Review | Greener Pastures by Michael Wehunt (Apex Back Catalog Book Tour)

This review is part of the Apex Back Catalog Book Tour to celebrate books published by the Apex Book Company. While it’s always exciting to read new books, there are plenty of backlist books deserving of attention! Greener Pastures by Michael Wehunt is one such example. Published in 2017, this is a short stories collection that is elegant, unnerving and poignant.

You closed your eyes against the scuttle of fingernails across the ceiling. When I was gone the room hung in quiet.

Greener Pastures lulls you into a sense of calm, placing the characters in mundane situations before moving the pieces and revealing hidden depth. These stories are as frightening as they are beautiful. The writing is brilliantly poetic but not too verbose that it loses its impact. The words are used to great effect to give you a shiver at just the right moment. There are no jump scares here but a subtle, mounting dread.

There are images that are hard to forget after reading this book. Like a figure covered in bees, the night time setting at a roadside diner, the slow walk into an abandoned house, the rise of a red-painted building, the flash of a movie projector. The mind-bending, fantastical elements of the stories make you wonder if you’ve missed something, so you go back and read them again. But the answers may not always be there. Only the images remain.

Loss is a recurring theme. Both A Discreet Music and Bookends feature grieving men; the former experiencing an inexplicable physical transformation and the latter on the brink of an irreversible act. A Thousand Hundred Years is about a father searching for his missing daughter, his pain palpable even as his livelihood is threatened. The dark side of familial relationships also features in these stories. Onanon looks at a mother’s secret; The Devil Under The Maison Blue looks at a broken home, Dancers looks at a fractured marriage. A particularly enjoyable pick is October Film Haunt: Under The House, a nightmarish twist on found footage horror films.

What I loved about these stories is that while they can be bleak, many of them are also hopeful. The characters are complex, at the cusp of immense change as they go through difficult times. But there’s always a sliver of hope hanging in the background. It made for a satisfying reading experience. The author provides Story Notes at the end and I really appreciate the background information into each story! Greener Pastures is an excellent debut and I can’t wait to read more of the author’s work.

Looking for a copy of Greener Pastures? Good news, Apex is offering 25% off on all their books throughout the month of September! Use the discount code SEPTEMBER at check out. Click here or the banner below to start shopping. Happy reading!

About the author: Michael Wehunt

Photo by Alexander Filonchik