Fifteen recent (the earliest appears to have been published in 2017) stories by Canadian writer Gemma Files combine to make a terrifically terrifying collection,
In That Endlessness, Our End. Files doesn’t exactly expose the horror found in the mundane because, once the thin veneer of normalcy is scratched, very little is mundane about her fictional realm. Dreams are always nightmares, residences provide discomfort, offspring are no delight, encounters with the eldritch are common, families are invariably dysfunctional, relationships tend toward the doomed, and even the electrical grid is a thing to fear.
The indelible lead-off story, “This Is How It Goes”, is about a particularly nasty apocalypse in which folks literally split into two; the original and the “dupe” then fight to the death. A women trying to wire lighting in her condo discovers electricity can be evil (and that we all doomed). A character in “The Puppet Motel”, one of the best stories in the book, s