The Endless Fall and Other Weird Fictions

efferey Thomas is pretty famous in the realm of Weird fiction. Among his most popular creations is Punktown, a city on a distant planet where hundreds of extraterrestrial races try to survive amid class struggles, social alienation and gruesome body horror. The stories in The Endless Fall are not part of the Punktown Universe, though they all share many stylistic themes with that grim, starry city.Thomas’ tales are a parade of phantasmogoria. There are whispers all along the edges, hints of what’s really going on. But the story leaves it to the reader to piece together the truth behind the skein. There are strong veins of Lovecraft throughout these works, but also the dream-like mysteries of Richard Lupoff or Clark Ashton Smith.Thomas’ protagonists are lost souls. Whether pushed to the edge of society, alienated form loved ones, or simply choosing to live alone and aloof, they are oarless boats slowly drifting into strange seas lit by the corpse-lights of alien dreams.The stories in this collection are:Jar of MistsA quiet tale about a bereaved father trying to understand why his estranged daughter killed herself. Was it to escape this world? Or to find another?Jar of Mists is set near the otherworldly Sesqua Valley of fellow horror author, W. H. Pugmire. the Valley is a place somewhere on the West Coast of North America, but not quite in the same time and space as the rest of our world.The DogsA recurring theme of Thomas’ works is a character remotely viewing a nightmarish future Earth destroyed by unfathomable alien horrors. In this tale a man uses magical formulae to see the unsettling evolution of humanity’s canine companions in a world where their masters and mistresses have long ago died off.Ghosts in AmberMy personal favorite story. A haunting, beautifully weird tale of cobwebs, ballooning spiderlings, abandoned factory and fossil tree resin (or maybe it’s something more). As I said, Thomas’ stories are often dream-like and give only a few hints as to what is actually happening. This story is an especially good example. There’s much more going on than the reader sees, but the full nature of that larger reality is left to the mind’s invention.The ProsthesisThomas (that’s the name of the protagonist, not the book’s author) works in a factory that manufactures medical prosthetics- including prosthetic fetuses for women who have suffered a loss. Thomas himself lost someone himself when he was just an infant- his twin brother Mason. And lately Thomas has been smuggling supplies home from work.The Dark CellIn the 1890s a young woman named Rose is sent to prison in Yuma, Arizona for killing her abusive husband. While there, she gets into a fight with an angry, bitter girl. As punishment for causing trouble, both of them are sent to a small, cramped cell in a lightless cave beneath the prison. The pit is meant to be a place to cool off, but the darkness brings out ancient, savage things that have been held down by the light of day.Snake WineA former boxer from Australia runs a bar and brothel in Vietnam. One day a young woman brings him a bottle of snake wine-a classic Vietnamese liquor for virility. But the creature pickled inside the bottle is like no serpent he’s ever seen. It’s pale and pink with little vestigial limbs like an amphisbaena lizard or, so he jokes, a baby dragon.The SpectatorThey just appeared one day. Mannequins colored black as empty space. They appeared in seemingly random places in people’s homes all across the world. Immobile, unresponsive. Watching. What are they here for? And why has one suddenly appeared in the nursery of the narrator’s long-dead daughter?Bad ReceptionAnother tale of a lonely man getting a glimpse of the cosmic horrors of the far future. A Korean war vet starts seeing strange visions on his TV, possibly a result of the weird frequencies he’s been picking up from the plate in his head.Sunset in MegalopolisA bit of an odd duck in this anthology. A superhero from the Golden Age of Comics has been trapped by his arch-nemesis in a stasis field for thousands of years. When he is at last released, he finds himself in a bizarre Paradise inhabited by creatures that maybe, possibly, were once human long ago- though they have been modified to the point of being unrecognizable as such. Falling back into old habits, the time-displaced protagonist tries to be a hero to these beings. But their minds are so alien to his that he may be doing more harm than good.Portents of Past FuturesThe nude body of a young woman is found in a vacant city lot next to a series of weird street-art murals. Detective Sloane has to figure out who she was and also why she’s soaking wet when there’s no water anywhere nearby. And what does that old woman who lives across the street know?Those AboveIt’s been a long time since Those Above erupted from another dimension and enveloped the world in a dull gray sky of interwoven intestine-like tentacles. Hind is a worker in a factory that processes and renders bits of Those Above that fall to Earth. He makes blocks of gelatin that mortals stick their heads into at night to keep the monsters out of their dreams. He does a good job, but something about the company just doesn’t feel right.The Individual In QuestionThe Individual in Question has endured...something. Some sort of massive supernatural event. He cannot remember what it was exactly. Only vague impressions. But the event has left him physically altered in a most unsettling way.The Red MachineLeslie is a frustrated artist working in a boring job where she gets no respect. To keep her sanity, she needs to create. At first it’s just sardonic, grisly cartoons that she hangs on the company bulletin board. But something dark is pushing around inside her. Compelling her to collect old junk- cardboard sheets, picture frames, old televisions, skulls. Compelling her to assemble them into a contraption that will give her frightening powers.The Endless FallIn the titular story an astronaut awakens in his space capsule to find he has crash-landed on a planet in the midst of deepest autumn. He can’t remember who he is or why he was even in space, let alone where he is now. Nor does he know the nature of those huge black pyramids coasting through the sky overhead.

"Their sentience is so far-reaching, so complex, so unfathomable, that it is as though we are without sentience by comparison."I've noticed that in the past few years Jeffrey Thomas has moved away from horror a little in the direction of sci-fi/weird. Not that he was ever a pure "horror" writer, he's always stood on multiple genres and surfed with them hard and fast. He's still thrashing the waves, fear not, but his focus here is more on oddball twist endings and freaky ideas than trying to scare you. Though he still does that in some of these stories. Another thing that comes through seems to be what I guess the writer is like, though I hate to presume anything. These stories are filled with people who are pretty cynical and kind of tired of the people in the world, not really nihilists, but guys that look into the abyss and are just kind of like, "Aw, to hell with it, I guess I'm going to bed."We start off with "Jar of Mist," and the first sentence in in a morgue, haha. Very cool story about a kind of magical misty stuff literally in a jar that takes people somewhere.... The description of the shop reminded me a little of Steven Millhauser, anyone like him too? He also rules."The Dogs" is about a guy who gets to see the future of the world as it, of course, dies, via the special occult placement of strings and drawings on his wall. As a big fan of dogs, the last two sentences really pull my heart strings, hahaha!"Ghosts in Amber," was a story I'd heard about before, maybe it was published as a chapbook or something, but I hadn't read it. This story was kind of gloomy, like a lot of the others in this collection. I was left a little puzzled by this one, but it shows that, for some reason, the writer knows a lot about shoe factories. ????"The Prosthesis" is a wonderfully messed up story about prosthetic body parts and... babies, heh heh. Again, how does he know so much about these factories?"The Dark Cell," kind of western story, with a woman stuck in dark not-quite-solitary confinement with something that's probably a demon. Kind of Laird Barron-ish in tone."Snake Wine" seems like it was a pretty reasonable train of thought from someone who took a look at funky Southeast Asian moonshine and thought, what is that?"The Spectators" was one of my favorites in this collection, weird, alien simulacra start appearing all over the world, apparently to watch one particular person. They absolutely interact with nothing. What the f...."Bad Reception" reminds me of the days when I grew up in East Texas in just precisely the wrong area to get a solid tv signal from anywhere, and I used to wonder if something was being transmitted and I just didn't get it. This story was fun and scary, it reminded me of Night Shift-era Stephen King, which is a good thing."Sunset in Megalopolis," almost pure comic book fantasy with the typical Jeffrey Thomas alien unease thrown in."Portents of Past Futures" is Jeffrey Thomas in noir detective mode, which I wish he'd do a lot more of. Scary story about a things murdering people who mess with a particular mural."Those Above" reminds me a little of another story he wrote that was probably the best story in Autumn Cthulhu, the short "After the Fall," I think that was the name. And also "The Spectators," in this volume, now that I think of it. What would the world go through if, you know, mysterious alien things just showed up, and they weren't exactly attacking, but you knew there was nothing good about them. This was a strange steampunk setting, something he doesn't do a lot, but which worked pretty well here."The Individual in Question" is more like a scene from a story, or an idea for a bigger one. Very cool, he should expand on this."The Red Machine," oh man this one freaking kicked butt. A woman into making oddball artwork installation type things accidentally creates a piece that actually does something. Another favorite, seems pulled straight from the same animal the best cuts of the Twilight Zone were made from."The Endless Fall," my favorite. I can't even tell you why it's my favorite without ruining the story. But it has this sentence: "He made the decision to only eat the young man."

I'm a huge weird fiction fan, and a regular follower, of the Lovecraft eZine podcast, so I was quite excited when I heard that Mike & co. were going to be releasing this. Jeffrey Thomas is an author I've been meaning to read for a long time now, and after reading his brother's work and catching a couple of his stories in anthologies I knew I wanted to get on board with his work...but with such a huge range of publications it was hard to decide on a jumping on point.This proved to be a fantastic proper introduction to Jeffrey's work, and I enjoyed every second of it. I'll be going back to start from the first Punktown collection next, and I'll work my way through from there. I could give a detailed breakdown of what you'll find within, but I think it's sufficient to say that the work here is all worthy of your time if you are even remotely interested in weird or horror fiction.Everybody should show Jeffrey, and by extension the Lovecraft eZine, some love and purchase this.

Jeffrey Thomas is an outstanding teller of tales who can express inner fears and insecurities in the shape of external things and events. This collection contains several exhibits of his work, where urban horror and dark fantasy combine to create a claustrophobic atmosphere. Slowly the author takes us down that grisly rabbit-hole as one of the protagonists.And the fall doens't end!Only two stories here contain a redemptive finale. They were "Jar of Mist" and "Sunset in Megalopolis". Remaining dozen stories were dark and cruel— the way we have come to view ourselves.I would not consider this as suitable for these depressing post-covid times. But the collection is definitely readable.Recommended, for some other times.

The Endless Fall is another great collection from the man who brought us Punktown. The stories are original and well-written, with a flowing style that doesn't get lost in Lovecraftian language like a lot of his contemporaries. It's very much worth the price of admission.

Uma coletânea de contos bizarros, estranhos e cativantes. Pra quem tem facilidade em ler inglês, e gosta de estórias curtas, vale cada centavo!

As above, not a bad read but nothing that really shocked or amazed me and I will probably forget fairly quickly. But still not bad!