Celestial Inventories

By Steve Rasnic Tem

Twenty-two genre-bending short stories of the strange and surreal from the Bram Stoker, World Fantasy, and International Horror Guild Award–winning author.
 
Steve Rasnic Tem is the celebrated author of award-winning horror novels and short story collections such as Blood Kin and City Fishing. But the stories featured in Celestial Inventories showcase his ability to defy genre with imaginative works of the fantastic. These stories cross conventional boundaries between science fiction, fantasy, horror, literary fiction, bizarro, magic realism, and the new weird.
 
Many of these stories have been lauded, appearing in Best of the Year compilations and receiving major Fantasy or Science Fiction nominations and awards. Others are collected from rare chapbooks, anthologies, and obscure magazines. And these previously published works are joined by a new story written specifically for this volume.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781771481663

Steve Rasnic Tem

Steve Rasnic Tem is a winner of the Bram Stoker, World Fantasy, and British Fantasy Awards. He has published five hundred short stories in his decades-long career. Some of his best are collected in Thanatrauma, Figures Unseen, and The Night Doctor & Other Tales. You can find him at www.stevetem.com.  

Reviews for Celestial Inventories

[andreablythe · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This collection was a mixed bag for me, some stories blowing my mind with their beauty and lyricism and others not grabbing my attention at all. On the whole, however, I would say that those stories that were wonderful outweighed those that were not as much (for me).My favorite story of the collection was the first, "The World Recalled," whichtells the story of a man's life backwards through a series of surreal vignettes. The man witnesses (or imagines) a tree of keys, a kitchen table that tells very odd time, a ladle for stirring better perspective into the daily news, a colander hat, and other odd objects. "He kept telling his nurse to keep the closet door closed: incremental weather was hiding among his old coats and pants, and he certainly didn't want any of that slipping unnoticed into his room" (from "Closet Weather").This focus on ordinary objects made strange or wonderful is clear in several of his stories, including "When We Moved On," in which an elderly couple choose to leave behind their home filled with object-bound memories, and the title story, "Celstial Inventory," in which a man closes himself up in an apartment and begins to make an inventory of everything within.Another theme I found fascinating was the exploration of art and what it means through very dark mediums. In response to world that is virtually disease free, an artist puts his body through the pain and suffering of a variety of diseases as a kind of performance art in "The Disease Artist." Meanwhile, in "Head Explosions," terrorists are causing people's heads to explode, but instead of dying, the people continue to live with grotesquely rearranged heads in floral and other graphic designs, which the narrator takes as a kind of art. And a beautifully mournful explorations of capturing a family's final moment with a lost loved one is presented in "The Bereavement Photographer."I also enjoyed a couple of the fairy tale Tem presents. "Little Poucet" is a dark noir retelling of a classic tale and it one of the most disturbing stories I've ever read, in all the best ways. In "The Woodcarver's Son" a father's tears fill a house while his wife haunts it, forcing the son goes to a local witch seeking a cure for his father's sorrow.