Reviews

"Smith is a real find, an elegant stylist with an imagination that's unsettling, paranoid, gruesomely funny at times, and startlingly original. He's written one of the scariest sex scenes I've ever read, but he can even make vacuuming your own house seem scary."--T.E.D. Klein, author of Providence after Dark and Other Writings"In his compelling sophomore collection, Clint Smith dives deep into his characters' psyches, unearthing the histories, the mysteries driving them toward horrors visceral and cosmic. His stories make reference to the work of John Cheever, of George Orwell, and his fiction displays the same attention to style, to grace and elegance of expression, which distinguishes the writing of those writers. In Smith's work, carefully rendered portraits of daily existence open into the weird and terrifying. There are images of body horror in these pages that would not be out of place in the early films of David Cronenberg, and there are evocations of vistas immense as any in the work of Machen and Klein. With these stories, Smith solidifies and extends the gains made in his first collection, and leaves us eager for another."--John Langan, author of Sefira and Other Betrayals"Smith's affect is a pendulum that swings from the classical and the mannered into his own vision of contemporary darkness; a darkness that conceals all sorts of hazards. The Skeleton Melodies is a splendid collection brimming with viscerally elegant horrors."--Laird Barron, author of Worse Angels