Title: Stone Gods

Author: Adam Golaski

Release date: February 3rd, 2024

*Huge thanks to John at NO Press for sending me a digital copy of this one!*

Recently I read Adam Golaski’s collection ‘Worse Than Myself’ which was released back in 2008 by Raw Dog Screaming Press. That collection was dark, mysterious and at times super weird, which, when done right, can really tick my boxes when it comes to short stories. Not long after I posted my review, John from NO Press contacted me to see if I’d be interested in reading Adam’s newest collection, which I readily agreed to. I’m always mystified by authors who have almost no social media presence other than readers sharing their books or the publisher posting about them. It feels like back before the internet was around and books came upon your reader radar organically and not algorithmically. 

What would Golaski deliver this time? I had no idea, but I was game for whatever he was about to throw my way!

What I liked: Much like ‘Worse Than Myself,’ the stories within this collection can be described as Ligotti meets Lynch. Despondent, bleak, dreary and ultimately devoid of sun, throughout each story grew heavier and heavier, as though a block of cement was continuously added to my back as the collection progressed.

Stand outs for me were;

‘Hushed Will Be All Murmurs’ – the opening story in the collection was very close to my favorite one here. It follows two men, potentially at the end of the world, who row a boat out into the fog and slowly go crazy while one tells the other a story. As someone who has always been scared of fog, this one had me unnerved from the first paragraph.

‘Stone Head’ – my favorite story in the collection, a man comes home, ready to prepare dinner for his wife and child who are returning from a trip, when he discovers a large, stone head in his back yard. From there, madness consumes him, a dystopian jungle sprouts up all around him and things that may or may not be his wife and child come home. This one paired really well with my favorite story from ‘Worse Than Myself’ – ‘The Man From the Peak’ – in that nature played a large roll in the smoke screen over reality and the main character continually questioned his own sanity. Outstanding story.

‘Holy Ghost’ – this one, much like the other two I mentioned, featured a man going insane, but this one utilized a very different manner to have this occur. ‘Holy Ghost’ is a strange band that sporadically releases albums. It’s a cause for celebration and when our main character gets a call from his local record shop that a new ‘Holy Ghost’ CD has arrived and is on hold for him, he races down to grab it. Then he meets a woman, who at first he thinks he’s seducing, but also wonders if she’s seducing him. Until he’s sitting in his car, body paralyzed and his mind begins to break. Fantastic.

Golaski has a way of immediately unsettling the ready, of telling a story from the beginning as though through a funhouse mirror where even the sentences themselves appear wavy and the reader struggles to digest what’s being projected.

What I didn’t like: As is often the case, some stories just didn’t click with me. Some of that is down to the ‘weird’ elements, that cross very close into Bizarro territory, a genre that I either get or don’t, and some of the stories either started strongly before taking a strange turn or simply were weird from the start and stayed that way.

Why you should buy this: Golaski occupies a section of dark fiction storytelling where the prose and the delivery are masterful but are written for a very specific group of readers. Much like how Ligotti and Zelenyj craft their stories purposefully, the reader must consume them purposefully, and for that reason, Golaski surely must be considered one of the masters of that subsection. 

Like a rain cloud that only remains over a singular person on a sunny day, ‘Stone Gods’ is dark, dismal and ultimately a collection that’ll leave a mark on every reader who consumes it.

4/5