Status Updates From All God's Angels, Beware!

interesting how many of the stories basically explore the plight of being a miserable low status male in a modern society, sometimes with fantastic or religious elements that make the overall reading experience COMPLETELY different than expected... thinking of the numinous entities in "The Fox Weeding" and "Mise en Abyme" but also the digressions into Hinduism in "Suicide Watch"

"Karabasa" is even more impressive, even if I am not 100% certain I understand it... takes place in a future where unimaginative modernist architecture has become a "rhizome blight" Japan has avoided by combining holographic architecture with its own traditional aesthetics, and the story follows a British refugee who encounters various weird characters there. Whole thing has a vaguely Kabbalistic flavour to it.

"Ynys-y-Plag" is absolutely amazing, yet another beautifully written yet profoundly existentially disturbing story about human encounters with the numinous that sets up a lot of stock horror tropes but goes in a completely different direction that is oddly consistent with the weirder corners of real life cryptozoology/parapsychology/Forteana... retains the rural Wales setting too

hooked after the Were-Sheep story... feels like the type of numinous entity encounter so highly strange even most cryptozoologists (who aren't Jon Downes/Nick Redfern/Zelia Edgar grade eccentrics) would not touch it with a 10ft pole and I absolutely love QSP's writing style: he is one of the very few authors I have encountered where I can perfectly imagine how everything in his stories looks, sounds, smells etc