In That Endlessness, Our End by Gemma Files

In That Endlessness, Our End Reviews

• 
  Char

  Reading this book was the literary version of walking on the wild side. The dark and wild side.
  
  This was my first experience reading Gemma Files' work, but it won't be my last. I've read comparisons to Ligotti and Barron, and even though I think they're comparable, I think Ms. Files holds a distinct spot of her own. IN THAT ENDLESSNESS, OUR END contains a wide array of stories and among the ones I enjoyed most were:
  
  THIS IT HOW IT ENDS. I kind of felt a science fiction vibe with one. Maybe I was duped?
  
  BULB In light of the power outages going on in Texas right now, it's easy for me to imagine that something might be living in the grid.
  
  THE PUPPET MOTEL The title of this alone is creepy, but add in the sound, a tone perhaps, "an inhuman frequency." A sound beckoning for you to...
  
  COME CLOSER. What happens when that spooky house in neighborhood keeps somehow moving?
  
  CUT FRAME Picture old school Hollywood, featuring the dark and mysterious star of B movies, Tamar Dusk.
  
  ALWAYS AFTER THREE In their apartment in an old building where renovations are never over-where is that smelling coming from? And why does it only start stinking after 3:00 am?
  
  VENIO Draw your door and tell your story! (Really loved this one!)
  
  I responded to most of these tales on a visceral level. There is a constant...hum, a certain..tone, that permeates all of the stories in this volume. It sneaks past the factual, logical, Spock-like portions of my brain and speaks directly to that emotional portion, that portion that senses things, that senses things aren't right. It's unsettling and disturbing and I loved every freaking second of it!
  
  My highest recommendation!
  
  *Thank you to Grimbscribe Press and to the author the paperback ARC in exchange for my honest review. This is it.*
  
  
  
  
  
• 
  Jack Tripper

  One of the best horror collections I've read in recent years. Each entry is imbued with an eerie atmosphere and feeling of dread, and they're rarely reliant on some twist or shocking ending for their scares. Files' characters feel like actual people as opposed to just being mere vessels for exploring strange happenings, so the reader empathizes with them during their dealings with both the supernatural as well as real-life horrors such as mental breakdowns and personal demons. The stories can be pretty moving at times, heart-rending even, especially when combined with Files' engaging, almost poetic prose. This gives her tales a unique feel among the coterie of modern weird fiction writers, and their quality stands with the best of them.
• 
  Gabrielle

  I would like to have Gemma Files added to a list of Canadian National Treasures, because the more of her work I read, the more I love her. And I specify "Canadian" because I think there is something quintessentially Canuck in her words, beyond the familiar setting: part of it is that she writes from the perspective of very diverse characters, who often know that their family's traditions leave deep marks - something many Canadians know intimately. There is also a deeply introspective element in her stories, which is something that I have often noted about writers from the Great White North.
  
  If this collection of short stories has a theme, it is, as the title reveals, ends. Of relationships, lives, worlds even. But that would be all they have in common. Some are about dysfunctional families, others about secret cults, survivalists, haunted houses... Things that go bump in the night, things that make us unable to sleep, things that make us wonder if an end might not be preferable to letting said things go on...
  
  One great sentence is both good advice and a perfect way to describe the nature of this collection:
  
  "If you ever hear that sound, or even suspect you're about to, then my advice to you is simple. Just. Fucking. Run."
  
  If you like horror, you owe it to yourself to look up Gemma Files, and this is a perfect place to start - and a wonderful addition to her catalogue, if you are already familiar with her work. Highly recommended!
• 
  Forrest

  I don’t hide the fact that I’m a fan of Gemma Files’ work. Her writerly reputation is solid, and deservedly so. Take, for example, her previous novel,
  Experimental Film, frankly one of the best horror novels I have read in many, many years. I had read and enjoyed Files’ stories as they appeared in various publications, but felt like she had hit a new watermark with Experimental Film. I was, admittedly, amped-up to read In That Endlessness, Our End. I even
  pre-ordered it, something I rarely do with books. But I had pre-ordered Experimental Film and loved it, so I felt that being an early adapter for this collection was a pretty safe bet.
  
  And I was right.
  
  Like any collection, there are “danglers and outliers,” but really, these fifteen stories hung together quite nicely. There are no bad stories among them. And because of my very high expectations, the one story that I rated at three-stars (out of five) might have just as well had something to do with my mood or something I ate (
  or didn’t eat) the evenings I spent reading it. Keep in mind that, at three stars, I still liked it. And overall, I loved the collection. The tales are sometimes horrific to the point that you wonder if the author poisoned the pages themselves, but many of them have a subtext of intimacy – not explicit sexual intimacy (though that is implied, in places), but familial intimacy and the intimacy of close friends. This, I think, is what sets Files’ stories here apart from much of the horror field – the foil of these intimate relationships against an uncaring or even inimical universe is profound and stark, casting love and friendship into relief against hatred and selfishness.
  
  Note: Hatred and selfishness win out when you least expect it to. Some of these stories are heartbreakers, full stop.
  
  Without further ado, here are my (slightly edited) notes from each story:
  
  "This is How it Goes" posits a split. I won't go into detail, but suffice it to say that
  doppelgangers are compelled to kill their originals.
  Many Worlds Theory comes into play here in a quantum apocalypse unlike any other you've read about, guaranteed. The horror comes both from without and from within, the apocalypse arising from and further fomenting the horror of literally facing yourself and conquering your demons. Four stars.
  
  "Bulb" skirts the border between creepypasta and cosmic horror. You might not want to turn the lights on after reading this. Makes me want to extend
  my social media "fasts" indefinitely. If you're at all averse to technology, this story is one giant trigger. A fantastic tale that will have you questioning every source of electricity around you. Five dazzling, electric stars.
  
  "The Puppet Motel" is a haunted-house story for the 21st-Century, a modern take on some old tropes that doesn't feel like a modern take on old tropes, but feels like something absolutely unique and terrifying. It's not your "typical" ghost story, but something far more Weird or, when one really thinks about the story,
  Weird and Eerie, in the Fisher-esque senses of both words. Five stars.
  
  So, what happens when the haunted house comes to you? And do you regret taking notice of some things, when you could have lived in blissful ignorance your whole life, but that one thing you took notice of consumes your life, consumes you? The characters in "Come Closer" have to ask these questions. And they don't get the answers they want. The characters here are extremely compelling, making us care for them, despite their broken-ness. Four stars.
  
  Take the twitter account
  Pagan Hollywood, add the Eastern European legends of the
  Night Hag, and trace the story of an obsession through a multi-document approach, and you get "Cut Frame". I am enamored of all of these things and I absolutely love the method of using disparate documents to point readers to the story behind the story (
  I am a trained historian, after all). A tragic story leading to the abyss. I love this style of storytelling (both as a reader and as a writer), and Files excels at it.
  
  "Sleep Hygiene" is . . . difficult. Because I've seen, up close and personal,
  a mental breakdown caused by lack of sleep. It's not pretty. It's terrifying. The narrator in this story ends up damaged in ways that, thankfully, the one I know did not. The fact that it hit so close to the mark is a testament to File's ability as a writer. After this, you might not trust a therapist ever again. And, Public Service Announcement here: please, please see that you don’t skimp on sleep. The effects are truly horrific. Five stars; reluctantly.
  
  "Always After Three" has a decent premise and characterization. For me, though, it lacked a natural sense of dread, like it was forced. I think it could have been longer to allow the characters and their situation to develop a bit more. I liked it, but didn't love it. Three stars.
  
  "Thin Cold Hands" is a morbidly beautiful story of possession, both of the ghostly kind and of the kind that binds mother and daughter in their relationship to one another, even if both parties aren't exactly willing. It's a clever subversion of that relationship, as well as the apocalyptic threat that would arise if such relationships were to multiply as, statistically, they must. Shades of
  Doris Lessing’s “The Fifth Child” here, folks. Five stars.
  
  The collective unconscious has spawned something inexorable in "Venio," and it's coming. The more you try not to think about it, the closer it is. And you want it to be as far away from you as possible. But its visitation is inevitable; only a matter of time. Here Files develops her familiar themes to a sharpened point, leaving the reader no escape, entrapping them in the story. Five stars.
  
  
  Folk horror meets vampirism in the guise of a pseudo-Fisher King in "Look Up". The shifting viewpoint is at times confusing, always kaleidoscopic. The motivations of the main subject seem to ebb and flow, winsome and immature with indecision, then stubborn resolve, then submissive acceptance. Tropes of inheritance, destiny, choice, and change swirl throughout the tale, both clarifying and confusing. Four stars.
  
  "The Church in the Mountains" is Files at her best. Varied viewpoints, sepia tones, the hidden interstices of media at once so familiar, yet so alien, the horror of becoming that which we don't want to be, but inevitably must. A written story finds validation in a long-lost film and concludes by folding external reality into internal realization. A symphonic, tenebrous collapse into fate. Five stars.
  
  Science fiction or horror? "Distant Dark Places" has an emotional resonance missing from much of modern dark fiction. It's a big story, yet personal, as big as a planet (or three), yet as small as the misfiring gaps in the human neural structure. The tale takes conspiracy theories and "prepping" to a cosmological level, yet never leaves the human sphere. The undulating scope of the story never loses focus. Five stars
  
  "Worm Moon" is a highly poetic piece of infestation, metamorphosis, and unwanted discovery. A horrific voyage into a murky realm of self: what was self, what is self, what is to become . . . something else. Four stars.
  
  "Halloo" is an utter gut-punch. I don't even know where to begin: the bottle? The therapy? The relationship between Isla and Amaya? Between Isla and her mother and Nan? It's all so wrong and just when you think it's going to turn right, it goes even more wrong. Ugh. This was an excruciating read, but in the good way. Yeah, the good way.
  
  Note:
  Rorcal's album "Mulladonna" was the perfect background music for reading this story. Definitely the right mood.
  
  Five stars (to Files and Rorcal)!
  
  Much more poignant than horrific, "Cuckoo" asks tough questions of a (autistic?) child's parents. The myths of the Changeling are explored throughout as a means to examine the themes of dedication, love, duty, and disappointment. This is an evocative meditation, if you will, on fate and responsibility, on a universe that gives not one whit about you, and yet calls on you to reach deep to find compassion inside yourself. Five stars.
  
  On balance, I am giving In That Endlessness, Our End a full five stars, despite the one story I only "liked," because I loved the rest to varying degrees. I strongly recommend getting the hard copy - believe me, with many of these stories, you'll want to be able to close the pages quickly when you reach the end . . . so you can pull the covers over your head and hide.
  
  But you can't.
  
  Can't hide.
  
  You can't hide;
  
  It's coming . . .
• 
  Richard Martin

  Gemma Files’ latest macabre collection of horror shorts presents us with darkly poetic tales of cursed movies, dream diaries, doppelgangers, family curses, fairies, lost videos, insomniacs, rituals, cosmic cults, deadly secrets, armageddons and remaking the universe.
  
  This is an incredibly difficult book to review because it is hard to convey effectively what these stories are about, while simultaneously doing them justice without falling into the trap of either over-simplification or over analysing. Neither is it an easy book to read, but it is an endlessly rewarding one.
  
  Anyone who has read Gemma Files horror work before will recognise her incredible talent for maintaining a constant sense of dread and unease throughout all her stories. She deals in themes and subject so cosmically large that there is a real ‘anything goes’ sense, but stories are typically set in an all too familiar down to earth situation. There are the unfathomably powerful and evil forces at work in ‘The Puppet Motel’, living in a Toronto based Airbnb, or the existential terror of ‘Venio’ where a student writing exercise unleashes an unstoppable and inexplicable darkness upon their normal, everyday existence. Each story is grounded in a familiar reality before Files introduces inconceivably high, Lovecraftian-esque stakes with a level of creativity so uniquely her own that you would be hard pushed to find any other horror author writing today so adept at getting to the core at what really frightens people.
  
  Some stories are incredibly rich and dense, rewarding those willing to pore over every detail, while some are more straight-forward and accessible, taking the form of a radio interview (‘Bulb’) or fairy-tale inspired monologue (‘Cuckoo’). There are moments of extreme violence (the opening tale, ‘This is How it Goes’ has some truly horrifying imagery), the oddly surreal (‘Come Closer’) and the dream-like (‘Sleep Hygiene’). A lot of these stories genuinely terrified me (reading ‘Cut Scene’ just before bed was a huge mistake) and some are so laden with existential dread (‘Worm Moon’, ‘Distant Dark Places’) that I needed to put the book down and pick up something different before pressing on.
  
  While there is a lot of variety, ‘In That Endlessness, Our End’ feels like a very cohesive collection. There are a lot of shared themes, to the point where a lot of the shorts feel very interconnected and, sometimes even a retelling of the same event from a different perspective. I found it to be an incredibly difficult book to put down for long, constantly telling myself ‘just one more’ until the final page.
  
  ‘In That Endlessness, Our End’ is a book that defies categorization, but what it undoubtedly is, is a book that will challenge you as it switches so deftly between so many conflicting themes and feelings. It is an incredible collection; one that reminded me just what I love so much about horror fiction and one I cannot recommend highly enough.
  
  
  You can read more reviews of new and upcoming horror releases at
  https://www.myindiemuse.com/category/...
  I also promote indie horror via Twitter - @RickReadsHorror
• 
  Lou

  Narratives edging on the periphery through fissures of existence.
  Conjuring, communicating and translating the unfixed, the cosmic, and the terrifying, vivid interjections at intersections and further on, Gemma Files a very capable conductor of the uncanny and a cacophony of things, executing with intimate and ominous poetic prose, transmuting the myriad via a trajectory with a phantasmagoric experience.
  All the right details no words wasted precision storytelling.
  
  There was Shirley Jackson, there is Stephen King and now there is Gemma Files.
  You may have watched a series of movies like Midsommar, Hereditary, and Mandy, shows like Haunting of Hill House and The Outsider. You are wondering which books or stories may evoke in a better way, this is you ticket to existential terror In that endlessness, be our end story collection.
  
  Check out my interview with the author in February 2021 @
  https://more2read.com/review/interview-with-gemma-files/
  
  The Stories reviewed briefly with notable excerpts @
  
  https://more2read.com/review/in-that-endlessness-our-end-by-gemma-files/
• 
  Carson Winter

  (originally published at my website carsonwinter.com)
  
  The best opening I can conceive of for this review is an honest one. I’ve been poking at it for awhile; I’ve tried relating it to what I want as a reader, who I am as a writer; I took a stab at asking a big, fat rhetorical question about what short fiction is really about—as if somehow, by asking said question, I’d become qualified to answer it. All those attempts at creating a hook really, really sucked, so I’ll just say this instead: Gemma Files’ new collection, In That Endlessness, Our End is really fucking good.
  
  Here’s the facts: Gemma Files is a Canadian author with a lot of work under her belt, including, but not limited to the collection Spectral Evidence and Experimental Film, a novel that dazzled me with its portrayal of human relationships as much as it did with its lost film conceit. The latter had been my only direct experience with Files’ work, but it left enough of an impression on me to see her as a major force in today’s literary horror scene. Her new collection continues to make this case, with some of the most creative, distinctively voiced short fiction I’ve read in years. In That Endlessness, Our End feels right at home in Grimscribe Press’s small catalog of authors who exist insistently as themselves on every page.
  
  Files has a syntax and style all her own that stands in sharp contrast to a lot of her peers who write similarly high-brow weird horror. The style here is well-represented by fundamentals that can follow their bloodline all the way back to Poe, of course, but it’s the twists on the fundamentals that provide Files with her voice. Point in case: the first person narrator.
  
  As I know it, the default narrator for the weird horror story has become a stock character. If one were to write a modern post-Ligotti weird tale right now, they might easily fall into a familiar lead archetype—nervous (as Poe would say: “TRUE!—nervous”), academic, cold, and exceedingly alienated. This is a narrative voice that genre auteurs such as Jon Padgett, Thomas Ligotti, and Matt Cardin have formed into something nearing a cliche in their (yes, excellent) work. But Files eschews the modern Weird blueprint and works from a more naturalistic and modern palate. Her characters speak like humans, not academics on the edge of breakdown. They are products of contemporary life, not detachments meant to highlight their own detachment. In this, Files work feels conversant with the present and very much alive.
  
  In That Endlessness, Our End has a bold streak that runs deeper than Files first-person narratives though, there’s also her sense of rhythm as a storyteller. Not too long ago, I read Chuck Palahniuk’s Consider This, a book on writing that I thought was actually pretty great—filled to the brim with pragmatic writing advice that didn’t try to turn the act of writing into some metaphysical exercise in muse-chasing. One bit of tangible advice that managed to stick to my brain-folds was the notion of eliminating scene breaks. For the inexperienced, the scene break is the sort of crutch you lean on when you don’t know how to link scenes, or end scenes, or really know what to do with a scene at all. They exist as something you saw once in a book, then ruthlessly liberated as an ill-considered element of style. Files is the counterpoint to this. Her fiction is brimming with sharp scene breaks, maybe more than I’ve ever seen employed before. It’s a confident bit of style that makes her stories feel like moving snapshots, or a constellation of stab wounds. They have a pace all their own, and it works in harmony with the quick, modern voices that do the telling.
  An interesting aspect of In That Endlessness, Our End—to me, anyways—is the conversation it has with the state of modern horror. Namely, the merging and restructuring of what is popular and what is respected. Gemma Files writes literary horror informed by the Weird—a style that has become the respected end of a genre, where serious writer’s writers write stories that will inevitably please other writer’s writers. On the other end of the genre, is the populist side—rollercoaster horror, as I call it. This is the stuff that’s supposed to be an amusement park ride, or a campfire story to make your next piss in the dark an exercise in hyper-awareness. One side wants to be art, the other side wants to be fun—the war wages on. “Venio,” possibly one of my favorite stories I’ve read in recent years, feels like a meeting of these two worlds, where the strange conceit is a game not unlike the games that form the basis for what is probably the least respected (and fittingly, the most read) form of horror short storytelling, the creepypasta. The story's hook is big and sharp and it drags the reader along through a frankly unsettling story, told with all the depth of a writer who cares a lot about good writing. Through a certain lens, “Venio” can be viewed as permission to be scared, to have fun along the way—an olive branch to the rollercoaster.
  
  There are other examples of these sorts of high-concept pitch-lines translated into the world of delicately crafted and personal art, but there’s also some outright subversion. “Come Closer” comes to mind as a haunted house story where the house is treated like Michael Myers, a big lug of a follower who gets closer every time you turn around.
  
  Creepy, right?
  
  Files is good at shit like that, finding just the right twist on an old trope so that it feels relevant and newly unsettling. “The Puppet Hotel” is another one of these stories, a true highlight, that features the very now concept of the AirBnB-as-haunted entity. Sometimes, in comparison to her contemporaries, Files seems as if she’s engaged in a constant war on the artifice and antiquity that has driven the genre for years Post-Lovecraft. It’s as if she’s grabbing us by the collar, frothing at the mouth, reminding us in her fast, athletic voice that the present is plenty scary.
  
  These concepts also mold the framing of her stories, such as in “Bulb,” which is presented as a podcast transcription with a surly guest; as well as the ambitious and creepy “The Church in the Mountains,” where Files uses her knowledge of Canadian film once again to craft a compelling tale of a half-remembered television show (which, so it happens, is another common trope in the world of creepypasta). Both of these stories reflect a relationship with media that is complex—in Files stories, media is the continuation of another of horror’s eldest darlings: the dream sequence—an uncontrollable unreality that whispers truths we’d rather not hear.
  
  In That Endlessness, Our End is a stunning collection brimming with style and verve. Gemma Files deserves to be talked about. Her fiction deserves to be explored. Her characters are complex and anxious and sometimes difficult. They represent a diverse sampling of the population. What can I offer at the end of this review that I couldn’t offer at the beginning?
  
  Nothing, really. Only a request.
  
  Please, I beg you: read this fucking book.
  
• 
  Karen

  As with all short story collections, some of these I really liked and others were just meh. I have to admit I skipped some of them that I just didn't "get". But these are some of the creepiest, most disturbing, scary stories I have ever read. Literally could not read them at night - they just left me feeling too aware of the dark.
  
• 
  Shawn

  This collection by Gemma Files tales comprises recent stories (2017-2021) and showcases her skill at storytelling married to an almost at times ferocious inventiveness (stories are not always in traditional formats, encompassing interviews, blog posts, etc.) - not every experiment works, but they are all interesting and this collection continues to signal Files as a talent to keep aware of!
  
  As usual, I'll be reviewing from least satisfying to most satisfying, but only two of the 15 stories here didn't work for me. "Worm Moon" is something like a prose poem, an impressionistic set of images/scenarios featuring fecund, spawning darkness. Not really my kind of thing as it's too vague for me. "Halloo," is an involved, emotional drama about a woman from a dysfunctional family and the guilt she feels from a deadly event she feels she caused, and the pain of which she then hid away. I didn't connect with this one, as it was a bit too emotionally raw for me.
  
  It is inevitable that with an approach as wide-ranging and inventive as Files', there are bound to be intriguing stories that only fail to "stick the ending", so to speak, but which are intriguing reads. "This Is How It Goes" is a good example - a woman with anxiety problems tells us about the worldwide body-trauma event "The Split", which led to mass deaths and a general economic collapse. But she warns us that the events may not be fully over... As I said, this is an engaging piece - although it may not read as a fully plotted story exactly (and almost seems more like the seed for a potential novel or novella) but I appreciated that underpinning the trauma were the mental health benefits to be gained from the termination of our current manic, overloaded, desperate "civilization". In "Cut Frame", a producer of a cult Canadian horror film from the 80s tells of the involvement of a notorious, aged Hollywood actress who seemed to exert a strange, obsessive fascination in her fans. This strikes me as an odd variation of
  Fritz Leiber's "The Girl With The Hungry Eyes" but focused on cinema instead of advertising. It's a bit lukewarm, due to the distancing caused by the chosen way of framing the plot, but not bad at all. "Thin Cold Hands" involves a women explaining her long-time alienation from her odd daughter and how it relates to a series of strange incidents stretching back to her own childhood, when she discovered something weird under her house. I wasn't sure I was enjoying this at first, as an attempt to explain one's own alienation from both parents and children seems a little too self-involved but this becomes an effective, one-step-removed tale of faeries or the Fey which resonates with larger social and emotional concerns.
  
  On a similar critical level, a young girl and her family drive up to remote Northern Canada for a celebration put on by her (now deceased) father's previously estranged Latvian side of the family, in "Look Up." But the gathering (ostensibly to mark the family's oldest member's birthday) also seems to directly involve her, as well as a family legend involving a sorcerer king from the distant past. An oddly "widescreen" piece (by which I mean cinematic) this is so ambitious in its conception and detail that it probably would have been stronger at novella length (which I guess is a nice way of saying that I found the ending rushed, and the interpolated telepathic contact sections seemed to mostly serve an expositional purpose) while I did find there was also perhaps a bit too much time spent on historical detail (that answer questions you didn't really ask and complicate the read). Still, the Monster is good and the climax in which our lead decides to accept the Monster's offer of matrimony, not just to save her adopted family but out of a perverse interest in escaping the mundane has some nice resonance with classic stories like "The Shadows Over Innsmouth" (or at least its cinematic adaptation in Stuart Gordon's DAGON). Finally, in "The Church In The Mountains" parallel stories tell of a young woman returning home to a strange, rural church to bury her mother, juxtaposed with a story about THAT story's author's attempt to track down the obscure source of its inspiration. This might be a better/more interesting IDEA than an actual story, as it lacks a satisfying ending when the two narratives overlap (again, might have worked better at longer length).
  
  While there is no stand-out piece here, there are eight solidly Good stories. "Bulb" - a woman who aggressively lives "off the Grid" explains to a Podcast (which has tracked her down) about the inciting event which caused her to take such drastic action. It has to do with a missing light fixture in her home and what happened when she and her friend tried to solve the problem. A piece in the tradition of
  Guy de Maupassant's "The Horla" or
  H.P. Lovecraft's "From Beyond" - with less of a "cosmic horror" quality and more in line with weird author
  Stefan Grabiński's futurist art/force concerns - that's told as a transcript of a cancelled podcast interview, with related emails and message board posts. A solid story (and origin of the overall collection's title). In "The Puppet Motel" a woman arranges check in/check outs and cleanings for a friend's Air B&B apartment, but finds that the place seems to exert a disorientating effect on anyone who stays there, causing illness, accidents, arguments or just odd effects. And so she faces a question - can a place be haunted if there is no history of or reason for a ghost? And on her last visit she gets something of an answer... even if it's one she didn't want to know... This story is quite good, a
  Thomas Ligotti-like riff on the same set-up found in
  Anne Rivers Siddons' novel
  The House Next Door. It would make a good segment/episode of an anthology film/show, with some powerfully creepy imagery. Meanwhile, a group of friends realize that a rundown, ominous house in their neighborhood seems to be surreptitiously moving closer to their own, street by street, in "Come Closer". But an attempt to confront it (or its occupants) directly leads to further problems. This story has a great hook and a nightmarish ending, and succeeds by realizing that no direct answer to the mystery is needed, only more mystery... A woman suffering periodic insomnia resorts to a conceptual therapy in "Sleep Hygiene" (which we presented on Pseudopod
  here), but as she maps out a comforting, repetitious dream geography, that place seems to be overwritten by a beckoning, malignant realm that repeatedly leads her to a circular pit and what lies at its bottom. This interesting story is something like INCEPTION crossed with Lovecraft's
  The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, with a Ligotti-esque spin. It's effectively weird while going in unexpected directions, and quite a good read.
  
  A young couple, the wife pregnant, begin to smell a rancid odor, while hearing strange music and an insistent voice at the same time every night, in "Always After Three". But trying to solve the problem only worsens it... A weird, eerie tale that, while more about building a strange atmospheric momentum than tracing a narrative arc, is still a good read. In "Venio" (presented in a slightly altered form on Pseudopod
  here) a quartet of friends in a fiction writing group try an imaginative prompt that creates a door for an unknown force to enter our world and threaten them. A compact little weird tale with a great hook and some good character dynamics - punchy and enjoyable, it put me in mind of a modern take on
  Richard Matheson. In "Distant Dark Places" a reporter tries to track down her ex-lover, an intriguing but morbid astrophysicist with some rather dark theories about the universe, and finds that she now seems to be informing the rhetoric of a doomsday cult (who believe in an early astro-catastrophic origin for the moon). But as she races to confront the woman, we begin to wonder if the cult and everyone else is being played by the scientist... A solid piece of cosmic/catastrophic horror (
  Immanuel Velikovsky by way of Lovecraft) of astronomical proportions, the climax almost plays as a deliberate inversion of
  Arthur C. Clarke's "The Nine Billion Names Of God". Finally, the book closes with "Cuckoo", a monologue from a faerie being approached by parents looking to replace their problem child (so, a calculated changeling scenario), this opens up the situation for some reflections on changelings, parents, children and how the faeries resent humans. Nice.
  
  And that's a wrap.
• 
  Jessie (Zombie_likes_cake)

  Gemma Files has been on my radar for years now, so I'm glad I can finally can make a check mark behind this Canadian Horror writer. And Canadian the writing sure is, Files makes a point to let the setting come through in each of these stories. One of my favorite aspects of this collection is how it was very urban, for most of these we are in Toronto; in the second half we find more that are set in the Ontarian wilderness. I feel like city settings are a little underrepresented in Horror and Files does a great job on weaving this setting and the themes of the stories together, but most of all it was such a fun experience to me to read this during a visit to Toronto.
  
  Another thing that really worked here was the build up and atmosphere: Files infuses her stories almost from the first line on with a strong feeling of dread that then continuously spirals to its finale. I mean, look at the title: that is exactly the feeling you will find in these stories, you can sink your teeth into this sentiment. The title appears word for word in the book for a reason.
  The endings I feel more mixed about, sometimes they were just perfect, other times it was bit too unfinished for my taste or for the particular story (sometimes the unfinished did match the story in questions though and I liked that!). Sometimes it got very left field and cosmic with, for example, tentacly monsters living in walls popping out: that's not my jam. I really like her writing but there were a good amount of stories that I thoroughly enjoyed for 2/3s and then had a more lukewarm reaction to the ending.
  
  I also thought that 15 stories were maybe a few too many, they are all of solid length and some definitely blurred together the more I read. So I think a tighter selection could have made it easier for me to rate this collection, now I am caught between stars but am apparently willing to round up. It also makes it harder for me to name favorites, these are all kinda similar, kinda similarly engaging, kinda similarly fascinating and dreadful. Even the themes often share common ground: the anonymity of cities and apartment life, coping with past trauma, several stories touch on the Canadian (Horror) film industry, found family vs actual families, insomnia: the hidden terrors in our everyday life that then explode into bigger dimensions. A really solid collection that could have used some minor streamlinig.
  
  3.5*
  
  My top stories, this time in no particular order:
  This is How it Goes/ The Puppet Motel/ Come Closer/ Sleep Hygiene/ Thin Cold Hands/ Look Up/ The Church in the Mountains/ Worm Moon
• 
  Zeke Gonzalez

  In That Endlessness, Our End is a dark and fantastic collection by Gemma Files about families, knowing (or not knowing) yourself, and untraditional hauntings (of places, people, and even planets). The prose is imaginative, thought-provoking, and intimate; I always look forward to reading more by Files!
• 
  Nisar Masoom

  I am no stranger to short-story collections especially those belonging to the horror genre. Clive Barker’s Books of Blood 1-3 were my entry into the adult version of horror. Of course, I have R.L. Stine to credit for my introduction to horror literature as a whole starting with Goosebumps and blossoming with Fear Street, but due to R.L. Stine’s lack of talent in writing horror for adults (read my review of his 2nd adult-orientated horror novel Red Rain here) I had to look elsewhere for inspiration.
  
  Clive Barker opened up the gates of hell for me. His prose is the epitome of dark fantasy, and despite my dislike of the fantasy genre as a whole due to too much description, the short-story format limited the word count and hence also shortened the visualization.
  
  Over the years I have read and reviewed countless horror short-story collections (check them out here) but I got so desensitized by reading new entries in the format that I began reading less short-story collections than usual, and those that I did read during this phase were not worth reviewing at all.
  
  I had almost given up on this format then along comes Final Cuts (2020) with contributions from authors brilliantly compiled by editor Ellen Datlow. You can read my review of Final Cuts here and one of my favorite tales in that collection is Cut Frame by Gemma Files.
  
  Forward to 2021 and I am reviewing her latest collection aptly titled In That Endlessness, Our End and it has taken me back to the young man I used to be when I was going through the pages of Barker’s Books of Blood. I thought Stephen King’s The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, Ellen Datlow’s Final Cuts or even the Mark Matthews’ edited Lullabies for Suffering would rekindle my first memory of reading a Barker story but it wasn’t until I began reading In That Endlessness that I felt born again.
  
  Every story seems to be written by a different author while yet incorporating Gemma’s signature style. In a way this book is like The Vampire Diaries’ first season which improved episode by episode as this book gets better and better the further along you get into it. However, here every story is not better than the last as was the case with TVD S1, but rather, each yarn complements the next.
  
  With 15 stories to choose from, I have managed to select 3 of my favorites (in no particular order) but please keep in mind that every story is awesome and not only is it rare not to find an average story in an overall awesome anthology but it’s even rarer to NOT find a bad story in a collection written by a single author. In That Endlessness, Our End is the exception to the rule.
  
  3 Favorite Stories off of In That Endlessness, Our End
  
  Cut Frame: My introduction to Gemma Files’ writing via the anthology Final Cuts is the 5th entry in this collection’s table of contents. This story is refreshing as it was mostly narrated in the form of audio transcripts and notes. I have never read a tale in this format before. It suited the theme of the overall collection just as it did the film-based horror anthology Final Cuts and I am thankful Cut Frame is a part of In That Endlessness because it is one of Gemma’s best stories and also one of the finest tales included in Final Cuts.
  
  Venio: This story is formatted in a very unique way similar to Cut Frame. It’s like a Wikihow article only that it frightens you instead of teaching you something, though its original structure and bizarre ending have taught me never to take Gemma’s work lightly no matter how safe it begins.
  
  The Church in the Mountain: If you’ve read my non-literature reviews on the site you’d know i’m a film buff so i was also tempted not to pick The Church in the Mountain in my top 3 as Cut Frame is another film-based story, and I didn’t wish to come across as biased, but The Church in the Mountain is equally dreadful and some scenes legit made me jump in my seat and thankfully I did not drop my MacBook Air on the floor in the process.
  
  In That Endlessness, Our End – The Verdict
  
  As mentioned earlier on in the review: In That Endlessness, Our End is perhaps the only collection I have read that matches Clive Barker’s Books of Blood 1-3 in terms of quality. It’s been more than a decade since I got introduced to Barker, and even though Gemma’s featured stories are not dark fantasy per se, her latest collection most probably incorporates all of the modern subgenres of horror, and thus, you get both the experience of reading a single-author collection as well as an anthology through only one book.
  
  Read this review on my website:
  https://www.literaryretreat.com/in-th...
• 
  Sara

  Gemma Files is my favorite 21st century (2000s onward) horror short fiction author. Period. I have all of her short story collections, and every one has delighted me. This one was no exception. Gemma has a way of writing that really immerses you into the story, and her approach to horror takes one to some strange, unfamiliar places, or to familiar places seen in a whole new light. I would have devoured it, but my wife and I ended up reading it aloud together haha. To me, this collection was up there with "Spectral Evidence" and "Kissing Carrion" (my other two faves of hers) in terms of story quality and diversity. My favorites were "Venio" (they've drawn a door-what's coming?), "Always After Three" (a slow-burn creepfest that really gets under your skin), "Bulb" (Lovecraft fans, you'll never look at electricity the same way again), "The Puppet Motel" (another slow-burn creeper), "Cut Frame" (a delightful tale that is very much Files about an actress who becomes something more), and "The Church In the Mountain" (another very-much-Files story involving forgotten films and their consequences, somewhat reminiscent of her novel "Experimental Film"). Gemma is the only writer who frequently writes in the second person and doesn't make it distracting or have it take you out of the story. She is a treasure, and I'm always so excited to see what she does next!
• 
  Irene

  Highly recommended.
  Probably the best short story collection I've read. Every story sticks with you. Took me a long time to read because I wanted to savour it for as long as possible.
• 
  Cristiana

  Extremely irritating short stories by an author who tries her best to write something "different" and fails.
• 
  Temple

  Gemma loves space. She loves houses and apartments. Occupancy and vacancy are more than statuses, Gemma makes them characters. She personifies space to terrorize you by either lulling you to its chambers or abducting you when you’re vulnerable.
  Gemma loves sound. She’s a foley artist with her prose and with space and sound she constructs uneasiness with acoustics, tension with (in)balance, walls of noise with eldritch distortion.
  Gemma loves control. Even the space on the page of the paper is her tool as she inserts breaks in her stories; she controls the last sentence you read for the night as you stop reading at the conveniently placed break she provides for you (she actually taunts and bullies this tactic in Venio).
  For me this collection’s worth is in the prose and not the property. Not atypical of the genre, especially in film, you can enjoy the journey more than the destination. Horror is a hard sell with a stratified fan base, you won’t please every fright snob and some people enjoy just about anything with a drop of blood. But Gemma has impressed me so much with her writing style that I’ll be following her wherever she goes. I think she’s going to do great things in her tenure with the genre. Though I implore her to publish some poetry, her elegance and grace with language would fit perfectly.
• 
  Aaron Lindsey

  Interesting and scary. My first read by Gemma Files. I loved most of the stories in this collection.
• 
  Jon

  Well dang it, it's over.
  
  Gemma Files and her writing are gifts to the world. Dark gifts more often than not, to be very sure, but gifts without a doubt. This was my first exposure to her short fiction, but it's very often just as fantastic as her long form work I've read (and that being said, Experimental Film is one of my favorite books).
  
  I didn't maybe love EVERY story here. That rarely happens. But many, the majority to be sure, reached that level of enjoyment. Her imagination and creativity scratch my mind's itch, so to speak.
  
  Big surprise to no one who knows my most recent tastes very well, my favorites included Look Up, The Church on the Mountain, The Puppet Motel, Sleep Hygiene, Cut Frame, Venio, and Always After Three.
• 
  Caleb

  Stories kind of petered off for me in the end, but way WAY better than "Experimental Film" in my opinion.
• 
  Alex

  This collection fills me with nihilistic glee. This is what creepypasta wants to be when it grows up. That claustrophobic feeling when a story makes uncomfortable eye contact, invades your personal space, and starts leaning in to take deep lungfuls of everything that you try to keep under your mask. “Venio” is an excellent brutal story about creation. “Sleep Hygiene” is one of the best variations on a dream cycle story I’ve read in ages. And insomnia renders our narrator delightfully unreliable. I love movies that probably don’t exist along with storytelling through found footage, articles, and transcripts. “Cut Frame” delivers on all of these. “Always After Three” is another unreliable insomniac haunted by a terrible neighbor. “Thin Cold Hands” is full of faeries and their inhuman perspective. Chilling. “This Is How It Goes” shows us apocalypse as psychotherapy: effective but expensive. “Come Closer” provides us a slow stalking by a voracious house and when a house is haunting you.
  
  Don’t just take my word for these being noteworthy. Some of the stories tell us directly. In “The Puppet Motel” - “Our world is far more porous than it seems...full of dark places, thin places, weak places, bad places. Places where things peer in from whatever far larger, deeper darkness surrounds us, whatever macro-verse whose awful touch we may feel on occasion yet simply can’t perceive otherwise, not while using our sadly limited human senses.” In “Bulb” - “Some people would say even a universe full of horrors is better than a universe full of nothing but us. To that, I say: Wait until you meet one.”
  
• 
  Ctgt

  This world is full of weak places, after all, where dark things peer through. Beckoning. One of which knows my name now. And I just have to live with that. I always will.
  
  Bit of a confession....I liked but didn't love
  Experimental Film and had no compelling interest in reading anything else from the author. But this collection piqued my interest when I read some early blurbs. And since I fall in to the "short stories/novellas work better for horror/weird" camp I decided it was worth a try.
  Very glad I did, this was a fantastic collection with only a couple of stories that didn't hit the mark for me.
  
  Favorites
  
  The Church in the Mountains
  Distant Dark Places
  Worm Moon
  Puppet Motel
  Bulb
  
  
  The feeling you get when enjoying music until there is one note that is out of tune or in the wrong key, just off a tad.....suddenly things aren't quite right, there's something lurking behind the scenes....waiting.
  
  
  Dark, eerie, uncomfortable...everything I could ask for in a collection.
  
  9/10.
  
  
• 
  Xavier

  I don’t have anything to add that other reviews haven’t covered (go read Carson’s in particular). This is an excellent collection. And I was able to appreciate And connect with Files’ writing much more in short form than I did with Experimental Film.
• 
  Nancy Baker

  Full disclosure: Gemma is a friend. She's also one of the most talented writers I know and I've thought so from long before we became friends. In this collection, nowhere is safe. Avoid Airbnbs, condos, family reunions, nature, the city, neglected houses, half-remembered movies, and most definitely do not do writing exercises. The prose is seductive and full of smart observation, the stories often told in a seemingly friendly first-person that hides the narrator's fate - or their knife. The stories cover everything from cosmic horror to family curses to the truth about changelings (not in the least flattering to humanity - which should be no surprise). As someone who always took comfort in thinking "At least my house is too old to be haunted", this was not a reassuring collection, as it takes the spaces we're accustomed to associating with only mundane dangers and invests them with otherworldly dread. At least I'm not likely to be in an Airbnb anytime soon. But I am sad about the writing exercises.
• 
  Hannah

  i absolutely loved this!! creepy, cosmically horrific stories about worms and cities and technology and folktales. the uniqueness and originality of each of these had me racing to see what files would do next! i also appreciated the casual and diverse lgbtq+ characters and relationships throughout a lot of these stories. absolutely will be checking out files' back catalogue and looking forward to what she writes next!
  
  favorites: Bulb, The Puppet Motel, Cut Frame, Venio, Cuckoo, The Church in the Mountains
• 
  Molly Ison

  I read 2/3 of the stories as part of a horror book club. Because I was going to miss the third part of the discussion and what I'd read so far didn't particularly inspire me, I stopped reading.
  
  I can see why people who like a certain style of horror really like these stories. To me, they felt pedestrian and vague.
• 
  James Lopez

  Started out incredibly strong, and then meandered a bit with some stories being stronger than others. Turns out, I'm not a big fan of reading in second-person.
• 
  S. Elizabeth

  There is always a moment in my dreams where space shudders and what was fine and well is suddenly not. Gemma Files’ stories contained in In That Endlessness Our End begin in that shiver just before the nightmare. It’s unnerving how preordained the descent feels, yet how abrupt. The horror is always uncharted and inevitable. Her writing feels like some of the best /nosleep narratives in their eerie inventiveness, their proximity to real life (but really there’s no comparison here, it’s just the best I can offer, is all) but with a precision of language and astonishing detail that comes from someone whose imagination has been guiding her hand for an impressive amount of time, and knows exactly how to take those things that frighten her and unleash them on us.
  
  
• 
  Billy Rubin

  I really like what Gemma Files does and how she does it, and this collection is a very engaging series of horror shorts with a very contemporary feel. A haunted Air B&B? Hell yeah! The stories are slowly revealed, and much is kept veiled, which amps up the creep factor. One niggle as a former Torontonian: King Street at Bathurst is WEST not EAST
• 
  Jonathan Maas

  This one is not for everyone, and that is meant in the best possible way - be warned that it is intense.
  
  Very good though !