Smoke House & Other Stories

Acclaimed author of the uncanny Matthew G. Rees returns with unusual tales of people in places off the beaten track, and events that by turns and twists are unsettling, shocking and darkly amusing. Step inside Smoke House & Other Stories and explore - among other destinations - a strange backwoods town whose citizens - though they seem not to know it - are on fire... a rotting seaside resort threatened by a small boy’s escalating awareness of its underbelly of sleaze... a remote, snow-cloaked cathedral with windows of oddly compelling stained glass... an ancient English manor with a garden of eerie topiaries whose grim guardian wields a decidedly worrisome pair of shears... and a weird lakeside town 'forgotten in its frost pocket' where peculiar Christmas lights shine every night of the year. These are just some of the settings to which Rees invites readers in his first collection of tales since the much praised Keyhole (2019).

As for the destinies of those that Rees entreats us to meet - among them a young teacher bizarrely detained by a much older member of the profession, a gallery attendant determined to thwart the artist she loathes, a bird-watcher alone - or so he thinks - on a menace-filled marsh, a farmer with an outlandish obsession, and an irascible, fading writer sentenced to finish an unwanted novel in a sinister small town... What shall be their fates? Macabre or merciful? Enter Smoke House & Other Stories and find out.

Most of the stories in this collection - which runs to a total of thirteen tales and one 'flash fiction' story - make their debut. Others have been updated or drawn from sources no longer accessible. Present-day England, Wales, America, Russia and, briefly, France are the settings... in ways that are unfamiliar. For these are - after all -villages and towns that exist in no authorised guidebook or on any official map.

A gallery of photographs by Rees accompanies the text.