The Ones Who Are Waving

“It’s a bravura performance, the kind of literary high-wire act that makes you want to stand up and applaud…Its stories exemplify Glen Hirshberg’s ambition and ability. Here is the carnival, in all its awful, shadowed splendor.” — John Langan, Locus

“Beautifully written…keenly felt and characterized…filled with little touches of detail that give the events a mythic and archetypal feel…a collection that is gratifyingly offbeat, aptly fitting the bill as regards the book’s subtitle.” — Peter Tennant, Black Static

“Glen Hirshberg has distinguished himself as an indisputable master of the American ghost story, but it is neither fair nor quite accurate to label him a writer of genre horror…The very subtitle running across the cover of The Ones Who Are Waving.establishes that there is more at stake than mere shiver-inducing. These are “Tales of the Strange, Sad, and Wondrous.” The classification just as easily could have read “Tales of Exquisite Craftsmanship.”” — Joe Nazare (joenazare.com/category/bookreviews)

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Praise for The Ones Who Are Waving:

The Ones Who Are Waving

“‘[T}he first story in Glen Hirshberg’s excellent collection…[has] the feel of a narrative by one of the great Russian Fabulists, Gogol or Bulgakov…It is as timely a story as any Hirshberg has written…. There’s a concern with the passage of time, particularly personal time, which reaches its apex in the astonishing title story…a commentary on realizing one’s identity as a writer…and a more general reflection on the process of aging, of seeing oneself at a specific moment in the unfolding narrative of one’s life…poignant and chilling….All of these themes…are realized brilliantly in ‘A Small Part in the Pantomime,’ Hirshberg’s sequel to his 2000 story, ‘Mr. Dark’s Carnival’… If Hirshberg takes a big chance here, then his reward is a tremendous pay off, a story that expands the original while standing as its own piece of art… The same might be said of the collection as a whole.”  – Locus

“I’ve always been a fan of Glen Hirshberg’s fiction, and that feeling is only strengthened by latest collection THE ONES WHO ARE WAVING…There are echoes of Roth’s The Great American Novel here…A brooding sense of dread mounts as events unfold, and you sense that once again tragedy is fated to take place, with revelations coming hard on each other’s heels and a powerful atmosphere of nostalgia for Halloween past and lost innocence thick on the page…it is a story that ultimately asks questions about the nature of fiction, showing how it can transform lives, with the writers themselves becoming the ghosts of their own work”  —Black Static

“Hirshberg’s prose is marked by literary style; his plots are rich in nuance. To use a cinematic analogy, his stories are Oscar-season releases rather than summer blockbusters. Hirshberg succeeds brilliantly. The plots (to get into specifics here would spoil the fun of gradual discovery) don’t just resolve; they resonate. Hirshberg’s narratives are never facile; they take their time to develop (which is not to say they are slow-moving–the reader is propelled by the urge to understand what is actually going on, to discover the wonder or wickedness lying ahead). Nor do they typically present neat moral wrap-up, instead requiring the reader to wrestle with the implications of what has just been recounted. But for anyone willing to put in the work, The Ones Who are Waving pays off as a treasure trove of fine storytelling.”  —Joe Nazarre

“Glen Hirshberg’s The Ones Who Are Waving was a standout, a reminder of his achievements writing what Ramsey Campbell has called the humanist horror story. In lucid, elegant prose, Hirshberg’s stories range from contempo­rary Russia to the American Midwest, bringing his characters face to face with the legacies of past actions, in some cases their own, in others those of people they have never met.”  — Locus Horror in 2018 Review