The Measure of Sorrow
Stories
Shirley Jackson Award-winning author J. Ashley-Smith’s first collection, The Measure of Sorrow, draws together ten new and previously acclaimed stories of dark speculative fiction.
In these pages a black reef holds the secret to an interminable coastal limbo; a father struggles to relate to his estranged children in a post-bushfire wilderness; an artist records her last days in conversation with her unborn child; a brother and sister are abandoned to the manifestations of their uncle’s insanity; a suburban neighbourhood succumbs to an indescribable malaise; teenage ravers fall in with an eldritch crowd; a sensitive New Age guy commits a terminal act of passive-aggression; a plane crash opens the door to the Garden of Eden; the new boy in the village falls victim to a fatal ruse; and a husband's unexpressed grief is embodied in the shadows of a crumbling country barn.
Intelligent and emotionally complex, the stories in The Measure of Sorrow elude easy classification, lifting the veil on the wonder and horror of a world just out of true.
J. Ashley-Smith is a British-Australian author of dark speculative fiction and co-host of the Let The Cat In podcast. His short stories have twice won national competitions and been shortlisted seven times for Aurealis Awards, winning both Best Horror and Best Fantasy. His first book, The Attic Tragedy, won the Shirley Jackson Award. His novella, Ariadne, I Love You, is available now from Meerkat Press. J. gathers moth dust in the suburbs of North Canberra, tormented by the desolation of telegraph wires.
