Sharply strange and eerily
familiar. Absurdly funny and terrifyingly serious. Surreal, fantastic,
gritty, real. The stories in Matthew Cheney’s Hudson Prize-winning debut collection range across various styles, modes, genres, and tones as
they explore the worlds of family, love, memory, and loss.
Children play through a war-torn world; a mother seeks to communicate with a dead child; a man is drawn to a mysterious destiny in the far
reaches of Maine; a historian tries to reconstruct a lost New York
history; Ronald Reagan founds a religion and hides a love; a daughter
tries to find her place in a family of men with guns.
Blood: Stories reprints work originally published in such different venues as One Story and Weird Tales, and it includes four new stories that travel from contemporary New
Hampshire to historical Prague to might-have-been Mexico to a future
world where no reality stays real for long.
Reality flows through these stories, even at their most surreal and
lyrical, because reality is more than just what is or even what might
be: reality is whatever gets beneath our skin and into our blood. The
pages of Blood: Stories not only take an axe to the frozen sea within us — they make a course for the heart.
Praise:
- “Blood is a magnificent collection — raw and real, yet also elegant and mischievous. Rooted in a sense of place, but yearning for a world beyond, the stories in Blood chart heartbreak, solitude, and
adventure in equal measure. It’s rare to read fiction with such depth
that’s also so entertaining. One of my favorite reads of the past year.” — Jeff VanderMeer, bestselling author of the Southern Reach Trilogy
- "Matthew Cheney has long been one of the most astute and
eloquent presences on the literary web, and now he reveals himself to be a fiction writer of equally high abilities. Some of the stories in
Blood are informed by science fiction or fantasy, some by literary
criticism, some by postmodern experimentation, and all of them by his
own keen intellect, adventurous hand, and broad yet exacting sympathy." — Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Brief History of the Dead
- "Whether Matthew Cheney is writing in strange, dream-like worlds redolent of Kafka and Calvino, or in more recognizable worlds
where every moment seems to breathe heavily with the air of reality, his stories are pumping the blood of the human heart, fast and hard and
necessary. Read these stories and bleed." — Christopher Barzak, author of One for Sorrow and Wonders of the Invisible World
