Gifts for the One Who Comes After

Author: Helen Marshall
Genres: Collection, Dark Fantasy, Horror
Publisher: ChiZine Publications
Publication Year: 2014

Ghost thumbs. Microscopic dogs. One very sad can of tomato soup . . . Helen Marshall’s second collection offers a series of twisted surrealities that explore the legacies we pass on to our children. A son seeks to reconnect with his father through a telescope that sees into the past. A young girl discovers what lies on the other side of her mother’s bellybutton. Death’s wife prepares for a very special funeral. In Gifts for the One Who Comes After, Marshall delivers seventeen tales of love and loss that cement her as a powerful voice in dark fantasy and the New Weird. Dazzling, disturbing, and deeply moving.

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Awards

World Fantasy Award for Best Collection (Winner)
Shirley Jackson Award for Best Collection (Winner)
British Fantasy Award for Best Collection (Short-list)
Bram Stoker AWard for Best Collection (Short-list)
Aurora Award for Best Collection (Short-list)
Sunburst Award (Long-list)
Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize (Long-list)
Edge Hill Short Story Prize (Long-list)

The National Post

“Marshall is a master at  bizarre, myth-infused scenarios that play on a reader’s subconscious in ways creepy and oddly pleasurable.”

What the Critics are Saying

"Helen Marshall is one of my favorite living writers. Her elegant, grotesque stories are best encountered like this, gathered together in a book and in conversation with each other; only then can you appreciate the staggering variety of her imagination. What unifies them, and what elevates them from being merely great fantasy to being literature, is the ache of human experience that informs them all: the yearning; the heartbreak; the desperate, misinformed love. This is life, in all its beauty and sorrow."
Nathan Ballingrudaward-winning author of North American Lake Monsters
"Helen Marshall uses the fantastic to pry her way inside her readers’ ribcages and break us wide open."
Neil GaimanAuthor of Ocean at the End of the Lane
"Gifts For The One Who Comes After should single out Marshall as one of the most accomplished writers of the fantastic being published today, an exceptional collection likely to be among the best 2014 has to offer."
". . . Marshall is a master at  bizarre, myth-infused scenarios that play on a reader’s subconscious in ways creepy and oddly pleasurable. "
". . . As she proved in her 2012 debut, Hair Side, Flesh Side, Marshall is a master at  bizarre, myth-infused scenarios that play on a reader’s subconscious in ways creepy and oddly pleasurable. Gifts For The One Who Comes After extends this practice with a suite of tales that employ tropes borrowed from Gothic and Grand Guignol traditions, viewing quotidian reality through a distorted lens that exaggerates angles and shadows, making the real unreal or, at the very least, surreal."
The National PostRead the Review
"Marshall is a masterful storyteller. … Her writing comes across as honest, and fearless, qualities which elevate her writing into the topmost tier of weird fiction being written today. . . . This is a must have collection for fans of weird literature, and is easily one of 2014′s best books."

Gifts For the One Who Comes After