've been saving up for? Why set yourself free?
All your friends are here.
Contains a novelette written especially for this collection, Ready Player (n+1).
"Dark elegies of loneliness and dissolution set in a world left dangling at the end of history. As an enquirer into the question of what it means to be human, M. Shaw is second to none."
- Nadia Bulkin, She Said Destroy
"Wonderfully Weird, bizarro horror with a deeply resonant, poetic sensibility and an itch-under-your-skin vibe that just won't quit."
- Michael Allen Rose, Jurassichrist
"There is not a story in this collection that doesn't hit like a heroic dose of acid straight to your cerebellum. Unhinged in the best possible way."
- Danger Slater, Starlet and House of Rot
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities1 Review
Ash
Created about 2 months ago
“Well. Where to begin? This is my first time reading M. Shaw, though I am no stranger to weird and other types of unusual fiction. I ran across this book in the Goodreads Giveaways, entered, and lost, but the Kindle version on Amazon was only $1.74, so what the heck. If I could sum up my review in one sentence, it would be: this is a heterogenous mixture of fecal matter and gold.
I was worried when I started reading, given there is a typo on the first page ("ateen" instead of "a teen"), and saw that the writing style Shaw employs is very straightforward and simple - I tend to prefer some purple with my prose. But somehow, for most of the short stories, it worked. I was impressed and intrigued. Man vs Bomb and The Only Friend You Will Ever Need were just awesome. Go With the Flow was... great. The Cure for Loneliness was fantastic, besides some politics injected in there.
My Dad Bought a Space Shuttle, however, was just an obvious dig at Trump supporters and people who like Elon Musk and capitalism, described exactly as I would imagine far left liberals imagining all conservatives to be. It wasn't clever or interesting, except maybe to an echo chamber of far left liberals. I'd be equally annoyed if an author included a story that was obviously from a conservative POV and full of liberal stereotypes, btw - it's idiotic and juvenile. This story, along with Ready Player, let me know that I'm not this author's audience and I shouldn't bother reading because it's not for me.
Let's talk Ready Player (n+1). I'm not certain how much my opinion counts here because I never read Ready Player One, I just saw the movie and barely remember it, but again, the unreasoned political biases were irksome. I'm not bothered by the trans stuff, I spent a good amount of time around the trans community when I was younger and it was more underground (I'm 41), but I learned that if you make your entire personality about your gender or sexual identity, you're an empty person. Maybe it would have had more depth if I had read Ready Player One, but not having done so it just read like an annoyingly petulant narrator screeching endlessly and hypocritically about nothing of import. I'm certain it will be fun for the echo chamber, but not so much for me. I did enjoy the banter about South Park and Silent Hill, and recognized the parody there, so I'll give it that. This one dropped my rating and my opinion of the author by a star - at least it was short.
The rest was soured by the previous, though I did enjoy Apartémon.
I'd rather not know the political preferences of author's I read, as a rule. Once I know, I keep looking for it, and that's tiring. After Ready Player I was just waiting for the next political stance reference versus allowing myself to get absorbed in what I was reading.
I don't know if I will give Shaw's other book a shot, maybe I'll wait a bit before deciding. The most fair rating I can come up with is 2.75/5 rounded up.”Start a Book Club
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