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    Visions Through a Shattered Lens
    Unavailable
    Visions Through a Shattered Lens
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    Visions Through a Shattered Lens
    Ebook589 pages9 hours

    Visions Through a Shattered Lens

    By Gerard Houarner

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    What visions may come, when peering into the darkness through the shattered lens of a broken world:
    —the sins of the father being vested on the son in "The Chain-Lynched Man."
    —the nature of angels, the price of their existence in “The Unborn.”
    —the horrors of drug addiction, in "Bone House."
    —Lovecratian cosmic dread, with a distinctly un-Lovecraftian heroine, in “Out of the Shadows.”
    —the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet manifesting herself in New York City in "Finding the Lost Children."
    —the Apocalypse, lurking on the periphery in 9/11 tales “Signs of Death" and "Things I Wish I Had Not Seen,” stepping out for a view from other perspectives in “Dead Ground” and “The Changeover.”
    —the ending and breaking of gender and sexuality in "Clown Fish."
    —the secret hard edges of "Those Who Cast Shadows."
    —the path that should not have been taken in “On the Road.”

    Visions Through A Shattered Lens presents the twenty stories, 9 original to the collection, plus two new additions to this Crossroad Press edition, all searching for meaning in the splintered realities of our existence in shadows and corners, among old gods and goddesses reborn in a modern world, in twisted faith, apocalypse, loss and transformation.

    Other stories included in this collection are: "Visions Through a Shattered Lens", "Bui Doi", "Children in the Moonless Night", "Born from the Womb of Forever", "Like Tears, Cast in the Steps of Her Mother", "The Mutilation Missionary", and "Bones of the Maker".

    What others have said:
    In his fourth story collection, native New Yorker Houarner (Painfreak, etc.) offers 20 tough, uncompromising horror tales, nine of which are previously unpublished. No reader is likely to enjoy all the stories, with their mostly urban settings and in some cases overly familiar themes, but there’s something here for every taste in adult horror.”
    Visions Through A Shattered Lens, Publishers Weekly, October 14, 2002
    Houarner's greatest strength is, hands down, his versatility of idea and style. In this collection, we experience the grand, almost poetic tales for which the author is often lauded, the ones that sweep off the pages in a lush beauty......and trail blood in their wake. Naturally, the old horror standards of pain and loss are also in abundance, but this collection has a more playful resonance, a wider breadth of ideas and stylistic forms, than some of his earlier collections, and it's all the stronger for it. Gerard Houarner is rapidly shaping up to be one of the finest horror authors in print today through such divergent works as THE BEAST THAT WAS MAX, PAINFREAK and others.
    Visions...., Richard Laymon Kills site, 12/02
    Visions Through a Shattered Lens does indeed offer a skewed portrait of the realities, both seen and unseen, that encompass the mysteries of our existence. This is powerful, primal work by a far from ordinary writer. It taunts with concepts too large to fit on the screen of the mind’’s eye, illuminating just enough of what can’t be clearly conceived to terrify and intrigue, while maintaining the essential mystery of enigma. This is the most definitive collection yet by an author who’’s only begun his journey of morbid discovery.
    Visions....., Hellnotes, Vol.7, Issue 3, January 16, 2003
    “...Houarner is a good writer, and he constructs some unusual plots...”
    Joe Bob Briggs.com, 5/03

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCrossroad Press
    Release dateJan 24, 2016
    ISBN9781311779366
    Unavailable
    Visions Through a Shattered Lens
    Author

    Gerard Houarner

    Gerard Houarner fell to Earth in the fifties and is a product of the NYC school system and the City College of New York, where he studied writing under Joseph Heller and Joel Oppenheimer and crashed hallucinogenic William Burroughs seminars back in the day. He went on to earn a couple of Masters degrees in psychology from Columbia University so he could earn a living. He’s worked in Hells Kitchen, on the Lower East Side at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, and in the Bronx at the start of the crack epidemic before settling into a quiet, contemplative and genteel career as an uncivil servant at a state psychiatric center. Married in a New Orleans Voodoo Temple, he and his wife, writer and poet Linda Addison, reside in a house decorated in Nouveau African Native French Goth Tribal Fantastic atop a hill in the Bronx. His publishing career includes three novels The Bard of Sorcery, The Beast That Was Max, Road to Hell and over 240 short stories published in a variety of magazines and anthologies including Cemetery Dance, Weird Tales, Midnight Premiere, Brutarian, City Slab, Flesh and Blood, Deathrealm, Borderlands, Damned: An Anthology of the Lost; Mojo: Conjure Stories;Dark Acts, and others. Story collections include Painfreak, I Love You And There Is Nothing You Can Do About It, Black Orchids from Aum, and Visions Through a Shattered Lens. He has also edited or co-edited three anthologies: Going Postal, Dead Cats Bouncing and Dead Cat's Traveling Circus of Wonders and Miracle Medicine Show (both with the artist GAK). In addition, he serves as Fiction Editor for Space and Time magazine. People seem to talk most often about his continuing character, Max, a supernaturally endowed assassin, as well as Dead Cat—a series of collaborations with the artist GAK about, like, you know...a dead cat. Fifty-plus years into life, he has come to believe he is the kind of person who wandered away from the village at a tender age, spent too much time in the wilderness, and these days is allowed to return only on ceremonial occasions or to scare the little children. He also believes, on cold and rainy days, that his purpose in life is to serve as an example for others, much like the crucified humans at the edge of the desert in the original Planet of the Apes, or rebel gladiator slaves along the Via Appia. On better days, he sees himself standing at the crossroads of the psychological and the supernatural; the real and the surreal; the past, present and future; waiting for some thing to come along, take his soul and leave him with the voice to tell anybody who will listen the story of how it all happened. He continues to write whenever he can, mostly at night, about the dark.

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