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5.0
There Comes a Midnight Hour
ByPublisher Description
One of the most respected voices of contemporary dark fiction, Gary Braunbeck, returns with all the gravity of an imploding star to chronicle the inescapable grimness of our human condition with There Comes a Midnight Hour. The full moon portending mysterious occurrences and nocturnal creatures as it illuminates your surroundings has had a shroud pulled over it by the author’s deft hand. In this midnight hour, there is no light to guide you, no matter how dim, as each story pulls you inexorably deeper into a desolate world paved with terror and smothered by an atmosphere of doom. Those fragile things ground into dust underfoot by your progress here are not twigs or dead leaves but your illusions of safety. While others map beaten paths on the literary landscape Braunbeck explores a veritable Marianas Trench where the sun never rises and toxic currents drag you through the bones of primitive things half-remembered—order, complacency, hope—making for a searing journey you’ll never forget.
This collection brings together some of the author’s most hard-hitting stories published over his celebrated quarter-century career, those with such a resounding emotional core you are left contemplating them long afterward. There Comes a Midnight Hour illustrates not only how profound an impact genre fiction can have on a reader, but also why Braunbeck’s work has influenced the next generation of horror authors. Discerning lovers of all things dark who have become jaded and are counting down the seconds for a volume of stories to distinguish their shelves…look no further. Your time has run out.
This collection brings together some of the author’s most hard-hitting stories published over his celebrated quarter-century career, those with such a resounding emotional core you are left contemplating them long afterward. There Comes a Midnight Hour illustrates not only how profound an impact genre fiction can have on a reader, but also why Braunbeck’s work has influenced the next generation of horror authors. Discerning lovers of all things dark who have become jaded and are counting down the seconds for a volume of stories to distinguish their shelves…look no further. Your time has run out.
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5.0
“There Comes a Midnight Hour is genuinely the perfect title for this collection because it does tear away a certain mask that so many authors have relied on for years and probably will for a long time yet. It doesn't do this to be shocking or to indicate that what lies under that mask is something unwholesome and deadly (as many horror stories and novels often do) as much as it does it in order to be very blunt about the nature of the dark and the sadness that often occupies its depths, sometimes even managing to do it with humor and cutting wit. The midnight hour is, after all, when all our less than delightful demons come to manifest and eat us alive, only to let us live and do it again the next night and the next.
Gary Braunbeck's books always make you feel something. You might think that isn't such a big deal or that it's something that any writer could manage given the right tools and effort, but I genuinely want you to understand that this isn't that polite and comfortable sort of engagement. No, this is the stuff that goes much deeper, shows you the trauma, and doesn't look away even while it offers you a hand to hold in some sense of sympathy and commiseration as the events unfold. These are the stories you think back to from time to time and feel a little of the feeling you shared when you read it that first time, the characters you wonder about or empathize with when it's often hard to stay and sit with what they're feeling, and the atmosphere that lingers with you a while after. Gary A. Braunbeck won't splatter you in gore, though he also won't spare you the meat of the matter, and he won't be the one to let you linger over established expectations either, this stuff is the kind of thing that haunts you in a far more genuine way.
I don't want to spoil the genuine treat of reading these stories for yourself, so I won't go into each of them here. I will say that some of my favorites include We Now Pause for Station Identification (which has long been one of my favorite stories), Paper Cuts, Tales the Ashes Tell, Smiling Faces Sometimes, and Glorietta.”
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