Nowhere More Haunted than Home: A review of Autumn in the Abyss by John Claude Smith

From the William Burroughs epigraph to the closing story that’ll make you rethink confronting the person knocking the back of your seat in a cinema, this is a collection of distinction, told in a rich, bold style with unifying themes, images and characters. It would be worth the price of admission for the title story alone, about the disappearance of poet Henry Coronado after a public reading turns into an invocation, of evil. The narrator, researching the poet’s life for a possible biography, becomes drawn into the literary mystery. Like him, you’ll be checking over your shoulder as you read.