PERIPHYLLA, AND OTHER DEEP OCEAN ATTRACTIONS

Bizarre zoological phenomena feature in Ashley’s debut collection of eerie short stories.

These short narratives lean toward the macabre and largely fixate on the animal realm, in which odd mutations occur in somewhat dystopic futuristic settings. The title piece describes the Deep-Sea Atrium, a vast, multi-storied aquarium. Visitors behold rare, exotic, and sometimes monstrous maritime specimens in simulated abyssal depths (an angler fish “hangs in the water beneath a timid yellow light. Extendable jaw and elastic stomach full of shrimp and other tank debris”). The emotionally detached, college-dropout narrator, an Atrium guide in a troubled relationship, habitually steals from the premises—readers will sense that this cannot end well. One creature from the menagerie figures in another story, “Riding the Waves of Leviathan”—an immense sea beast that frequents a stretch the Atlantic coast, forcing the hard-drinking local fishermen to seek new employment as gold miners (faintly absurdist dream-logic is another recurring trait here). Their neglected children take to surfboards to master the waves the Leviathan stirs up in a sometimes fatal pastime. Another family bedeviled by water-dwellers, weird biology, and alcohol appears in “Last Stand of the Alligator Killers,” a story depicting a (literally) decaying household of swamp folk who grow scalier and less human while hopelessly fighting the amphibious encroachment of saurian “horn-tailed Joes” that have rudimentary intelligence. A sort of slime-mold “protist,” a subterranean species possessing sentience and near-human emotions, tries to co-exist with unusually accommodating Homo sapiens in “Skin,” but the social arrangement is heartbreakingly fragile. Many of the yarns have ambiguously open endings, but they are rarely less effective for leaving things not tidied up; the animal-free “An Execution” is narrated by a bereaved father in an America in which relatives of homicide victims have the right to ritually slay the guilty party in eye-for-an-eye manner (this provides dubious closure). These tales raise shudders of the existential dread variety rather than ‘Halloween-boo!’ scares, despite such Lovecraftian mainstays as tentacles, ichthyic environments, and creature-metamorphoses; one suspects the author has bigger fish to fry.          

An unsettling bestiary of narratives for SF and horror readers with a taste for unease—and seafood.