Excellent anthology. My favorite stories were by Nadia Bulkin, Michael Griffin, Christopher Slatsky, Brian Evenson, and Betty Rocksteady, but I liked just about every story here. Looking forward to volume 2!

I frequently review anthologies because horror and Weird fiction are genres that are often best-sustained in shorter works. (Though I’m craving more novel-length works of late.) Looming Low is the first in a proposed original series of curated Weird tales from Dim Shores, not unlike Undertow’s stellar Shadows & Tall Trees anthologies. There are many familiar names contained within, but editors Steele and Cowan have cast a wide net for what Weird means to them. While I appreciated how they kept t...

What a fantastic anthology! There's something here for all fans of weird/horror fiction.Some of my favorite stories were:“The Stories We Tell About Ghosts” - A.C. Wise“The Christiansen Deaths” - Daniel Mills“Doused by Night” - Simon Strantzas“The Small Deaths of Skin and Plastic” - Kristi DeMeester“SPARAGMOS” - Christopher Slatsky“Banishments” - Richard Gavin​​​​​​​“The Sound of Black Dissects the Sun” - Michael Griffin“Live Through This” - Nadia Bulkin“Distant Dark Places” - Gemma FilesIf one o...

Sam was kind enough to send me out an ARC of this. I'm no reviewer so I'm not going to go into individual stories and merit them, I'll leave that to more capable hands. But what I will say is that this is a first for me. Never have I read an anthology or collection where there wasn't at least a few stories that *didn't work for me* or that just didn't fit the overall tone of the volume. Not here. Every. Single. Story shows each of the authors at the very top of their game. From the longest to th...

A wonderful collection of stories by great authors.Two of the stories in this collection just melted my brain in the most blissful way imaginable."The Sound of Black Dissects the Sun", by Michael Griffin"Distant Dark Places", by Gemma FilesDim Shores always puts out the good stuff and this collection is certainly a gem.

Dim Shores: Looming Low is all things weird. A great collection with an all-star mix of writers.From children who suddenly turn into orange bouncy balls, ghost hunting apps, masks that hide true identities, doors that lead to alternate places, and deadly gardens. This is something you want to read.My top favorite stories:The Christiansen Deaths - Daniel MillsDoused by Night- Simon StrantzasThe Small Deaths of Skin and Plastic - Kristi DeMeesterStranger in the House - Jeffrey Thomas

After a run of fine chapbooks, Dim Shores has assembled an anthology showcasing some of the best authors of the weird currently working, all at the top of their game here. Kurt Fawver begins the proceedings with "The Convexity of our Youth", a bizarre yet strangely believable story of a plague which turns children into giant orange balls. From there, the tales look at a vast range of human experience through the weird lens: childhood, marriage, heartbreak, parenthood, old age; domestic and polit...

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I was very kindly offered to review this book by Justin Steele, and I am deeply honored and grateful for the opportunity.In his thoughtful and affectionate introduction, Justin Steele reflects on how this anthology came about as the result of conversations he’d had with Sam Cowan, the man behind Dim Shores Press, who has been publishing one sensational limited chapbook after another by the leading (and up-and-coming) contemporary authors in weird fiction. Calling upon many of thes...

This is an excerpt from a guest post I wrote for Kendall Reviews, "Ten Short Stories by Women in Horror You Need To Read," which included a story from Justin Steele's Looming Low Volume I:I met Ms. Warra at Readercon 29 this past July, and discovered that she’d contributed to Justin Steele and Sam Cowan’s Shirley Jackson award-nominated anthology, Looming Low, when I had the privilege of sitting with her at that very awards ceremony. While Looming Low did not take home the Edited Anthology prize...

Back in the early 2000s, there was a proliferation of speculative short fiction anthologies, a couple of which I edited. It was a kind of golden age where the internet was available as a tool, but it had not yet been saturated by so much dreck; a time when an author (or editor) still strove to have their work published in hardcopy, but when electronic communication (mostly in the form of message boards) allowed one to get one's name "out there" without having to spend a mint doing it.When I saw

Review coming soon. Overall loved it, a ton of great stories in here.

This book is worth the price of admission for the star power alone. That it contains new stories from Lucy A. Snyder, Simon Strantzas, Richard Gavin, S. P. Miskowski and Gemma Files should be more than enough to get any prospective reader to consider the book. However, the stories themselves are just outstanding.There are too many good stories to review in depth, though I know all writers crave such attention (at least, I do when I write). A. C. Wise, Michael Wehunt, Betty Rocksteady, Christophe...

I'm still relatively new to the world of weird fiction and so, when I was given the chance to review this collection for This is Horror, I jumped at it. Well, kind of slowly jumped at it - it's a huge collection with 26 full stories, many of which are pretty long.Over the last four or five weeks I've been spellbound by the collection which contains some terrific stories by renowned and emerging authors in the weird genre. Particular highlights for me were 'Dusk Urchin' by Betty Rocksteady which

This hardcover edition is copy 138 of 150 numbered copies.

... this book’s inspiring symphony of dangers to face in our times (a paradoxical end game of rapture and darkness.) An anthology with many gems, especially the Hannett and the Gavin.The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long to post here.Above is its conclusion.

I have previously read several of the chapbook releases by Dim Shores, all of which were great. They have been putting out some of the best original content from the indie weird lit scene. Of course, when I saw this anthology of original fiction by a stacked roster of weird fiction writers I knew I would be reading it sooner than later. It is a large book both in size and a page count of almost 330 pages. There are 26 stories many of which read by authors I have read before and some new ones tha...

The collection didn't initially feel as large as it proved to be. 300 pages of weird fiction short stories is big. It proved to be a good mix of familiar and new authors. A few of my favorite stories:The Convexity of Our Youth by Kurt Fawver: A great story to open with. Fawver sets the weirdness dial to 11 with an exploration of the pathology of a... bouncy plague.The Christiansen Deaths by Daniel Mills: Presented as interviews (or court transcripts) of a frontier tragedy. I'd just watched the H...

Looming Low Volume I collects some of the biggest names in modern weird fiction into one very enjoyable anthology. Almost all the stories within are good and quite a few are great. "Dusk Urchin" by Betty Rocksteady, "Live Through This" by Nadia Bulkin, "Distant Dark Places" by Gemma Files, and "We Grope Together and Avoid Speech" by Sunny Moraine stood out in particular. With the high-quality of this first volume, I'm looking forward to the anthology's future.

Not without its high points, but I felt like several stories deserved more polish and the collection as a whole could have benefited from another round of copy editing. Collections are a bit difficult to judge, since the the variety means you'll find some stories, authors, themes, and styles that you'll like, and probably just as many that you won't care for. Even authors I usually like have compiled and edited collections of stories I haven't taken to, so it's definitely a matter of taste. Pers...