Greener Pastures

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 AppalacMichael Wehunt hians 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