Stories From the Plague Years

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Stories from the Plague Years is the first fiction collection from award-winning fantasy author Michael Marano. Nine tales arranged in a haunting symphony that guides readers through a tour of the darkest landscapes of human existence.Here, fury and hate grow so strong, they cannot be held within one man’s body, and manifest themselves to devastating effect. Cities contain second, unseen cities populated by the vengeful ghosts of those who died too soon. Countries fall to famine and war. But these are also the tales of love lasting beyond death, love existing beyond all hope, and friendships never forgotten. Within are the widely praised stories “Winter Requiem,” “The Siege,” and the controversial “Burden,” as well as two original novellas, including the Shirley Jackson Award-nominated “Displacement.”Marano, acclaimed for his evocative voice, paints lush portraits both terrifying and tender, injecting even the darkest of fantasies with a punk rock sensibility and a touch of the humane. With Stories from the Plague Years, he presents snapshots of a time when our world collided with evil, sickness, and self-destruction, and left behind lasting scars on those who dared to survive.From Publishers WeeklyThis feeble collection of nine horror stories opens with an untranslated chunk of medieval Italian, fair warning of Marano's fondness for self-conscious hyperallusiveness ("His voice was soothing and unsettling, like HAL's in 2001") that strains to impress rather than express. The two previously unpublished stories, "Displacement" and "Shibboleth," are the worst offenders: lacking discipline, the words run amok, a verbal wall against reader empathy. The others fare somewhat better. "Little Round Head" even makes an emotional connection thanks to its protagonist, a human child raised by animals. Mostly, the narcissistic narrators marinate in adolescent resentment and self-righteousness. Recurrent imagery and themes--eyes like stones, cigarettes, AIDS, monstrous women, abused children who grow up to wreak murderous havoc--dig a rut without ever gaining traction. (Nov.) (c) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistFew horror authors are better equipped to write about madness than Marano. With an expansive vocabulary, a tenacious commitment to poetic prose, and a willingness to follow whatever discursive paths his whim takes, Marano is an acquired taste—but without doubt possessed of a unique talent. He’s at his best when striving for clarity, as in “Displacement,” the novella that anchors this book of short stories. Dean is a serial killer describing the brutal justice he handed out to those whose emotional poisons gave him a deadly cancer. It’s a tale that takes several unexpected and delicious turns, somehow combining a Poe-like belligerence and a Clive Barker–like vividness with pop-culture touchstones as commonplace as Sex and the City and Dr. Phil. The other, mostly first-person stories are hit and miss, but when they hit, they hit big: “Burden,” about the ghosts of an AIDS-ravaged gay community, possesses an unusual power, and “Little Round Head,” about a feral child raised by subterranean beasts, is nothing short of a horror classic. --Daniel Kraus