Nightingale Songs by Simon Strantzas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Another fine collection of weird fiction from one of the most original voices in the field. Strantzas has been carving his own niche in the world of horror and dark fantasy for several years now, and he just gets better and better. Deeply influenced by Robert Aickman, Strantzas writes stories where the everyday is interrupted, often to devastating effect, by something beyond human understanding or explanation. This could leave readers who are looking for narrative cohesion, or indeed any sort of explanation for the supernatural horrors that befall Strantzas’s characters, feeling at a loss. Yet if you look closer you’ll see in those horrors the characters’ deep fears and long-repressed emotions made real. Strantzas’s fiction is routinely dark and rarely offers a happy ending — even rarer is any kind of return to the status quo of the everyday — but the imagination on display in his work is its own reward. This collection, like all his others, is well worth your time.
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