My story, Grooming my Grandfather, will appear in the next edition of Vastarien. Though of course the events of this weird story are not in any way related to facts of real life, it remains very personal to me, and I am grateful to Jon Padgett and the Vastarien team for selecting it.
Preorders are available here, and I note that the price for the kindle and epub editions are “pay what you can”, which is very generous in these strange and difficult times.
Each passage he entered in the book both enchanted and appalled him with images and incidents so freakish and chaotic that his usual sense of these terms disintegrated along with everything else. Rampant oddity seemed to be the rule of the realm; imperfection became the source of the miraculous — wonders of deformity and marvels of miscreation. There was horror, undoubtedly. But it was a horror uncompromised by any feeling of lost joy or thwarted redemption; rather, it was a deliverance by damnation. And if Vastarien was a nightmare, it was a nightmare transformed in spirit by the utter absence of refuge: nightmare made normal.
Thomas Ligotti, “Vastarien”
Nobody is looking 