All Your Friends are Here

November 1, 2024
Shaw's new short-story collection (after the novella One Hand to Hold, One Hand to Carve, 2022) makes for a surreal reading experience that is humorous and creepy in equal measure. "Roots in the Ground" begins with a search party encountering a group of naked people in the freezing cold in what the narrator assumes is a tree orgy but later learns is something much more sinister. Shaw continues his fever-dream compilation with fascist deer who race humans; vampiric, centaur-like cars and erotic fantasies; dead-beat dads in spaceships; rich men in space selling Earth to aliens; and a Pok�mon-like game app that isolates players with impossible yet mundane tasks. "Ready Player (N + 1)," a brand-new novelette, takes on the original title by Ernest Cline to reveal a toxic, tech-bro, gamer culture and its exploited, none-the-wiser clientele. Although all the tales are different, they're tied together by the author's straight-to-the-point, tongue-in-cheek narrative style. The exciting new voice delivers a fresh take on horror and will appeal to fans of T. Kingfisher, Grady Hendrix, and Jason Pargin looking for lighter, spooky reads.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

October 7, 2024
The 13 stories in this eerie collection from Shaw (One Hand to Hold, One Hand to Carve) explore the unnerving and grotesque with glee. In “Roots in the Ground,” a man deliberates on inviting his estranged daughter to spend Thanksgiving with him after a creepy experience in the woods involving an entity that reminded him of his daughter’s childhood imaginary friend. “Go with the Flow” centers on a construction worker with a bionic arm who grapples with the limits of his own body after an ill-advised tryst with a married client goes bloodily awry. Woodland prey animals have taken control of the world in “Man vs. Bomb,” forcing humans into a sadistic game of survival in which they must run from one another or be detonated by explosives. “My Dad Bought a Space Shuttle” follows a trans teenager whose father’s eccentric new hobby has not actually made life any more fulfilling. Shaw’s loose, easy style fits the stories like a glove, and the collection does an admirable job of taking the tales’ premises to their logical conclusions, even if they have a tendency to pull back at the last minute and leave things feeling slightly unfinished. Fans of new weird horror will want to check this out.