Terrible Things
"These are horror stories with soul."
“Each of the stories contained within Terrible Things is a small treasure to be marveled at. David Surface unpicks the seam of humanity to reveal the necrosis of our terrible secrets – the harms we visit upon one another, the lies we tell – but also that quiet hope that beneath it all there might still be something worth saving. Compassionate, astute and beautifully crafted, these are horror stories with soul.”
––Laura Mauro, author of Sing Your Sadness Deep
––Laura Mauro, author of Sing Your Sadness Deep
“Suffused with atmosphere, populated by horrors half-seen and then, in startling moments of revelation, seen all too clearly, David Surface’s stories stay firmly rooted in ghost story tradition. But where those oddly comforting classical terrors bubble up from grief or loss or regret or revenge, the menaces in Terrible Things sprout from a disturbingly contemporary sense of bewilderment. These are the ghosts of lockdown drills and frayed marriages, identity confusion and forced retirement and that constant crackling hum of a world tilting out of true, and therefore new and now and terrifying all over again.”
––Glen Hirshberg, author of the Motherless Children trilogy
––Glen Hirshberg, author of the Motherless Children trilogy
“David Surface is like no one else. His fiction has a precision of detail that is always unsettling, and often heart-breaking. One of our greatest contemporary writers.”
––Ralph Robert Moore, author of Ghosters and Father Figure
––Ralph Robert Moore, author of Ghosters and Father Figure
“David Surface’s first short story collection is a reason to rejoice for all lovers of disturbing, off-beat, and ghostly fiction. Well-written and multi-layered, these stories are unpredictable in the best possible way: the author doesn’t allow the cliches of the genre to dilute his own personal vision. Put simply, these stories are some of the very best weird fiction has to offer.”
––James Everington, author of Trying To Be So Quiet and Other Hauntings
––James Everington, author of Trying To Be So Quiet and Other Hauntings
“Knowing very little of the man aside from the warmth and intellect reflected in his fiction — and how his aesthetic has affected me — I’ve come to gain a sense that Mr. Surface, as a writer, operates like a war-torn combat medic. In the trauma unit of tale-telling, David Surface is unable to supply too many precious answers, rather he provides verbal sutures to the damaged and heart-sick, patching us up the best he can.”
––Clint Smith, author of The Skeleton Melodies
––Clint Smith, author of The Skeleton Melodies
