A Graveside Gallery: Tales of Ghosts and Dark Matters

These stories serve as doorways to different times and different realities, allowing readers to travel from Camelot during King Arthur’s reign to the literal end of the world. There are stopovers in places both familiar and fantastical, such as 1950s Los Angeles, where a gay Hispanic teen confronts his past and himself during Día de Los Muertos, or in the final pages of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as the Monster learns how to literally become the sum of his parts. Guignard’s previous book, Doorways to the Deadeye, showcased how he integrates folklore from all over to create his own unique worlds, and he continues to demonstrate a skill for it here. Guignard dabbles in longer-form short stories that offer significant worldbuilding as well as shorter works that bear the dramatic pacing (complete with twist endings) of Richard Matheson and Rod Serling. Standout stories include the surreal “Ritual Sacrifice to the Great God of Skates” and the fun, folksy “The First Order of Whaleyville’s Divine Basilisk Handlers.”