You won't find any vampires, werewolves or other traditional monsters in Hirshberg's horror fiction. You'll barely even find horror in The Two Sams. What you will find are five stories laden with human sorrow and a palpable atmosphere of dread. These stories are not so much written as they are crafted. You can practically see Hirshberg's professorial, academic fingerprints on every carefully sculpted line of text. The five stories collected in The Two Sams quietly wrap you in a cloak of uneasine...

If you want to hear our in-depth discussion of this collection, check out our podcast:http://nachonomics.com/hnh/2016/6/1/e...http://nachonomics.com/hnh/2016/6/8/e...Well-written "New Yorker" style fiction that makes repeated use of the same stylistic tricks and an accumulation of exotic and fascinating details that don't really play any role in the actual narrative of the stories. Calling this horror is a real loosey-goosey playing with definitions, and anyone expecting ghosts in these "ghost s...

Superb collection of "ghost stories" that function better as meditations on childhood, grief, loss, memory, and phobias. The final, title masterpiece studies the effects of miscarriage on the would be parents and is a subject not often addressed in fiction and most certainly not this perceptively. All the tales hang with you because this author has that rare uncanny ability to hit the right notes for an emotional punch in the heart. Hirshberg is a rarity. Highly recommend.

I read this when it first came out. I had found it while browsing the San Francisco Library. I loved it. I couldn't remember the title (until tonight) and have wanted to read it again! Yay! This book is a gem!

Hirshberg seems to have a little trouble with muddiness in a lot of his endings, but "Mr. Dark's Carnival" is pretty much the only ghost story ever to make me yell aloud as I read. The guy is brilliant.

Glen Hirshberg's ghostly tales are firmly in the tradition of the literary short story. These are disciplined short works of plain style and poetic detail in which credible characters experience appropriate revelations and the narrative efficiently reaches a well-executed (although never melodramatic) climax. You will find no pulp horror here, and yet you will indeed find much to disturb and to terrify. Henry James, Edith Warton, Walter de la Mare and Robert Aickman once did wonders with this so...

Hirshberg's novel The Snowmen's Children, a genuine, bracing remembrance of a childhood terrorized by a serial killer targeting children in the narrator's neighborhood, surprised me when I read it a few years back. I wasn't expecting much from this new champion of horror fiction. The genre, except for a few glaring exceptions, and they are blindingly glaring, is a bit of a joke, and most books disappoint, not only on the horror level, but also from a basic storytelling level. I've read absolute

I've been dancing back and fourth on how well I liked this and decide that the style was what made it stand out. It was much more literary than most ghost stories I've read. I found this approached worked well. It was chilling at times and thoughtful at others. There is a nice mix of range in the stories, my personal favorite was Mr. Dark's Carnival. I think what is neat is that the style will make it more suited to readers of all types of work rather than just pinning it in the horror genre.

This is probably the best collection of horror stories I've read in a long time. While the stories seem "high brow" and literate, they still carry a chill about them. And yet, the mass slaughter is traded for more of a quiet, implied sense of doom. Hirshberg relies on atmosphere, but his stories are definitely not dry. My favorites are "Struwwelpeter" and "Mr. Dark's Carnival", although I'd say that "The Two Sams," the title story, hit me hardest.

These stories are incredibly well written, multilayered and eminently re-readable. If you're wanting something utterly terrifying, you'll be better off looking elsewhere...for the most part. These tales are along the lines of the ambiguous, haunting stories of Robert Aickman, but with more emotional impact than his generate on average. They're haunting because Hirshberg holds his cards pretty close to the chest, then when the story is over we go back and put all the pieces together, with a lot o...

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERSYep, that's right, folks. I'm giving this book of short stories zero stars. It was terrible. I felt that there were good ideas in some of the stories, but the execution was lacking.I was clued-in by the intro by Ramsey Campbell, which went on, and on, and on, and on, and ON about how wonderful these stories are and what a great writer Glen Hirshberg is. Campbell was trying awfully that hard to convince readers of this book's greatness, and that right there raised a r...

Five short stories of varying power. The second, Mr. Dark's Carnival, is one of the best ghost stories I've ever read.

In the title story of this unique collection a husband struggles with the grief and confusion of losing two children, and forms an odd bond with the infant spectrals that visit him in the night. "Dancing Men" depicts one of the creepiest rites of passage in recent memory, when a boy visits his deranged grandfather in the New Mexico desert. In "Mr. Dark’s Carnival," a college professor confronts his own dark places in the form of a mysterious haunted house steeped in the folklore of grisly badlan...

I checked this book out on my way to a camping trip, hoping for some spooky fun, but when I started reading I realized that the stories were much more subtle than your traditional ghost stories. None of the stories (bar maybe one...) were your typical rustling chains, axe murder, haunted house situations. Many left you wondering if there even WAS anything paranormal going on at all. If you're looking for a more traditional heart pounding haunting, look to Mr. Dark's Carnival. Super spooky, witho...

Not horror per se, more a collection of melancholic and eerie stories. Mr. Dark's Carnival is good for those into haunted houses.

This is my first foray into Hirshberg's work (Though I did read "Mr. Dark's Carnival" in OCTOBER DREAMS) and I'm kicking myself for taking this long. Literate, stylish, with depth and emotional resonance, this is the kind of horror which peers into the depths of our consciousness and probes it for the monsters which clutch to our innermost selves. Will definitely have to read more of his work.

Hirshberg's work has always stood out for me whenever I've encountered it in anthologies. This small collection with its sophisticated style, intricate plotting, and elegiac tone place Hirshberg's stories among the best of the genre.

The vivid imagery this author paints with his words just left me awe-struck at times - Ship Wreck was an outstanding accomplishment in this bundle of short stories, beautiful, haunting, strange, perfect - I devoured this novel and really look forward to reading more by this author.

But this book does exist. Here for me electronically, a ghost? Has always existed – or at least since 2003, it seems! A book with a rollercoaster audit-trail: with bumps and invigorating dips, haunted house sections and shipwrecked scenarios through which our-foolhardy-belief-in-our-‘invulnerable’-carriage can journey, with pangs and sorrows, rites and tribulations, a paradoxically uplifting engagement with the world’s dark history as well as with personal tragedy past or present and (if neither...

****1/2Glen Hirshberg has written one of my favorite novels of recent years, "The Snowman's Children," but I've just now gotten around to checking out his short stories. "The Two Sams" didn't exactly take me by surprise, having read the very dark, very sad "Snowman's Children," but it did startle me a little just by how creepy and unsettling the stories are.There are five of them, and they're all creepy, shadows-and-haunted-house-type ghost stories. Which isn't to say you've already read these s...