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.
