The West and Everything Above by Brendan Williams-Childs
The West and Everything Above by Brendan Williams-Childs
Winner of the 2019 OutWrite Chapbook Competition in Fiction. Selected by JY Yang. A 5”x5” chapbook. 62 pages.
“Williams-Childs has assembled a compelling collection of short stories dealing with themes of loss, entrapment and rebirth. Each story pivots around the haunting of a character: An abattoir worker struggles with her past as a farmer on Mars, a psychic sees a ghost attached to the mind of his dying father, and a young woman cannot shake the time she spent in a doomsday cult in Vegas. With vivid, deftly-wielded prose, Williams-Childs paints bleak yet relatable settings populated by unforgettable characters as they navigate their desires and marginalizations. I was hooked from the first sentence to the last.” — JY Yang
“It’s a difficult and often unsettling handful of stories, grim but with a resilience and determination to refuse the rigid structures imposed by the dominant culture and find a way forward embracing a universe where they can exist without compromise.” — Charles Payseur (full review)