Terrible Machine of Heaven and Other Stories of Horror

Elegant horror ranging from the physical to the existential. Obliquely transgressive stories that shift the thin veneer of reality aside and wander toward bizarre deaths beyond death, with impossible vistas, strange obsessions, and terrors of things with teeth and claws bared."e;The Terrible Machine of Heaven"e; is a 19th century tale of mariners on a remote South Atlantic island who discover a mysterious machine beneath the ground, a mechanism capable of transporting them into Heaven; and they learn that to see Heaven can be truly terrible indeed.In "e;Attic Thing,"e; seemingly innocuous noises from a family attic disclose a threat of shocking death that grows into something viler still.In "e;The Poison Pear,"e; two feuding food critics battle viciously against each other, until one decides to take a cruel revenge."e;Empty Meadow"e; is a tale in which a man looks out his window at a dismal, empty field, a story in which virtually nothing happens at all – where a directionless terror builds upon him with each new day.In "e;Flat Earth,"e; fugitive sailors are plagued by a horrible, paranoid anxiety – that they have sailed too impossibly far; that they are going to fall off the Edge of the Earth – when the truth instead turns out to be far more horrifying than anything they had ever imagined.Here are five stories of terror, from the utterly ordinary to the implacably vast. Here the domain of appearances is exploded by the radical uncanny - from the seizing fear of an imaginary flat world, to reality-destroying visions granted by an unimaginable mechanism – this is experimental horror pushed to an extreme. These five stories represent a fundamental reassessment of the real; and they are a transcendence of the conventional that will shade the awareness with huge and fearful echoes.