And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe by Gwendolyn Kiste
Journalstone, 2017
ISBN-13: 978-1945373558
Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

Every once in a while, a new voice emerges and takes the genre by storm. Remember this name: Gwendolyn Kiste will one day rule the world of dark short fiction if there’s any justice in the world of writing. The 14 hallucinogenic stories of And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe hit as hard as a sledgehammer; they are rich, brutally dark, and beautiful.

The stories captivate: each sucks in the reader, letting go only when the last word flows by. The first speaks of a woman who gives birth to birds, and is incredibly dark and endearing. Another describes a test citizens must pass to remain in society: a failure damns them to leaving, but it’s unclear how or why people fail. The story recalls the bleakness of Sarah Pinborough’s The Death House.  A few others recall the magic of what readers, as children, found in the best fairy tales, which most adults have lost the ability to see. These stories, reminiscent of Neil Gaiman’s best retellings of classic tales and mythologies, spin new twists on tired tropes to create something splendid.

Plenty has been written about the final tale, “The Lazurus Bride,” and rightly so. While it’s not the best story in the bunch, Kiste makes its second person point of view work, where most others fail. In the story, Kiste writes to her lover, who may or may not be dead, in a head-twisting wrench of a plot that displays the pain of loving someone– and how sometimes, that love may not be enough.

While praise for new writers is often overdone, that’s not the case here. Kiste seems as fresh as Gaiman, Bradbury, Braunbeck, or Pinborough. Pick this up and be ready for your mind to be turned inside out. Highly recommended.

Reviewed by Dave Simms