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Cemeteries of the Heart and Other Stories
Cemeteries of the Heart and Other Stories
Cemeteries of the Heart and Other Stories
Ebook129 pages1 hour

Cemeteries of the Heart and Other Stories

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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In a distant future, Stan works at a dead-end job, handcuffed to his desk, forbidden to look out the window. His life seems hopeless till he meets Meredith, a coworker who harbors secrets about this world and the next, secrets that could make his life worth living . . .

Thus begins Cemeteries of the Heart and Other Stories, eight mind-bending tales of madness. In “Aphelion,” we meet a man who receives strange messages through his laptop, messages that turn him into a creative genius and make time disappear; in “Parting Sorrows,” an old man has a fling with a sexy young girl he meets online, but there’s something strange about her; in “Flaming Butterfly,” a young man is abducted and forced into another world, where he becomes a slave.

In Cemeteries of the Heart and Other Stories, Grant Palmquist explores that elusive part of the mind where reality and insanity meet. These surreal, unsettling tales will leave their mark on you—permanently.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 3, 2012
ISBN9781476230481
Cemeteries of the Heart and Other Stories
Author

Grant Palmquist

Grant Palmquist is the author of the science-fiction novel Azure and four horror novels: A Song After Dark, Permanent Winter, Dirge, and The Seer. His short stories have appeared in Chizine, Dogmatika, and Underground Voices.

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Reviews for Cemeteries of the Heart and Other Stories

Rating: 3.62500004375 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

16 ratings8 reviews

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Read the first story "Cemeteries of the Heart" which is set in a futuristic dystopian world where people are shackled to their desks at work and don't have any concept of fun. Well written and made me sad.
    The second was "Lullaby" which is about a guy who loses his wife to childbirth. Another sad piece.
    "Parting sorrows" was about a girl with serious daddy issues and a lonely old guy. Seriously creeptastic!
    "Aphelion"-weird!
    "Burn Victims"- a girl without a nose and a guy without an arm find each other.
    "Flaming Butterflies"-is about a man who didn't live his life to the fullest and paid for it.
    "Stanley" knows Sabrina is perfect for him and he'll do anything to get her to actually exist!
    "Taenia solium",the pork tapeworm, will take over the human race!

    A good collection of stories that'll creep you out in the right way and you'll finish it in no time.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This collection of eight short horror stories is dark but very imaginative. I enjoyed reading them.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This collection of stories are all about what your heart desires most. Each story takes unique look at this very question. Mr. Palmquist is a creative and imaginative mind. The stories were haunting, rich, bold, and unique making this book a real page turner. I invite you to discover this for yourself in Cemeteries of the Heart and Other Stories.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A good collection of well developed original short stories. There are plenty of twists and turns in the stories. As in all collections, some stories are better than others. The ending of some stories are left to your imagination. I would recommend this book to all adult readers.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This author gets an A+ in originality. This book is a collection of short stories, horror stories, though not of ghosts and goblins. His writing reminded me of Amanda Lawrence Auverigne. The first story takes place in a dystopian society. Two of the stories include characters with physical deformities, and all of the stories feature an act of violence, some more obvious than others.I personally did not enjoy this book, but I think that it was well-written and creative. I would recommend it to adults and young adults, but not to middle-grade readers.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Wow!!!! I was blown away by this book of short stories by a very talented writer! I have read almost everything from this author and he is an up and comer for sure! I couldn't put this book down and read it in two nights! I really liked the flow of the short stories in this book and found the majority of them to be very solid! The horror in these stories was excellent. I found my self scared, disturbed, grossed out, shocked, laughing, cheering, and saying to myself...wow! I am definitely a Grant Palmquist fan for life!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Several short stories based on the humanly desire of the want and need for love and acceptance in life. Overall the stories had respectable ideas but a need to work out certain details and endings throughout.Cemeteries of the Heart – A tyrannical world with nothing to live for forces two people to come together and take action over their circumstance. The story is a bit unbelievable with random killings and rapes on the street. I think that in a tyrannical state that would not happen because in that state it is all about control over the citizens and when citizens take law into their own hands the outcome would be the same as the end of the story. Lullaby – A woman gives birth to a deformed child and dies in the process. The father of the child is left with the burden of raising a child but is haunted by his dead wife who wants him to kill the child. The child appears to be somewhat of a demon but there is no definitive answer to know what the child truly is. Who is after him and why? More substantial detail on where this story is headed and for what purpose is needed.Parting Sorrows – A story about a daddy’s girl who will do anything to keep her father with her even for a short time despite the cost. It would have been nice to have more information as to what happened to her father and how the transformation takes place between the two men. The anticipation of the story is sensed and gripping. Aphelion - A strange computer pop up leads a man on a journey that will take him back to an act he committed when he was younger and a settlement that he will not forget. A good idea but not clear as to what the computer pop up and the video that was made has to do with the sin that was committed years ago. Burn Victims - Two people who long for love but never seem to find it because of their deformity eventually find each other. The title is misleading because from the description of the characters I don’t know that either one is a burn victim or if they are there is no definitive description of them being as such. The story is predictable but complete.Flaming Butterfly - A man who has squandered his life is taken away by force to live in a place performing slave labor. If you are a productive citizen you can have a wonderful life, but if you are idle and selfish beware of what may come. The timing was off on this story; there was no sense in lapse of time and no point really to what the slaves were doing. What was the purpose of them being slaves other than that was their punishment.Stanley - A recluse man with a fetish for taking photographs of women’s torsos decides to take things a step further when an image of a woman he has fantasized about begins appearing to him. Opportunity presents itself and he takes advantage of the situation. The story could have had more depth to it with a more vivid feeling of anticipation. I wanted to feel afraid for the girl but there was no connection. Taenia solium - This story started out with potential but got sidetracked along the way. The story was not smooth in its transitions and the beginning strays far from the end.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It’s not just cemeteries of the heart. It’s hostels of the heart, rehab centers of the heart, hospitals of the heart. These are fantastical tales on the snares of love and sex – and the need and, in one tale, the well-nigh commandment to connect with fellow humans in intimate ways. They are also often tales on how circumstances and our innate natures frustrate that connection.Palmquist knows how to keep your interest even if he doesn’t always know how to adequately end his stories. He almost never diagrams an ending out for you. They’re usually ambiguous, elliptical, and require some thought. And, in a couple of instances, I don’t think the endings work even after contemplation.He’s also given to some stylistic tics. Windows are often “yellow squares”. Guns are usually 9 mms. Texas, usually Houston, is the frequent setting.The title story is set in one of those horrific extrapolations of our present day, ludicrous and implausible, and there to make an emotional point via metaphor and not provide realism. In a future Houston of such rampant street violence that the hero routinely sees rapes and killings every day on his work commute, Palmquist’s work hell has the hero literally shackled to his desk where, if he looks out the window or flags from his duties (randomly creating tax code, a satirical bit I found very amusing), his masked boss flogs him. Deserted by his wife and son, he, in the tradition of dystopian stories, becomes the lover of a co-worker.“Lullaby” was one of my favorite stories. Its hero must cope with being newly widowed – by the deformed son his wife died giving birth to. He begins to think the child has defects of the soul as severe as those of his body. Constant appearances by his dead wife suggesting he just kill the kid don’t help. Or, maybe, stress has rendered him paranoid and crazy.I think I understand what’s really going on in “Parting Sorrows”. The story certainly conveyed the loneliness and desperation of its 60 year-old narrator who goes to meet the 22 year-old woman he has been conducting an online affair with. The ending is horrific in images and action, if not entirely clear in motives and cause and effect. Still, I liked this one too.“Aphelion” has a narrator who is having fugue moments after he sees a popup on his computer screen, a popup a complete stranger in a bar says shows him pleasuring himself while being strangled by a man. The plot hinges on, for me, an effective conceit, but I think the ending is marred by an unnecessary coda, making it the most unsatisfying story here.“Burn Victims” is another story of desperately seeking love and companionship, here a man and a woman each in their own ways mutilated. It has its own fantastical elements but a resolution much different than the other stories.“Flaming Butterfly” seems, perhaps, a tale of existential terror or, more precisely, existential judgment by unknown forces. The protagonist is dragged out of his bed one day, told his life makes no contribution to life on Earth, and then dragged through a portal where he works as a shackled field hand. I’m not sure I quite understood the ending, but the image, themes, and idea behind the story will definitely stick with me and make this another high point of the collection.The narrator of “Stanley” claims that a childhood with his beautiful sister sucking away all attention has left him unable to relate to women. (Or so he sees it. He may not be the most reliable narrator regarding his sister. This book features several narrators with questionable powers of reporting and explanation.) To compensate, he takes pictures of women in public – but only from their kneecaps to neck – and constructs fantasy faces and personalities for them. He starts seeing one of these fantasy constructs in person.In a book of mostly horror stories, “Taenia Solium” is the most straightforward. As you would expect from the title (which refers to a type of tapeworm that infects humans), it’s about parasitism and also effective.There a higher than average number of memorable stories in this collection despite some problematic endings. If I was going to quickly convey a sense of Palmquist’s work, it would be a Thomas Ligotti style writer cut with a modern sensibility of specific settings and realism which concentrates on the need, recognized or not, to have others in our lives.

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Cemeteries of the Heart and Other Stories - Grant Palmquist

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