Perdition: Stories

(Paperback)

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Description

Perdition,Brian Kubarycz's debut,is a collection where each story, linked or otherwise, focuses not on an action but on a single arresting image a symbol, in the Romantic sense of the terman ambiguous vision that emerges despite Kubarycz's determination to avoid anything which might appear merely sensational. While these stories are decidedly dark and moody, they are never crude nor morbid, and despite their darkness, they do not lack humor, though the laughter tends to come from the balconies. Not wholly noir, gothic, or horror, these stories curate qualities of each in the cultivation of a unified and pervasive atmosphere that is equal parts psychological and visceral. Sometimes crescendoing, at other times merely popping, each fiction results in what can only be qualified as terror, and the air in each is "filled with the very instant of it." Singular in theme and surprising in musicality, Perdition is a bright beautiful light that will entrance the reader while bearing down with the force of a train.

Reviews

"In prose both ecstatic and haunted, Kubarycz tears apart the known world to unveil the space stalked both by religion and selfhood that lies behind it. These are powerful, eccentric and visionary tales, the sorts of things that people tell one another around the campfire after days without food as they slowly go mad. An impressive, devastating first book." Brian Evenson, Good Night, Sleep Tight

Author Bio

Brian Kubarycz is a literature professor at the Honors College of the University of Utah. In addition to teaching and writing fiction, Kubarycz paints and exhibits visual art, and performs in various musical groups. His enthusiasm for the arts derives from two primary sources: physical mediums (whether India ink or guitars), and the practice of offering and receiving art within the social economy of the gift. He lives in Salt Lake City.