Sefira and Other Betrayals
Sefira and Other Betrayals book cover

Sefira and Other Betrayals

Paperback – April 20, 2019

Price
$20.00
Format
Paperback
Pages
352
Publisher
Hippocampus Press
Publication Date
ISBN-13
978-1614981923
Dimensions
6 x 0.73 x 9 inches
Weight
1.04 pounds

Description

"John Langan's Sefira and Other Betrayals (Hippocampus), an outstanding collection of horror stories by a literary writer whose work will unnerve you as deeply as Shirley Jackson's."--Michael Dirda, The Washington Post "John Langan is a beast of a contemporary horror writer. Sefira and Other Betrayals would be career-defining for some authors. In Langan's case, this is merely his best work this decade."--Laird Barron, author of Black Mountain "John Langan is a Leviathan of modern weird fiction."--Paul St. John Mackintosh, L. A. Review of Books "John Langan is one of the few great wizards who not only understands but as mastered the magic of the darkly weird. His prose is both beautiful, fantastical dream and terrifying nightmare, subtle in its delivery and staggering in its implication. In Sefira and Other Betrayals , readers stand on the shore of a strange sea full of monsters, with its tide of secrets and emotions tugging the ground out slowly from underneath. Undoubtedly, readers can't help but be drawn in by its surreal and inexorable undertow."--Mary SanGiovanni, author of Behind the Doo r and host of Cosmic Shenanigans podcast "With Sefira and Other Betrayals John Langan cements the fact that he is one of the strongest voices in literary horror. His willingness to tell a story that pulls no punches is refreshing. The fact that his prose is so richly textured is beautiful. It's a divine combination that is resent in all of works and I love and envy the man's talent."--James A. Moore, author of Boomtown and the Seven Forges fantasy series. "Langan is a master of the short-story form, and his trade in the terrifying and supernatural should not take away from the literary nature of these layered tales full of thought-provoking dread and relentless monsters, and the lyrical beauty of the words that tie it all together."--Becky Spratford, Booklist Online

Features & Highlights

  • 2019
  • THIS IS HORROR AWARDS WINNER: Short Story Collection of the Year
  • 2019 BRAM STOKER AWARD® NOMINEE: Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection
  • "This book is a treasure trove for lovers of literary horror fiction."
  • —Publishers Weekly
  • Starred Review
  • From the award-winning writer of
  • The Fisherman
  • comes a new collection of stories. A pair of disgraced soldiers seek revenge on the man who taught them how to torture. A young lawyer learns the history of the secret that warped her parents’ marriage. A writer arrives at a mansion overlooking the Hudson River to write about the strange paper balloons floating through its grounds. A couple walks a path that shows them their past, present, and terrible future. A woman and her husband discover a cooler on the side of the road whose contents are decidedly unearthly. A man driving cross country has a late-night encounter with a figure claiming to be the Devil. And in the short novel that gives the collection its title, a woman chases a monster in a race against time.

Customer Reviews

Rating Breakdown

★★★★★
30%
(95)
★★★★
25%
(79)
★★★
15%
(47)
★★
7%
(22)
23%
(73)

Most Helpful Reviews

✓ Verified Purchase

Weird and wonderful

This precisely why I read weird fiction. Many a plot twisting surprise pivoting on a sharp points of betrayal. Langan has found his voice and it is a piercing howl into the darkness. Buy it. Read it. Tell your friends. Spread the news like a virus. John Langan has arrived.
4 people found this helpful
✓ Verified Purchase

This is for readers who prefer their short fiction a bit on the longer side

This is for readers who prefer their short fiction a bit on the longer side, as this hefty volume contains a novella and a stack of novelettes, with only one story coming in under 7500 words. “Sefira” is the eponymous novella and does a tense exploration of body horror and betrayal. “In Paris, In the Mouth of Kronos” is a moody piece that wrestles with “enhanced interrogation techniques” and captures a moment in amber that society would prefer forgotten.

“Bor Urus” was my favorite of the collection. In the story notes at the end, Langan says, “By placing my narrator’s emotional dalliance with his ex after his first encounters with the supernatural, I wanted to try for something different than what I usually might have done. Specifically, instead of having the supernatural event happen after the real world occurrence, thus allowing and even encouraging the supernatural to be read as a trope for the mundane, I wanted to reverse that order in the interest of presenting the mundane as a trope for the supernatural.” I think this is the crux of my challenges with this collection. Far too many were flipped the other way, and the supernatural felt like a metaphor. Excellent craft, but metaphors don’t deliver unease and dread. For example, “The Third Always Beside You” feels akin to a magical realism story that wrestles with how infidelity haunts a relationship. I would have preferred the supernatural woven a bit more strongly throughout to maintain tension. The girl’s lunch out is an excellent character study, but bleeds out the dread.
3 people found this helpful
✓ Verified Purchase

Classic Langan

Probably the pinnacle of literary horror writing.
3 people found this helpful