Perdition - by Brian Kubarycz (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Perdition is the debut collection from Medieval scholar Brian Kubarycz. Conjuring dread without the jump scares, each story focuses not on an action but on a single arresting vision. In "The Bends," a hunting expedition devolves into a disorienting search for a lost woman, while in "Buckets," human bodies fall from the sky.

These stories are dark and moody, but despite their darkness, they do not lack humor, though the laughter tends to come from the balconies as in "Denomination," where a true believer seeks salvation by swallowing scripture and corn whiskey.

Frightening and cerebral, these stories create an atmosphere that is equal parts psychological and visceral. Each fiction results in what can only be qualified as terror, and the air in each is "filled with the very instant of it." Singular in theme and surprising in musicality, Perdition is a bright light that entrances the reader, but also the monstrous things lurking behind the light in the grim dark.

Review Quotes

In prose both ecstatic and haunted, Kubarycz tears apart the known world to unveil the space stalked both by religion and selfhood that lies behind it. These are powerful, eccentric and visionary tales, the sorts of things that people tell one another around the campfire after days without food as they slowly go mad. An impressive, devastating first book. - Brian Evenson, Good Night, Sleep Tight

Just as Poe's narrator lured Fortunato through the catacombs with the delicious and intoxicating promise of a rare cask of amontillado, so does Brian Kubarycz's collection, Perdition, lead us through a landscape of language that is as curiously engaging as a stroll through a charnel house: at times lush and gorgeous, while melding both quiet horror and haunting beauty. We are unsettled by it, uneasy, but thoroughly seduced in finding bits of our own psyches revealed therein, and so we turn that slitted page for more, and read on. - Pamela Ryder, Paradise Field, and the forthcoming Daybreak Birdsong Always Wakes Him

John Berger says the first paint was probably animal blood and there's a painterly, hot blooded, blood-drenched quality to Kubarycz's prose that piques all the senses. Perdition's over-brimming, ornately carved table of language, glistens strange as a Yorgos Lanthimos movie. --Kirstin Allio, Double-Check for Sleeping Children

About the Author

Brian Kubarycz is a literature professor at the Honors College of the University of Utah. In addition to teaching and writing fiction, Kubarycz paints and exhibits visual art, and performs in various musical groups. His enthusiasm for the arts derives from two primary sources: physical mediums like the painting on the cover of Perdition, and the practice of offering and receiving art within the social economy of the gift. He lives in Salt Lake City.