Peter Stenson received his MFA from Colorado State University in 2012. His first novel, Fiend, was an Amazon Best Book of the Month for July 2013. His stories and essays have been published in The Bellevue Literary Review, The Greensboro Review, Confrontation, Blue Mesa Review, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and daughter in Denver, Colorado.
With his second novel, Stenson proves to be a more articulate, more
empathic, and more intelligent version of Chuck Palahniuk.
Stenson's sentences devastate, and his characters are nuanced and
warm ... A book that manages to break your heart, make you dizzy,
and punch you in the gut all at once. You will be hard-pressed to
find a novel as dark or intense in any bookstore.
-Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Unnerving but
spellbinding...Stenson's brilliantly vivid prose and striking
characters deserve the widest possible audience.
-Booklist (starred review) An eerie, complex, and unsettling
portrayal of a traumatized teen caught between the brainwashing
tenets of a self-destructive cult and the more common
indoctrination into mainstream society's expectations...A
provocative, thoroughly gripping ride.
-Publishers Weekly (starred review) Engrossing and brutal...For
fans of the more anarchistic works of Chuck Palahniuk, as well as
those who value the brutal honesty and grittiness of Hubert Selby
Jr., there is no greater talent than Stenson. As a writer, his
maturity and intellect dwarf Palahniuk and his lyrical beauty in
the face of unspeakable violence and emotional torment hearken back
to the most impressive novels of Selby, including Last Exit to
Brooklyn and The Room--Michigan Quarterly Review An intense,
exceptionally well-made, unforgettable book. ... Meticulously
constructed, Hitchcockian in its layering of tension, Faulknerian
in its network of ideas, wise and strange as an angel, black as a
night in a dungeon. Certainly one of the best books I read in 2018.
... Stenson has written a small, dark miracle of a book. ...
Incisive, absorbing, persuasive, and impossible to forget.
--3am Mason is a great guide into the deep, disturbing dark, and
things do get very, very dark. Be careful. Once you pick this one
up, you'll loathe to put it down, so set some time aside. Stenson
is a great talent, and one of the best-kept secrets in
transgressive fiction, and fiction in general. Hopefully that won't
be the case for very long.
--Criminal Element Stenson has a knack for creating characters who
are on the verge...I definitely haven't read anything like this in
the genre, or even at all. This book may be a bit
unclassifiable--it slants toward the horror aesthetic, but why put
it in a box? I want to put this one in everyone's hands--start a
little Survivors cult of my own.
-Shelf Stalker Uneasy but engaging...Writing is extremely engaging,
with clever uses of rhythm, repetition, and other musicality that
give portions of the story a songlike feel. ... Thirty-Seven is
uncomfortable, disturbing, and impossible to put down.
-Foreword Reviews
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