[title]
[message]Greener Pastures
by Michael Wehunt
Cover art by Michael Bukowski
ISBN 9781937009540
Pp. 238
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They say there are always greener pastures. These horror and dark fantasy stories by Michael Wehunt consider the cost of that promise.
From the round-robin, found-footage nightmare of “October Film Haunt: Under the House” to the jazz-soaked “The Devil Under the Maison Blue,” selected for both The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror and Year’s 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 poet’s eye.
Table of Contents
- "Of Insects, Angels, and People Too Tired to Go On" (Introduction) by Simon Strantzas
- "Beside Me Singing in the Wilderness"
- "Onanon"
- "Greener Pastures"
- "A Discreet Music"
- "The Devil Under the Maison Blue"
- "October Film Haunt: Under the House"
- "Deducted From Your Share in Paradise"
- "The Inconsolable"
- "Dancers"
- "A Thousand Hundred Years"
- Bookends
- Story Notes from Michael Wehunt
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 wood smoke, 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 O'Connor on his favorite bookshelf. His fiction has appeared in various places, such as The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, The Year's Best Weird Fiction, Cemetery Dance, and The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu.
Reviews
"If you’re looking for a short story collection to become completely immersed in, Greener Pastures will do the trick. You will devour it, albeit more slowing, as every single story commands your undivided attention. If you’re a horror fan, this is an absolute must read for you. This book will challenge what you think you know about this genre."
—Nightworms
"The stories here are all signs of a talent that is ready to go. Everything is polished and tight. Not a single story feels like filler and they all have shared thematic threads, grief in particular. A collection worthy of your time that will provide a satisfying experience."
—PopCult
"Michael’s tales have that natural appeal of a deeply felt lived life of a man who sees into things. His tales have the seduction of folk lore and strange days, of the voice of story rising out of the black loam of a hidden America that is riddled with the lost souls, misfits, eccentrics, and broken keepers of our darkening and decaying country of forgotten dreams and terrible secrets. And, yet, there is deep and abiding love and emotion in his utterance of our worst nightmares, a desperate quest for transformation and change, and an openness to the unknown wonders of a frail universe that does not frighten so much as seduce us to enter its dark harmonies. Then there’s the grief of the inconsolable that follows one’s days like a dead woman who will not go away but haunts one’s flesh like the 'slow drip of living' in a world in which the 'nights black and the days flat and you can hardly care'."
—The Dark Fantastic
Excerpt
From: "Besides Me Singing in the Wilderness"
Sissa died last year, just shy of our hundred and thirtieth birthday. I ain’t talked much to folks since, excepting Mr. Pearl. Me and Sissa was both childless. But I’ve shook it off and traveled such a long way at my brittle age. I’ve come home to this nameless mountain pouring blood from its bowel.
Mr. Pearl stands beside my wheelchair watching the bloodfall. It’s closer to a trickle now, whether through time clotting some wound or through holes in my memory I can’t be sure. I’m humming snatches of hymns Sissa and me made up in our girlhood. Mr. Pearl takes this last chance to ask my age—he’s been mighty curious these last two decades—and I tell him. He gives a sly look, then whistles and says he thought I was at least forty years younger. I say thanks but that’s still old as bones. He laughs, though it’s a laugh with a shiver inside.
This far up in the Georgia wilderness you can near enough spit clean into North Carolina. The air smells of recent snow and pine and spruce. It still seems a quiet land, but when I was a child any folk in these mountains was little more than a mote in the world’s eye.
I spent just shy of a month here. Sissa and me had just turned seven and shared one button-eyed doll between us. Mama moved us nearby after Daddy got crushed under a locomotive down in Atlanta. We was supposed to start afresh in the new township Mama’d heard tell of. They had plans of a lumber mill down at the mountain’s foot and a town hall and even a school for us little ones. Such life that would’ve bustled not half a mile from where I’m sitting withered in this chair.
But it wasn’t long before somebody found the bloodfall. It spewed forth in them days. A man called Jessup come tearing into the village, what had of late been christened Adepine, his mouth dripping red. Two of the elders had to put him down with buckshot. Folk set out to find what it was he’d got into and within days there was screams tearing at the trees and settlers strung dead across the mountainside, Mama among them. Winter of 1889. I don’t recollect the exact date. I miss Sissa fierce, but there’s times I can’t hardly remember Mama. Faces from before the blood are swallowed up.
Mr. Pearl looks down at me, and I see the place eating at him. The smile on his lips is that of a starved wolf. His glasses like new pennies in the blood’s glare. I can’t say what it is bleeding in that rock, but I know how it pulls at you. A magnet tugging at the meat in your head. How the taste of iron gets in your throat and makes you powerful thirsty.
So I dismiss him before he can step over to the pool. I’ve left him the money I got from all six of my husbands, for he’s done fine by me. Never was I in want of better caretaking. He carted me four hundred and some-odd miles from Charlottesville, even pushed me the last few of them. He’s reluctant to leave, but with a troubled “You take care now, Miz Alma,” he starts picking his way back down to the car.
A slow hush falls. The pool stains its rim of snow and the land presses around me. It is bitter cold.
I tip forward and unfold myself. The wheelchair rolls back along the flattened ground. I ain’t been upright in a pile of blue moons but already I feel those decades shedding like dead skin. All the same it’s a passing notion. My heart still sags with time as ever it did.
And there’s other folk up here, off around the mountainside but getting closer. I can feel them in my joints. Some are bound to stumble across this pocket of the world now and again, I suppose. Even in the deep of winter, toothless as it is this far south. Lord, don’t let them find this place. Though I reckon I’m wasting my breath on that one. Seems the Lord ain’t listened to my voice in an age, if ever He did.
I hole up in the log shack, inside the trees a ways from the clearing. It’s a ruin of a thing, much like myself, and it was here when I was but a child. After so many years, the soil must be mystified that either the shack or me still stands upon it.
I heft this plastic jug and knock its lid off. Mr. Pearl had to tote it up here because just hours ago I surely couldn’t have brought it off the floor. Still I rest a while before I start drinking Sissa’s life. Soon my belly’s fit to bust and I need to prepare for the coming day. Sleeping’s one of the few things I got in common with regular folk so it’s long been precious to me. I go over to the bed. Sorry thing looks as if it’s been used by every critter under the sun. One more won’t hurt.
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- Description
- Table of Contents
- About the Author
- Reviews
- Excerpt
They say there are always greener pastures. These horror and dark fantasy stories by Michael Wehunt consider the cost of that promise.
From the round-robin, found-footage nightmare of “October Film Haunt: Under the House” to the jazz-soaked “The Devil Under the Maison Blue,” selected for both The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror and Year’s 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 poet’s eye.
- "Of Insects, Angels, and People Too Tired to Go On" (Introduction) by Simon Strantzas
- "Beside Me Singing in the Wilderness"
- "Onanon"
- "Greener Pastures"
- "A Discreet Music"
- "The Devil Under the Maison Blue"
- "October Film Haunt: Under the House"
- "Deducted From Your Share in Paradise"
- "The Inconsolable"
- "Dancers"
- "A Thousand Hundred Years"
- Bookends
- Story Notes from Michael Wehunt
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 wood smoke, 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 O'Connor on his favorite bookshelf. His fiction has appeared in various places, such as The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, The Year's Best Weird Fiction, Cemetery Dance, and The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu.
"If you’re looking for a short story collection to become completely immersed in, Greener Pastures will do the trick. You will devour it, albeit more slowing, as every single story commands your undivided attention. If you’re a horror fan, this is an absolute must read for you. This book will challenge what you think you know about this genre."
—Nightworms
"The stories here are all signs of a talent that is ready to go. Everything is polished and tight. Not a single story feels like filler and they all have shared thematic threads, grief in particular. A collection worthy of your time that will provide a satisfying experience."
—PopCult
"Michael’s tales have that natural appeal of a deeply felt lived life of a man who sees into things. His tales have the seduction of folk lore and strange days, of the voice of story rising out of the black loam of a hidden America that is riddled with the lost souls, misfits, eccentrics, and broken keepers of our darkening and decaying country of forgotten dreams and terrible secrets. And, yet, there is deep and abiding love and emotion in his utterance of our worst nightmares, a desperate quest for transformation and change, and an openness to the unknown wonders of a frail universe that does not frighten so much as seduce us to enter its dark harmonies. Then there’s the grief of the inconsolable that follows one’s days like a dead woman who will not go away but haunts one’s flesh like the 'slow drip of living' in a world in which the 'nights black and the days flat and you can hardly care'."
—The Dark Fantastic
From: "Besides Me Singing in the Wilderness"
Sissa died last year, just shy of our hundred and thirtieth birthday. I ain’t talked much to folks since, excepting Mr. Pearl. Me and Sissa was both childless. But I’ve shook it off and traveled such a long way at my brittle age. I’ve come home to this nameless mountain pouring blood from its bowel.
Mr. Pearl stands beside my wheelchair watching the bloodfall. It’s closer to a trickle now, whether through time clotting some wound or through holes in my memory I can’t be sure. I’m humming snatches of hymns Sissa and me made up in our girlhood. Mr. Pearl takes this last chance to ask my age—he’s been mighty curious these last two decades—and I tell him. He gives a sly look, then whistles and says he thought I was at least forty years younger. I say thanks but that’s still old as bones. He laughs, though it’s a laugh with a shiver inside.
This far up in the Georgia wilderness you can near enough spit clean into North Carolina. The air smells of recent snow and pine and spruce. It still seems a quiet land, but when I was a child any folk in these mountains was little more than a mote in the world’s eye.
I spent just shy of a month here. Sissa and me had just turned seven and shared one button-eyed doll between us. Mama moved us nearby after Daddy got crushed under a locomotive down in Atlanta. We was supposed to start afresh in the new township Mama’d heard tell of. They had plans of a lumber mill down at the mountain’s foot and a town hall and even a school for us little ones. Such life that would’ve bustled not half a mile from where I’m sitting withered in this chair.
But it wasn’t long before somebody found the bloodfall. It spewed forth in them days. A man called Jessup come tearing into the village, what had of late been christened Adepine, his mouth dripping red. Two of the elders had to put him down with buckshot. Folk set out to find what it was he’d got into and within days there was screams tearing at the trees and settlers strung dead across the mountainside, Mama among them. Winter of 1889. I don’t recollect the exact date. I miss Sissa fierce, but there’s times I can’t hardly remember Mama. Faces from before the blood are swallowed up.
Mr. Pearl looks down at me, and I see the place eating at him. The smile on his lips is that of a starved wolf. His glasses like new pennies in the blood’s glare. I can’t say what it is bleeding in that rock, but I know how it pulls at you. A magnet tugging at the meat in your head. How the taste of iron gets in your throat and makes you powerful thirsty.
So I dismiss him before he can step over to the pool. I’ve left him the money I got from all six of my husbands, for he’s done fine by me. Never was I in want of better caretaking. He carted me four hundred and some-odd miles from Charlottesville, even pushed me the last few of them. He’s reluctant to leave, but with a troubled “You take care now, Miz Alma,” he starts picking his way back down to the car.
A slow hush falls. The pool stains its rim of snow and the land presses around me. It is bitter cold.
I tip forward and unfold myself. The wheelchair rolls back along the flattened ground. I ain’t been upright in a pile of blue moons but already I feel those decades shedding like dead skin. All the same it’s a passing notion. My heart still sags with time as ever it did.
And there’s other folk up here, off around the mountainside but getting closer. I can feel them in my joints. Some are bound to stumble across this pocket of the world now and again, I suppose. Even in the deep of winter, toothless as it is this far south. Lord, don’t let them find this place. Though I reckon I’m wasting my breath on that one. Seems the Lord ain’t listened to my voice in an age, if ever He did.
I hole up in the log shack, inside the trees a ways from the clearing. It’s a ruin of a thing, much like myself, and it was here when I was but a child. After so many years, the soil must be mystified that either the shack or me still stands upon it.
I heft this plastic jug and knock its lid off. Mr. Pearl had to tote it up here because just hours ago I surely couldn’t have brought it off the floor. Still I rest a while before I start drinking Sissa’s life. Soon my belly’s fit to bust and I need to prepare for the coming day. Sleeping’s one of the few things I got in common with regular folk so it’s long been precious to me. I go over to the bed. Sorry thing looks as if it’s been used by every critter under the sun. One more won’t hurt.

Greener Pastures