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In Los Angeles, the stars were below. Everything above was just a poorly lit backdrop.
I don't believe in destiny. I don't really believe or even like the idea that life knows what's better for me better than myself. Existence is chaos and I take pleasure in choosing as many variable of my own personal maelstrom as I can. So, when destiny shoots an arrow my way, I like to believe I catch on pretty quick. When I first laid eyes on the cover of T.E Grau's debut short story collection THE NAMELESS DARK, I recognized the inspiration and knew right away it would be special. The title, the Lovecratian themes and the black metal inspiration of the cover lead me to believe it would be true, standout horror and it's just what I was served. I would've taken a couple refills if I could've.
Another standout short story collection in 2015, who would've though, right? Not every story in THE NAMELESS DARK is a home run, some are too Lovecraftian to have an existence of their own, but most of them are hits and whenever T.E Grau knocks it out of the park, he leaves you feeling it in your bones. My favorite story in THE NAMELESS DARK is titled Transmission, where a man is rolling through the Nevada desert, listening to a religious radio broadcast and letting his mind wander about the history of the place. It's a rather simple concept, but it gets terrifying quite fast because its originality and unpredictability. I assure you that story isn't going anywhere you're familiar or comfortable with.
Fortunately for us readers, there are other stories in THE NAMELESS DARK that hit almost as hard as Transmission. Return of the Prodigy is a story about a religious couple vacationing in Hawaii and being swarmed with Godless symbols The subtlety and the ambivalence of this story really makes the reader himself unsure if he's reading too much into what he's seen. T.E Grau makes him share the paranoid panic of its protagonists. Several other stories are worth the admission price too: The Screamer, Expat and Tubby's Big Swim from the top of my head, were all what I would qualify of home runs. The Screamer is a bit of a calling card for THE NAMELESS DARK if I understood correctly. It has a nice existential edge to it, which is an important variable of T.E Grau's horror.
"There is beauty and horror here, wisdom and madness, and I have drunk deeply of it all. Will you do the same?"
The man went silent. Lightning licked the sky. Max, again feeling the car close in around him, began to wonder if this was merely a one-way conversation.
"Will you?" the voice asked again.
"Me?" Max answered.
"You," the voice continued, as if in confirmation. "Will you do the same?"
The signal wavered and buzzed, then faded into fuzz again.
What makes T.E Grau's horror stand out from the pack is that Grau understand one tiny little detail that other horror writers don't: horror is a feeling of unspeakable terror and helplessness you trigger in your audience's mind. It can have many faces, take any means necessary to get there, but it's a lot more efficient if you keep your audience guessing. The characters of T.E Grau all question their sanity in good Lovecraftian fashion, unsure if they are losing their mind or if reality is collapsing around them. What gives Grau's fiction an identify beyond its Lovecraftian inspiration is its blissful ambivalence: you never TRULY know either. You too are in the nameless dark.
T.E Grau is a powerful and majestic new voice in horror fiction. I know that I should read him in long form before making such claims, but if Grau decided today to only write short fiction for the rest of his natural life, I sincerely believe he would be bound to succeed anyway. THE NAMELESS DARK is what horror is all about. There are no easy, gimmicky stories in the collection, just tales that'll crawl up your spine and keep you in a state of complete terror. T.E Grau is an author that doesn't take shortcuts or easy decisions in his writing and that gives his fiction a strong and powerful sense of identity. If you're looking for new and original horror stories, don't miss out on this one.
