In his striking debut collection, Greener Pastures , Michael Wehunt shows why he is a powerful new voice in horror and weird fiction.
From the round-robin, found-footage nightmare of βOctober Film Haunt: Under the House β to the jazz-soaked βThe Devil Under the Maison Blue,β selected for both The Yearβs Best Dark Fantasy & Horror and Yearβs Best Weird Fiction , these beautifully crafted, emotionally resonant stories speak of the unknown encroaching upon the familiar, the inscrutable power of grief and desire, and the thinness between all our layers. Where nature rubs against small towns, in mountains and woods and bedrooms, here is strangeness seen through a poetβs eye.
They say there are always greener pastures. These stories consider the cost of that promise.
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Review
"Michael Wehunt's Greener Pastures is a wonderful collection of quietly creepy tales that are mature and smart enough to let their effects linger. An impressive debut. Just stay away from that house where your favorite weird horror movie was filmed, okay?"
--Paul Tremblay , author of A Head Full of Ghosts and Disappearance at Devil's Rock
"With Greener Pastures , Michael Wehunt creates visions of creeping dread and transfiguration that lift a trope-heavy genre into the realm of existential poetry. There are things in here I've never seen before, some of which I devoutly hope to never see again. The stories thus collected trace a journey through the heartland of an America that's unfamiliar yet primordially recognizable, stripped down to its red-soaked roots and bones--the squirming heartstrings of a nation founded by heretics and outlaws, in all its irreligious ecstasy. Occasional spasms of regret and terror aside, you'd kick yourself for not coming along."
--Gemma Files , author of Experimental Film
"Moving through landscapes rendered with a poet's precision, the characters in Michael Wehunt's compelling stories confront deep mysteries of the self and the world. In the process of plumbing the unremembered and the unknown, Wehunt's characters undergo transformations catastrophic and sublime, occasioned and spurred by their growing contact with the hidden portions of themselves and their surroundings. Wehunt skillfully invokes the history of horror fiction and film even as he is at work crafting the genre's future, in one of the more remarkable debuts in recent memory."
--John Langan , author of Sefira and Other Betrayals
"Weird, emotionally complex, Kafkaesque, dread-filled: I might apply all these terms and more to Michael Wehunt's collection Greener Pastures. It's one of the finest debuts I've read in years. Wehunt understands that true strangeness comes out of the personal, and that true horror is what happens during the complex interactions between real human beings. Greener Pastures is outstanding work."
--Steve Rasnic Tem , award-winning author of Deadfall Hotel and Blood Kin
"A deft and subtle collection of terrors, full of precise observations and chiseled language, and shot through with genuine dread. Michael Wehunt's Greener Pastures strikes me as how it must feel to be watching a sunset and suddenly realize you're being bitten all over by something you can't see, softly at first, and then harder and harder as whatever it is realizes you can't move. These tales have a remarkable, almost pastoral sense of calm at moments, which lulls the reader and makes their disturbances all the more palpable."
--Brian Evenson , author of A Collapse of Horses and Last Days
"The stories in Michael Wehunt's collection, Greener Pastures , move from quietly tender to coldly vicious effortlessly, like the gentle breeze of a fall before hitting the jagged rocks below. These stories are united by the author's beautiful mastery of evocative language and darkly elegant imagery. Whether bathing in blood falls, listening to ghosts reveal terrible secrets hidden in the insides of jazz, to the monstrous footprints of a beast carrying inconsolable sorrow, Greener Pastures is a virtuoso performance of everything there is to love in dark fiction."
--Bracken MacLeod , author of Mountain Home and Stranded
"As though sprung from the forehead of Zeus, Michael Wehunt has come abruptly onto the scene with the seasoned maturity of a veteran. His stories are lighted way-stations in the dark and unnavigable territory between the beautiful and the horrific. If he's this good now, I can't wait to see what he has in store for us in the future."
--Nathan Ballingrud , author of North American Lake Monsters
About the Author
Michael Wehunt grew up in North Georgia, close enough to the Appalachians to feel them but not quite easily see them. There were woods, and woodsmoke, and warmth. He did not make it far when he left, falling sixty miles south to the lost city of Atlanta, where there are fewer woods but still many trees. He lives with his partner and his dog and too many books, among which Robert Aickman fidgets next to Flannery OβConnor on his favorite bookshelf.
His fiction has appeared in various places, such as The Yearβs Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, The Yearβs Best Weird Fiction , and The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu. This is his first collection.