My House Gathers Desires

July 15, 2017
Fifteen ghost stories from historical fantasist McOmber (The White Forest, 2012, etc.).Gothic overtones and sexual undertones color this new collection of eerie, nearly antique tales. The opener, "Hydrophobia," starts ordinarily enough, opening on Jane, a doctor's wife, taking a walk in the woods. But when she meets a boy painting there, he tells her a story about a miner and his wife who came to a bad end, leading to a grotesque fate for Jane as well. In "Petit Trianon," two young women set out to explore the final refuge of Marie Antoinette, a place whose ghosts do not yet rest. The judgment handed down in "Sodom and Gomorrah" differs radically from the biblical interpretation: "We finally understand the meaning of our monument's song, the words it has been chanting even when we could not hear: there are no gods, it says in its beautiful voice. And if there are, my friends, believe me: they do not matter." A phantasmagorical fair provides the background for "Poet and Underworld," while a traveling museum with a dark purpose sets the stage in "Metempsychosis." The collection's title comes from the Civil War story "Swaingrove," which finds an aging raconteur admiring the handsome young soldiers who come to call. A woman becomes a human sacrifice in "The Rite of Spring," while a different girl suffers for the sins of another in "Night is Nearly Done." Finally, McOmber explores obsession with the body in "History of a Saint," about one man's explorations of a "sleeping girl" discovered during an excavation, and finishes with "Notes on Inversion," one doctor's catalog of sexual deviance. These aren't for everyone, but readers who feel more kinship with Edgar Allan Poe or Lord Byron than the modern world will find common ground here. An otherworldly collection of tales rich with mystery, suspense, and eroticism.

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October 9, 2017
This collection of short horror stories from McOmber (The White Forest) strongly recalls French decadent writers such as Théophile Gautier: several of the pieces are set in France at various times between the 17th and 19th centuries, and McOmber does not shy away from aimless young protagonists discovering beauty and/or horror in the world around them via suffering, a common decadent preoccupation. However, McOmber’s prose is uncompromisingly minimalist and spare, which sometimes heightens the effect of his baroque imagery (such as a giant assembling itself from living humans in the collection’s best piece, “Sodom and Gomorrah”) and sometimes lets it fall flat (such as the king of France’s confusing vision in the vignette “Versailles, 1623,” too sparsely described for any emotional impact). McOmber can produce a sense of claustrophobic dread, but also falls repeatedly into the use of themes and ideas already well-trodden—one can guess the conceit of “The Rite of Spring” from the title alone. The highs of this collection are high, and the lows are entirely too low.

September 1, 2017
Taboo desire is a dangerous cosmic force in McOmber's eerie, unnerving, even macabre short stories. As in his first collection, This New & Poisonous Air (2011), and his novel, The White Forest (2012), his yearning characters find themselves in menacing, shape-shifting, time-warping places haunted by monstrous entities, from the devil to an alchemist's homunculus to a laser-eyed white ape. Pascal, a young, shy Frenchman, embraces trouble in the form of a confident American man. A weary Confederate soldier is lured into a spooky mansion by a sexually predatory viscount. A young, rebellious woman in medieval times who usually does not favor whimsy follows a handsome butcher's apprentice into some form of hell. In 1901, a headmistress and her assistant and lover, Eleanor, encounter otherworldly horror at Versailles, and a lonely woman in our era allows a strange boy to lead her into a cave. In the mode of Shirley Jackson, A. S. Byatt, Kathryn Davis, and Kelly Link, McOmber has fashioned crisply rendered, richly informed and imagined, sorrowful, malevolently erotic, and archly funny campfire tales for grown-ups.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)