In his surreal, darkly comic collection of literary horror tales, DIVINE IN ESSENCE: Stories, author Yarrow Paisley plunges the reader into a phantasmagoric realm where the subconscious plays havoc with the mundane and the miraculous slow dances with the macabre. Across ten intricately crafted tales, Paisley explores such heady themes as the mutability of identity, our susceptibility to primal drives, and the fundamental inadequacy of language to convey the depths of human consciousness.

The collection opens with “The Great Event,” in which young Helen, the daughter of the deranged Mr. Runcible, gestates a supernatural brood destined to transmogrify the world into their rapturous dream—or, one might argue, nightmare. “I in the Eye” finds an impressionable lad ensnared in the glass eye of his father’s beguiling betrothed, compelled to bear witness to the increasingly unsettling goings-on in his own dwelling. “Your Mother Loves You” traces a mother’s nocturnal torments of her son and the grisly consequences that unspool after the boy morphs into a girl christened Jenna.

In “The Metaphor of the Lakes,” amnesiac Gracie, who harbors suspicions she may be a specter, chronicles her surreal existence in an enchanted abode she shares with the Cat Bob and the enigmatic—and frequently antagonistic—Mr. Menders and Mr. Scatt. “Fever Visions” finds young Hattie besieged by lurid hallucinations amidst a bout of malady, shepherded by a mother who may be less nurturing than she appears. In “Nancy & Her Man,” Nancy pirouettes upon Herman’s grave and spirits him away for a terminal promenade through town as his reanimated cadaver gradually disintegrates.

The loosely linked stories “Icarus in Bardot” and “Mary Alice in the Mirror” are perhaps the collection’s most disorienting and avant-garde. In the former, the mythical Icarus, having survived his legendary plummet, explores the landscape of Brigitte Bardot’s mind; in the latter, Mary Alice whiles away decades imprisoned in a mirror, eventually joined by her beloved Norbert. “Rocking Horse Traffic” conjures a Freudian fever dream in which sickly Bobby is subjected to repeated surgeries by his father, retreating into visions of his dead mother and oneiric communion with sculptural rocking horses. The collection culminates in “The Life of Cherry,” an epic charting the rise and fall of a girl born without genitalia whose conquest of the dream world ultimately proves hollow.

Paisley’s ornate, baroque prose—dense with inventive imagery and wordplay, by turns luminous and tenebrous—evokes comparisons to literary horror writers such as Thomas Ligotti and Caitlin R. Kiernan. Much like Ligotti, Paisley eschews the more straightforward, plot-driven narratives of traditional horror in favor of a more philosophical, existentially unsettling approach—more concerned with exploring the uncanny and darkly absurd than with crafting conventionally scary stories. And, like Kiernan (known for her dark, lush prose and exploration of liminal spaces and identities), Paisley is interested in the porous boundaries between the real and the imagined. He imbues inanimate objects—from furniture to a bottle of kefir—with ominous agency, investing them with more vitality than the characters they taunt and torment. In these tales, human bodies are porous, protean things, their boundaries subject to transgression and transformation. Orifices multiply, organs crawl with critters, and flesh dissolves into dust.

While DIVINE IN ESSENCE showcases the author’s undeniable linguistic prowess and fertile imagination, the collection as a whole may prove too esoteric and unapproachable for many readers. Taken in small doses, Paisley’s penchant for obscure vocabulary and convoluted syntax (“A tidal pool constituted a unique and sedulously maintained Akashic blockchain, recorded in the ætheric fabric of existence itself and counterfeit-proof”) serve to create a dense atmosphere of queasy disorientation that mirrors the distorted realities and psychic disintegration experienced by his characters. Passages like “The red organs on their heads had burst and deflated, leaking a green viscosity which streamed down their cheeks and chests, seeming tears” showcase Paisley’s ability to unsettle and disturb. Over the course of an entire collection, however, Paisley’s labyrinthine narratives can feel overwhelming, leaving readers bewildered and exhausted.

DIVINE IN ESSENCE will undoubtedly appeal to readers with a taste for the grotesque, the transgressive, and the avant-garde. Its deliberately opaque and alienating style, however, may limit its accessibility to a broader audience. Those who prefer their fiction to be grounded in recognizable reality may find Paisley’s collection more frustrating than rewarding, though one cannot help but admire the audacity of Paisley’s vision and the virtuosity of his language.

Yarrow Paisley’s DIVINE IN ESSENCE: Stories is not for those who like their fiction tidy and clear-cut. Rather, it is a collection for readers willing to plunge into the murkiest waters of the subconscious and grapple with the phantoms therein.

~Edward Sung for IndieReader