The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature - by Christopher Slatsky (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

From the author of Alectryomancer and Other Weird Tales comes this devastating collection of fifteen stories and essays. A father's desperate search for his missing child leads to a cosmic haunted realm. A woman returns to her childhood home to find a past preserved in a semblance of life. A young man and his canine companion find themselves in the heart of an occult government exercise deep within a Pacific Northwest forest. An elderly man is subject to mysterious experiments as he descends into dementia. And, in the title novella, a forensic anthropologist is called to the site of the mass suicide of an anti-natalist cult intent on communicating with Nature.

Review Quotes

"Slatsky, more than any writer I know, has an ability to fathom human pain in a way that neither dismisses it or dilutes it but rather shows the way pain opens us all up to the inhuman. A powerful book of stories, each of which tears off the face of the so-called real in a different, alarming, enlightening way."
--Brian Evenson, author of A Collapse of Horses and Song for the Unraveling of the World

"Displaying a remarkable variety of formal innovation, the pieces collected in The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature slice through the conventions of daily existence to the profound and terrifying absence undergirding it. In the best tradition of Ligotti and [Nicole] Cushing, Slatsky's work wrestles with the void, to produce an art uniquely his."
--John Langan, author of Sefira and Other Betrayals and The Fisherman

"The sense of loss in these stories is profound but balanced by a powerful yearning for wonders sublime and ineffable. Whether grotesque, conjuring dread and horror, or plunging the reader's imagination into the fantastic, the strangeness never feels forced and seems innate to the writer. With The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature, Christopher Slatsky embeds himself among the best writers of the contemporary North American Weird Tale."
--Adam Nevill, author of The Ritual and The Reddening

"The gritty landscapes and detailed, hallucinogenic transformations in these extraordinary stories are somewhat reminiscent of Ramsey Campbell's work, but Slatsky's journeys lead us into weird visions even more darkly grotesque as his characters walk that delicate line between madness and illumination. The sensibility here as he explores the ineffable qualities of nature and our place within it (as just another animal) evokes the best of Algernon Blackwood, but through the lens of characters caught in downward spirals of grief and despair. Few writers of weird fiction go as dark as Christopher Slatsky."
--Steve Rasnic Tem, author of Ubo and Deadfall Hotel

"A book of dreams and lamentations. Slatsky writes powerfully of absence, of grief, discovering cosmic horror in the agony of loss and a kind of bereavement in cosmic despair. Throughout The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature, stories of human tragedy become windows to an empty universe. The view is at once sobering, inspiring, and profoundly sad."
--Daniel Mills, author of Moriah and The Lord Came at Twilight