Category: Press and Reviews

Gestalt Real-Time Reviews on my story, “Slough”

Prior to reviewing Infinity Dreams, D.F. Lewis posted these welcome comments about my story, “Slough”, as it appeared in the most recent (and, sadly, final) edition of Best New Horror: “This is a genuine horror story masterpiece, one to help cope with our own hateful times…you MUST read this momentous story full stop.” Full review here.

Gestalt Real-Time Review of INFINITY DREAMS

UK scholar/critic D.F. Lewis has been on a Glen Hirshberg kick of late. Here’s what he had to say toward the end of his deep dive into INFINITY DREAMS: “Bowen blended with O Henry, without it ceasing to be utterly unique in itself…This now arguably most important book I have ever read …Quite staggeringly beautiful. Why is this book not more famous?“

Review of THE ONES WHO ARE WAVING in BLACK STATIC

A great review for The Ones Who Are Waving, can be found in the newest edition (64) of Black Static.  A few highlights: “Keenly felt and characterised…filled with little touches of detail that give the events a mythic and archetypal feel;” “…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. It’s a strong end to a collection that is gratifyingly offbeat, aptly fitting the bill as regards the book’s subtitle or tagline, ‘Tales of the Strange, Sad, and Wondrous’.”

GOOD GIRLS Reviewed in LOCUS

From the Locus review:  “…there is enough material in Good Girls for a novel twice its length. But the economy and grace of Hirshberg’s style allow him to fit this plenitude into a more modest number of pages, while maintaining its full emotional and thematic resonance. The novel continually returns to its title, interrogating notions of goodness. What, it asks, might the phrase ‘good girls’ mean for a mother or a young woman or a monster?… Is it possible for a monster to demonstrate goodness? It does all this while hurtling toward a climax that is heartbreaking, horrifying, and riveting.

“With Motherless Child, Glen Hirshberg embarked on a new phase of a career whose accomplishments were already many and considerable…. [Good Girls] fulfills the promise of its predecessor, and promises more to come. A third novel in the series has been announced; It cannot arrive soon enough.”  –John Langan, Locus Magazine  (Get the May 2016 edition–or a full year’s subscription–of Locus Magazine here.)

Liz Hand Reviews GG for MAGAZINE OF FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

“…by making the damaged, grief-mad, yearning Sophie the emotional center of his tale, Hirshberg ensures our attention never leaves her…. The satisfyingly gruesome surprise ending nicely sets up the third and final book in Hirshberg’s brilliant, darkly captivating trilogy.”  –Liz Hand, Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction  (Pick up a copy to read the whole review).

Jonathan Maberry Praises GOOD GIRLS on Facebook

Glen Hirshberg continues to knock it out of the park with GOOD GIRLS, the second in his brilliant Motherless Children series. This is why vampire fiction will never die.”

Posted by Jonathan Maberry on Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Coming Back from San Francisco

Spent 36 hours (12 of them driving) floating up the coast to the Bay to do a reading. I ate things I never do anymore and miss (hello, Zachary’s stuffed spinach and mushroom), drifted in the parks among the Easter egg hunters and the homeless, ghosted up and down Haight-Ashbury and the Castro (where my friend Andrew isn’t anymore) and in and out of record and bookshops with new stories coming, the way they always do when I’m drifting and ghosting.

When I went to the signing, I got met with hugs and stories from Jude and Alan, the owners of the resurrected Borderlands, and we swapped survivors’ stories like the survivors we really all are, I guess, now, and they seemed genuinely happy to see me, and the store looks terrific.

But only three people came, this time, one a former student from a decade ago (so great to see and talk to you again, Siena), plus another couple I managed to lure over with my reading, and Jude said it was the holiday weekend, and I told her you can’t predict these things, and it’s a long game, and all those things really are true, and they told me they want me back as soon as I want to come up.Still, I started home a little blue, despite the blue in the bay in the late afternoon.

Six hours later I was home with my family, and I found the review below. Which, did, I admit, chase what was left of the blue away. There hadn’t been so very much of it in the first place:

“…the novel hearkens back to great vampire novels of the past including Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot and even the brilliant Dracula by Bram Stoker’s. Good Girls manages to take some very heavy and dark topics and apply them to a collection of very real, very engaging characters….Good Girls is a reminder of what kind of literary quality it takes to make good suspense and horror. Good Girls returns to the defining elements which authors such as Poe, Lovecraft, and Shirley Jackson set up long ago while also staying true to the modern horror elements set up by masters like King and Straub.”  N.C. Patterson,  A Slice of Horror

Songwriter Thomas Anderson and GOOD GIRLS

Thomas Anderson–Thomas Anderson–one of my favorite songwriters, ever, and of the many artists I know who deserve more attention, he deserves it just about the most–and I have been corresponding and trading art for years, now. That has been its own reward. One of the best my own art has given me. But today he also gave me this, via his own page. It’s one I’m going to keep:
‘My buddy Glen Hirshberg has just released Good Girls–the second volume in his Motherless Children trilogy of vampire novels. In it, he creates a world of orphans where everyone–the living and the (un)dead–try to mend their broken families. Children, parents and lovers roam a blasted dystopia from the Mississippi Delta to the piney woods of New England, where vampires long for Victoria Spivey but settle for Ted Nugent, and everyone’s favorite podcast is by a dead girl. A land where nobody wins. But what you’re left with at the end, is what Nanci Griffith perhaps expressed best: There’s a light beyond these woods. Good Girls. Get yours today.'”

Posted by Glen Hirshberg on Wednesday, March 23, 2016