The Shivering Ground & Other Stories

By Sara Barkat

Subjects: Science fiction, alternate universes, American Ecofiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Gothic fiction, FICTION / Magical Realism, Alternate universe, Ecofiction, Fiction, gothic, Fiction, science fiction, short stories, Science fiction, fantasy, horror, Fiction, science fiction, collections & anthologies, religion and quantum physics, Magical realism in literature, Philosophy and aesthetics, Fiction, magical realism, Extinct birds, American Science fiction, queerplatonic, qpr, weird fiction, queerplatonic relationships, Fiction, science fiction, general, Fairytale Retellings: Sleeping Beauty, Fiction, short stories (single author), Quantum physics, Queer literature, Psychological Horror fiction

Description: The Shivering Ground & Other Stories is a National Indie Excellence Awards finalist, a collection of weird fiction with a steampunk aesthetic. In "The Door at the End of the Path" a young girl discovers her parents' secret in their gothic house with a garden behind it... in "Conditions" a man with Frankenstein-ian aspirations gets a visit from his twin sister, who tells him about the disappearance of her ex-lover. "The Eternal In-Between" details a narrator's dream during the plague, while "The Mannequin" explains a medical procedure that involves taking out one's heart. "Brianna" retells Sleeping Beauty with a dark twist, and "Noticing" is post-apocalyptic fiction about a man and an alien creature obsessed with extinct birds, stuck on earth during the end of it all. "Entanglement" tells the story of love between two soldiers, and "The Day Before Tomorrow" tells the story of friendship between two young girls in an ordinary suburb, that is being slowly eaten away by a vastness of char and bones. "It's Already Too Late" is a fatalistic group of people's response to the changes in their world, and "The Shivering Ground" creates a narrative between a guard and their winged captive in a post-war city, intertwined with music. "A Universe Akilter," the collection's only novella, a love story in epistolary format, tells of the meetings, through dreams, between a failed playwright and a young painter who live in different dimensions.