New Arrival: Paul Tremblay's Growing Things and Other Stories

There was a time where written communication was dominated by paper and ink, but the way we communicate has changed drastically from the development and integration of new mediums in our society. Want to get a message across? You can write it longhand, type a letter on a computer or on your phone, or even make a video using that phone. Just as Bram Stoker used diary entries to tell the story of Dracula, writers are more and more finding new ways to weave a narrative. One of the forerunners of this trend is Paul Tremblay, who has used everything from blog posts and diary entries to create spellbinding novels that fit well within the genre label of Weird Fiction. His current collection Growing Things and Other Stories shows his willingness to experiment.

Tremblay has a gift for looking at a story not as a linear climb up a mountain until the reader reaches the climax at its top; rather, his stories are like seeing the moving parts, the gears grinding, the levers lifting, and letting the reader see how his narrative structure work. The pieces within all of Tremblay’s stories can come from, for example, fairy tales, the Apocalypse, and a disintegrating family (“Growing Things”). His stories can also be built from seemingly innocuous photographs (“Nineteen Snapshots of Dennisport”), from literary discussion about non-existent stories (“Notes from ‘The Barn in the Wild’”), and even from the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure format many remember reading as children (“A Haunted House Is a Wheel Upon Which Some Are Broken”). The terror he generates in these stories comes not from a killer’s hand at one’s throat or the roaring of a chainsaw, but they come in the more subtle terrors of a neighbor’s bizarre behavior, the oppressive quiet of a house that is currently uninhabited, or conversations had that seemed innocent until one has time to process them. Tremblay refers to an author, obviously himself, as “Mr. Ambiguous Horror” in his story “Notes from the Dog Walkers” and the title fits him so well. The endings may not be the hard, definitive endings that some readers like to have as signals the terror is over. Rather, Tremblay’s stories are meant to stick with you and make you a little more wary of the shadows. These stories are a great selection for readers who love classic ghost stories like M. R. James where the horror is like a slowly rolling fog from the moors, but with a clear American postmodern bent.