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Onion Songs

by Steve Rasnic Tem
Publication Date: 13th Mar, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-907681-21-9
Paperback, 370 pages

Onion Songs is a collection of 42 short stories spanning the writing career of Steve Rasnic Tem, with an emphasis on the bizarre, the off-beat and the meditative. Here Tem confronts the big questions of human experience (ageing, death, identity, relationships) like a collector digging deep in the clutter of an attic and pulling out only the most unexpected and most telling finds.

His style tersely poetic, Tem is able to give fine reproductions of the texture of everyday life while writing with all the invention of unrestrained nightmare. The mindscapes contained here, where circus clowns cling to meaningless office jobs, skeletons fall like snow, ‘true unicorns’ rummage in garbage piles, and fires are liable to break out at any moment, first engage us deeply where things ache most, then compel us to keep reading with a beauty that, for all its strangeness, we finally recognise as human.

Contents

1 Onion Song
2 The Sadness
3 The Messenger
4 The Hijacker
5 Out Late In the Park
6 Picnic
7 Doodles
8 Strands
9 Night: the Endless Snowfall
10 Archetype
11 The Hunter Home from the Hill
12 Shoplifter
13 Brain of Shadows
14 Attached
15 The Rifleman, the Cancerous Cow, and the Swedish Memorial Hospital
16 Jungle J.D.
17 Cats, Dogs, & Other Creatures
18 How to Survive a Fire at the Greenmark
19 Minimalist Biography
20 Sometimes I Get Lost
21 The Changing Room
22 Charles
23 The Figure in Motion
24 The Glare and the Glow
25 Slapstick
26 Strangeness
27 Off the Map
28 Unknown
29 Saturday Afternoon
30 A Visit Home
31 The Multiples of Sorrow
32 Fish
33 Merry-Go-Round
34 The Green Dog
35 A Dream of the Dead
36 Saturday
37 Aphastic World Syndrome
38 December
39 The Mask Child
40 Shuffle
41 12 Minutes of Darkness
42 An Ending

About The Author

Steve Rasnic Tem was born in 1950 in Jonesville, Virginia, in the heart of Appalachia. His short fiction has been compared to the work of Franz Kafka, Dino Buzzati, Ray Bradbury, and Raymond Carver, and his 200 plus published works have garnered him a British Fantasy Award, World Fantasy Award and a Bram Stoker Award. Previously published books include Excavation (1986), City Fishing (2000), Daughters (2001) (with Melanie Tem), The Far Side of the Lake (2001), The Hydrocephalic Ward (poems) (2003), and Deadfall Hotel (2012).

What People Say

“Steve Rasnic Tem is a school of writing unto himself.”

Joe R. Lansdale