Shadows & Tall Trees, Issue 5, Summer 2013

Shadows & Tall Trees #5

by Michael Kelly (Editor), Gary Fry (Contributor), Claire Massey (Contributor)

The acclaimed literary journal Shadows & Tall Trees has featured authors short-listed for the Man Booker Award, and World Fantasy Award winners. Several of our stories have been reprinted in "Year's Best" anthologies and have garnered numerous award nominations. Of the journal, Peter Straub has noted: "Shadows and Tall Trees is a smart, soulful, illuminating investigation of the many forms and tactics available to those writers involved in one of our moment's most interesting and necessary projects, that of opening up horror literature to every sort of formal interrogation. It is a beautiful and courageous journal."

Genres: Horror, Short Stories

130 pages, Paperback

First published April 29, 2013

About the author

Michael Kelly is the Series Editor for the Year's Best Weird Fiction, and author of Undertow and Other Laments, and Scratching the Surface; as well as co-author of the novel Ouroboros.

His short fiction has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including All Hallows, Best New Horror, Black Static, Dark Arts, the Hint Fiction Anthology, PostScripts, Space & Time, Supernatural Tales, Tesseracts 13, and Weird Fiction Review.

Michael is a World Fantasy Award, Shirley Jackson Award and British Fantasy Award Nominee.

Reviews

[Forrest · Rating 4 out of 5]

I owe my writing career to the small press. My first story published in print appeared in the February 2001 issue of Indigenous Fiction. Since then, my work has appeared in over 50 venues, some of them prestigious or popular, but most of them in the small press universe (both literary and speculative). So, feeling nostalgic, I bought a copy of issue 5 of Shadows & Tall Trees. The cover art is amazing, and the submission guidelines rang a happy bell in my head, the kind that says "you just might like this".

Now, I've done a little editing here and there. I'm pretty keen on having a unifying theme or at least a unifying sense of atmosphere in the anthologies I edit (or have edited - it has been a while). Still, I understand that most anthologies and magazines are mixed affairs. As Stepan Chapman once said, remarking about Leviathan 3, "there's something for everyone to hate".

While I didn't truly hate any of the pieces in this (let's call it what it is) short anthology, it was a bit of a roller-coaster ride, in terms of quality. I was a little worried, at first, as the introductory story really didn't do it for me. "New Wave" gave too much away early on. Today, on NPR, I heard the writers of Breaking Bad extol the virtues of telling a story by what is not said. I tend to agree with them. Give the audience 2+2 and let them figure out it's 4. Unfortunately, this story seemed like it felt the need to explain everything. It gave me 4 - I'm giving it a 2, as in 2 stars.

"Casting Ammonites" was much more moody than the first piece. It left enough unsaid, building the skeleton of a story around the bones of dialogue between two characters, but leaving the meat of the narrative up to the reader's imagination. This helped create mystique that added to the brooding nature of this 4 star piece.

"A Cavern of Redbrick" telegraphed the ending way too early. Still, it was a decent story; 3 stars worth, at least. One note: A lot of these stories had children as either protagonists or narrators. Long ago, I was given advice by Jeff VanderMeer, with whom I was editing Leviathan 3, at the time. He said, in essence "never include children in your stories - it's too easy to rely on sentiment to get a response from the reader". I've only spurned that advice a few times (all of them here). It's good advice for you writerly types. Writing about children often slips into child-like writing, which is not good if you're not writing a children's book.

"Laudate Dominum (for many voices)" continued in the same sombre mood that pervades the earlier stories. Again, the author "telegraphed" a bit too much for my liking. As soon as the narrator stated that his milk was sour, the gig was up - I had a pretty good idea of what was coming. The surreal central conceit of the story, however, knocked me back on my heels. So, despite knowing that the narrator had been drugged, I found this an enjoyable, very creepy, 4 star story.

"Moonstruck," by Karin Tidbeck, was the jewel of the anthology. It is a brilliant piece of speculative absurdism that avoids becoming silly. I was reminded of one of my favorite authors, Italo Calvino, which is some of the highest praise I can give to a story. The main child character in this fable is held in check by her staid, logic-driven mother. By far the best story in the volume, and possibly worth the cover price alone. 5 enthusiastic stars!

"Whispers in the Mist" is a ghost story set on its head, a'la The Others. At least that's how I read it. It was more emotive than most pieces in this volume, but not super compelling. I liked it, didn't love it. 3 stars.

Interestingly, this volume of Shadows & Tall Trees contained a non-fiction piece entitled "A Woman's Place". This essay examines Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper in the context of fin-de-siecle feminism. It was an intriguing take on Gilman's story, with little substantiating evidence (in the form of cross-referenced sources). The reader in me enjoyed it, the trained historian bathed it in red ink. Still 3 star worthy.

"The Other Boy" continues in the child-as-central-figure vein. I really enjoyed the characters in this family ghost story, but it was a very slow read. 3 stars.

The volume closes out with "Widdershins," the story of an American expatriate in Ireland who finds himself enmeshed in the local scene a little more than he would have liked. This story is an excellent example of giving 2+2 to the reader. I give it 4 stars.

From a rough statistical viewpoint, the anthology rates a 3.44. But, given the absolutely stunning cover art and the fact that editor Michael Kelly can keep a theme (children) and an atmosphere (brooding and a touch sad) running strong throughout, I have to "cheat up" to a 4 star.

Seriously, you've got to read Tidbeck's story. Wow.

[Justin Steele · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michael Kelly has put together one hell of a weird fiction journal, and one I've been missing out on the last few years. Issue 5 of Shadows & Tall Trees was only recently published, and was good enough that I ordered every other volume.

Issue 5 has eight short stories and one non-fiction piece. Every story is at least good, with several being great.

The collection opens with New Wave by Gary Fry, a story about a father and son. After an accident in the ocean involving the wife, the husband and son move further inland to rural farmland. Gary Fry does a great job at showing a father falling apart at the seams when he can't help but be reminded of the ocean every time he looks at the swaying wheat field behind his house. The father's anxiety also gets worse when the son starts to see things, and the father fears his child may be suffering from the same mental deficiencies his mother was.

Claire Massey writes the shortest story in the book, weighing in at only five pages. Despite the short length, Casting Ammonites packs quite a punch. The narrator encounters a girl on the strange beach he lives on. Massey is an author I am not that familiar with, but after reading this story I will definitely be hunting more of her work down.

One of my favorites, if not my favorite, story in this collection comes from Richard Gavin. A Cavern of Redbrick is about a young boy who is spending the summer with his grandparents. His summer starts off like normal, with a bike ride to the local gravel pit, although this bike ride ends with a bizarre encounter that is the beginning of horrors for the boy. As usual, Gavin is excellent, and I found the ambiguity and the horror in this story to be tightly wound. I find that children as main characters work very well in the horror setting. The world children live in differs much from the world adults live in, therefore their fears can be very much different yet very much the same, yet they are open to so much more. A truly effective weird tale.

D.P. Watt is an author I recently became familiar with, and very much enjoy. Laudate Dominum (for many voices) is a good example of the author's talents. Watt takes a stuff-shirt protagonist, and puts him in an awkward social situation which takes a turn for the worse. This story is a great example of one of those stories that can make the reader laugh one minute, but freak them out by the climax.

Moonstruck by Karin Tidbeck is an excellent example of dark fantasy. A mother withdraws from her family in an unnamed foreign city as the moon leaves it's orbit and starts to slowly work it's way towards the Earth. The story is told from the point of view of the daughter, who thinks the whole thing might somehow be her fault. Tidbeck expertly delivers this melancholic tale.

Ray Cluley's story, Whispers in the Mist, follows a man heartbroken over his latest breakup. The man travels to where he believes is near her hometown to explore a local legend about a mysterious mist that brings with it the voices of the dead.

A Woman's Place is a great piece of nonfiction by V.H. Leslie, taking a look at topography and entrapment in Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper.

Daniel Mills is a young writer who continues to impress. The Other Child is an excellent story about a young man who becomes fixated on a strange childhood memory, and heads back to his childhood home where he finds the bizarre truth.

The collection closes with another standout story: Widdershins, by author Lynda E. Rucker. This story follows an estranged man having a holiday getaway at his friends' cottage. He starts to become fixated on a strange local legend about a gate in the woods, and accidentally unleashes something. It's a great story, classic weird horror at it's finest.

Originally appeared on my blog, The Arkham Digest.

[Paul Roberts · Rating 4 out of 5]

Michael Kelly has assembled a wonderful collection of subtle horror stories here.
Personal favourites:
"A Cavern of Redbrick" Richard Gavin
"Moonstruck" Karin Tidbeck
"The Other Boy" Daniel Mills
"Widdershins" Lynda E. Rucker

[Craig D.B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent issue, quite possibly my favorite of the run to date. The quality of these stories is uniformly high and the set encompasses a variety of styles and approaches to ghost stories and weird tales. Editor Michael Kelly has a fantastic journal going here and the only semi-bad news is that it will now be an annual anthology, leaving eager readers waiting a full year between issues. But he's doing it to preserve the viability of the publication and for that fans of the elegant dark tales he publishes should be grateful.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Afterward, when Father found her, and the moon had returned to its orbit, and the hill was empty, and everyone pretended that the city had been in the grip of some kind of temporary collective madness, Alia refused to talk about what happened, where Mother had gone. About Mother on the top of the hill, where she stood naked and laughing with her hands outstretched toward the moon’s surface. About how she was still laughing as it lowered itself toward the ground, as it pushed her to her knees, as she finally lay flat under its monstrous weight. How she quieted only when the moon landed, and the earth rang like a bell.

***

Shadows & Tall Trees is an annual journal of weird and dark fiction published by writer Michael Kelly. The Summer 2013 issue contains nine stories from a range of authors, each one exploring a more personalized response to typical horror genre tropes such as monstrous creations, ghosts, and death and loss in general.

In Gary Fry’s “New Wave”, the first story in the collection, a single father must address the possibility that his young son is presenting similar physical symptoms as his late schizophrenic wife. “A Cavern of Redbrick” by Richard Gavin is a ghost story expressed through a young boy’s eyes as he discovers the murderous truth about his grandfather’s extra-curricular activities. D. P. Watt’s “Laudate Dominum (for many voices)” is an unexpectedly disturbing tale of creation as a mad Mechanical Music Museum curator is caught harvesting human organs for the construction of a Frankenstein’s organ that emits human vocal sounds instead of base musical notes and tones.

Several of the more dominant themes make recurring appearances throughout the collection. Claire Massey’s “Casting Ammonites” and Ray Cluley’s “Whispers in the Mist” both deal with memories of love lost and/or forgotten, while Karin Tidbeck’s “Moonstruck” and Fry’s “New Wave” both deal with, in subtle and overt ways, issues of mental illness and fears therein.

The one non-fiction entry in the collection, V. H. Leslie’s “A Woman’s Place: Topography and Entrapment in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’” stands out as an intriguing deconstructionist look at women and their literal and allegorical positions within the horror genre. It’s especially prescient given the strong focus on mothers, daughters, female lovers, and their impact, even in absence, in the stories “New Wave”, “Casting Ammonites”, “Whispers in the Mist”, Daniel Mills’ “The Other Boy”, and “Moonstruck”.

Speaking of “Moonstruck”, Tidbeck’s entry is the strongest in the collection for the quality of the writing as well as the depth of its ideas and imagery. It shares the same fearful tenor as “New Wave”: an astronomer mother grows obsessed with the moon as it appears in the afternoon sky and gradually descends, coming closer and closer into contact with the earth. This strange event, which even more strangely has no ramifications to the planet’s tides, happens alongside the mother’s twelve-year-old daughter Alia receiving her first period. The layers in this story are obvious, but nevertheless effective: Alia’s mother’s inability to accept her daughter’s entry into adolescence, and with it her own impending inessentiality; Alia bidding farewell to her childhood and learning how to cope with life apart from her mother; and as previously mentioned, similar to the first story in this collection, there are unavoidable cues leading one to assume some form of mental illness is constricting the mother’s rational behaviour, pushing her away from her daughter as she enters womanhood instead of drawing her nearer. The ending of this story, which I’ve quoted at the beginning of this review, is far and away my favourite piece of writing in the issue.

Not every tale in the collection captured my undivided attention; I struggled to find a foothold of interest with “Casting Ammonites” and the final story in the collection, “Widdershins”, by Lynda E. Rucker. That being said, my first Shadows & Tall Trees experience is brimming with ideas and authors not afraid to take a soft-focus approach to otherwise predictable genre conventions. As mentioned in the Editor’s Note in the beginning of the journal, Shadows & Tall Trees is currently in a state of flux, and the format will be undergoing a shift from Issue 6 onward. Whatever its upcoming state of being, this is most certainly a journal worth checking out.

[Gef · Rating 4 out of 5]

Michael Kelly and Undertow Publications put out the latest issue of Shadows and Tall Trees a couple months back, a passion project that has garnered praise each time from some of the heavyweights in the realms of dark fiction. I managed to get my hands on a review copy of this fifth edition, and possibly the last in its present form, as it looks like S&TT is transitioning into trade paperbacks and e-book formats from now on.

Rather than strictly horror, the stories are quite diverse, spreading all over the realm of the weird. All of which displaying the quiet, literary bent that can go under-appreciated at times. Right off the bat, Gary Fry's "New Wave" reminded me why I needed to keep an eye out for this talented British author. The story of a grieving widower left to care for a psychologically stressed young boy, who may or may not be sharing in the same mental illness his late mother did, carried this striking balance of sympathy for the father coupled with dread over the scarecrow in the neighboring farm's field and how it relates to the sins of the father. Really good stuff.

Claire Massey's "Casting Ammonites" was barely a thousand words, if that, but packed a sizable punch, as did Richard Gavin's "A Cavern of Redbrick," which had a bit of a Bradburian vibe with its boy discovers a ghostly girl in a gravel pit that may be more than she lets on. Veering into something that might be more in Clive Barker's territory was D.P. Watt's "Laudate Dominum" and a wanderers encounter with a museum along a path that houses mechanical wonders with a musical bent--and the terrifying project underway by its caretaker.

Among the engrossing fiction was a bit of nonfiction too, in V.H. Leslie's "A Woman's Place," which served as an examination of a gothic novel called The Yellow Wallpaper. Gothic novels can be a bit hit or miss with me, all depending on the author I suppose, and it sounds like there's a weighty bit of storytelling going on in Perkins' novel. I may need to look out for that one.

I've helped myself to a steady diet of some rather raucous horror fiction recently, so the quiet horror depicted in the stories of this book served as a bit of a palette cleanser. If you're also a fan of dark fiction that likes to play with language and style, you're bound to get hooked by at least one of the tales in Shadows & Tall Trees.

[Karl]

This being issue 5 of an annual publication contains:

5 - Editors Note - Michael Kelly
7 - New Wave - Gary Fry
25 - Casting Ammonites - Claire Massey
29 - A Cavern of Redbrick - Richard Gavin
43 - Laudate Dominum (for many voices) - D.P. Watt
59 - Moonstruck - Karin Tidbeck
71 - Whispers in the Mist - Ray Cluley
89 - A Woman's Place (non-fiction) - V.H. Leslie
95 - The Other Boy - Daniel Mills
107 - Widdershins - Lynda E. Rucker
121 - Contributers

[Erin Cole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shadows and Tall Trees have some of the best horror writers around. This is rich, subtle, and classic horror. These stories aren't about shock; they're about the kind of scare that sneaks up on you when you least expect it, or the kind of dread that grows in the mind after reading. Atmospheric, but modern. Chilling and original. Pick up an issue today.

[Chrystal Hays · Rating 4 out of 5]

Slim volume with short stories which pack a punch. One essay. This is the first time I have read from this series/ journal, and I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I didn't want to put it down.
Some more psychological than supernatural.

The Claire Massey piece feels like a sequel to another haunting story by a different author to me, but it clearly is not. It captures the same feeling, which I like.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

3* to 5* varying resonance, from ‘well-written, but heard it before’ to ‘didn’t see that coming’. D.P. Watt is a personal favorite, and his contribution did not disappoint. Short, but highly satisfying collection.

[Lewis Housley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved these stories and the critical analysis piece in the middle was a fantastic addition. I am very excited that I found Undertow Publications because they put out consistently wonderful stuff.

[Chris Riley · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent collection of weird tales. Both creepy and largely pastoral, this odd mixture kept in place an atmosphere and tone worthy of its genre.

[Ross Warren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another faultless selection of stories by Editor Michael Kelly. The two stand-out tales amongst them both play with the readers assumptions to twist recognisable scenarios; Ray Cluley's 'Whispers in the Mist',a lost hiker in the woods tale just being edged out by Daniel Mills' gut-wrenching tale of a ghostly drummerboy, 'The Other Boy'.

The replacement of reviews, which had appeared in previous volumes, with a piece of non-fiction is a brilliant decision and V. H. Leslie's piece on 'The Yellow Walpaper' is wonderful.

Shadows and Tall Trees has been a wonderful journal and with its expansion to a larder, annual, anthology format can only become even more essential for the discerning reader of short fiction.

[Lou Sytsma · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read every volume of this small press collection that Michael Kelly has put out and this horror series continues to explore the themes of alienation and loss. This volume includes stories by Ray Cluley, Gary Fry, Richard Gavin, Claire Massey, Daniel Mills, Lynda E. Tucker, Kin Tidbeck, and D.P. Watt.

There are several great tales here with the standout being Moonstruck by Karin Tedbeck which has a Gaimanesque quality as the moon gets closer and closer to earth. Other tales range from the sublime - Casting Ammonites by Claire Massey to the outright horrific - Laudate Dominium (for many voices) by D.P. Watt.

As Peter Straub is quoted on the cover - 'A beautiful and courageous journal.' I agree and will continue to follow the journey Michael Kelly is charting with it.

[Carlos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Save for one story, all of the stories in this collection are well-written haunting works of weirdness.

[Micah · Rating 5 out of 5]

A well-curated journal. Some of the best, most affecting short stories I've read.