A collection of unsettling and uncanny ghost stories traveling across time, space, and genres by the author of critically acclaimed novel This Weightless World. In the words of Robin Sloan, Adam Soto's debut, This Weightless World, was the social novel for the 21st century. Soto writes speculative fiction that subverts expectations while adhering to the tropes that make the genre so familiar. With his sophomore collection of ghost stories, Concerning Those Who Have Fallen Asleep, he continues in this tradition, switching modes from sci-fi to horror while maintaining his signature style. In Concerning Those Who Have Fallen Asleep, a soon-to-be empty-nester is visited by her son's comatose girlfriend every night; a couple travels to see a childhood friend in Wyoming after she has killed her abusive husband; a trillionaire centenarian, bent on becoming the first person to die of natural causes on Mars, puts his plans on hold when a Martian woman is murdered; and a one-armed Harlem Hellfighter discovers a German tailor's alterations to his military uniform mysteriously return his missing arm to him while influenza ravages Philadelphia. Sorrowful, funny, and surreal, the warped and eerie stories in Concerning Those Who Have Fallen Asleep explore the ways we haunt each other and ourselves through our choices, institutions, and dreams.
Adam Soto is a co-web editor at American Short Fiction. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is a former Michener-Copernicus Foundation Fellow. He lives with his wife in Austin, TX, where he is a teacher and a musician. Concerning Those Who Have Fallen Asleep is his second book.
Title: Concerning Those Who Have Fallen Asleep: Stories
Author: Adam Soto
ISBN: 9781662601354
Binding:
Publisher: Astra Publishing House
Publication Date: 2022-12-02
Number of Pages: 272
Weight: 0.2401 kg
The stories in Concerning Those Who Have Fallen Asleep are meant to sit with the reader and digest slowly. Throughout the collection Soto draws the reader into the often overlooked transitional spaces of a character's life, and while each story is full and complete, the reader will be left hungry for more as Soto leaves his endings open to the possibility of an unending expansive future.
-Corrine Watson, West Trade Review
[Soto's] well-drawn characters with their nuanced battles with grief and hope shine brighter. Haunting and complex.
-Kirkus Reviews
An imaginative and otherworldly collection . . . In these well-crafted stories, Soto evocatively shows how the characters are at turns mystified by inexplicable experiences or haunted by burdensome pasts . . . Readers will be enriched by the way this work thoroughly investigates the human heart.
-Publishers Weekly
Adam Soto has talent to burn and then some. The stories in Concerning Those Who Have Fallen Asleep are intense, beautifully dense, wonderfully detailed, funny, scary-all this. That rare thing, a thrilling book of stories.
-Peter Orner, author of Maggie Brown & Others and Love and Shame and Love
Adam Soto is the metaphysical detective for our dissonant era, and every one of these stories is a new type of ghost he shines a light on, in this portable haunted house of a short story collection. An exhilarating ride, to be read throwback-style: chain-smoking under a pale moon, in black and white.
-Fernando A. Flores, author of Tears of the Trufflepig and Valleyesque
Adam Soto's ghost stories are mostly not literal-but they are haunting. There are so many tricks and feints here that you'll be working through Soto's cleverness days later. In this collection of tightly wound but diversely approached stories, Adam Soto unravels the sloppy, conflicted lives of his characters with precision and polish. Each work-some short, others longer-all find a way to compact the breadth of a novel within constraints of the short story. Concerning Those Who Have Fallen Asleep is less an anthology of stories, but an impressive and thrilling accumulation of small universes.
-Kevin Nguyen, author of New Waves
Concerning Those Who Have Fallen Asleep is weird in all the best ways possible. These stories show fragments of much larger universes, enticing you with what they give as well as with what they suggest. These tales are plucked from bizarre worlds, from the blood of shadow creatures, from the tears of angels. Let them haunt you.
-Gabino Iglesias, author of The Devil Takes You Home
