Daniel Mills

Would pair perfectly with other solid works I'll call "Puritan fiction," such as The Scarlet Letter,The Minister's Black Veil, and Ethan Frome. Not necessarily because of the sinister and cold New England setting (though that is present here, to astonishingly great effect), but because of the themes of guilt, old secrets, and curdled theology that run through these books. Mills steeps the reader in guilt and fear, along with wonder and horror and that sick cold sweat of old sin.… (mehr)

Among the Lilies is a rather singular collection by a writer whose prose style and recurring themes might almost be mistaken for those common to 19th-century weird and horror fiction. Daniel Mills and his protagonists amble in delicate menace through the tangibly-described natural scenery of a New England that no longer quite exists, leaving a tapestry of subtle terror creeping in their wake.

The triumph of this collection is the weight of dread that builds and builds as one progresses through its stories. Mills’s impeccable prose wastes nary a word as he spins his webs of enigmatic fear, entangling readers in mysteries without explanation that somehow reveal the world as a place both inexplicable and horrifying. Readers who appreciate beautiful writing will find much to admire here.

The only jarring note for me in an otherwise seamless collection was the sequencing that placed a story set partly in 1997 after several stories set in what sometimes appears to be and is sometimes explicitly stated to be the mid-to-late 1800s. While the tone of that story, “The Lake,” settled into something that fit the book, its rather more 20th-century themes of boys and bikes and traumatic coming-of-age experiences felt a little at odds with the other stories’ recurring themes of ill, dying, mad, and illicitly—often incestuously—sexual women and the men who are in some way ruined by proximity to such women’s pregnancies, birthings of children, and inevitable deaths. I also could not help feeling a little put off by the collection’s preoccupation with the horrors adjacent to female sexuality and illness—why is it that men must always find such horror in feminine existence?—though Mills certainly does not treat these horrors lightly, and I will add that my distaste and unease in some ways served to make the stories even more frightening, which may well have been the author’s intent.

Ultimately, though I did not always enjoy this collection’s themes, I could not help being swept away by its captivating style and the sheer quality of its sentence-level writing. I imagine I will keep an eye out for other books by Mills, and will recommend this volume to readers in search of something both excellently written and truly frightening.

I received a free digital advance copy of this title from Undertow Publications via Edelweiss+ in exchange for my review.… (mehr)

If you fancy yourself an old soul, someone born several centuries too late, and you are of a dark and rainy disposition, Daniel Mills' debut collection is likely to be your bag, and it should fit as snugly on you as the hangman's rope from the creaking gibbet. Mills transports us back to a time when America was still in its infancy and all the woods bordering New England were pregnant with infernal strangers and shadows that bore physical weight. He writes in the refined style and manner of all the old, dead masters, and he does it so wholly and so thoroughly that you might be convinced that this isn't some homage published three short years ago but a dusty, mold-eaten omnibus of fevered confessions and whispered prayers from the long-ago days of Puritans and putrefaction. His talent is best exemplified in strange and quietly unsettling tales like "John Blake," "MS Found in a Chicago Hotel Room," and "The Wayside Voices," but for this reader the pinnacle of his form comes through in "Whistlers' Gore," a tale told entirely through the cryptic epigraphs chiseled on the faces of gravestones in a crumbling cemetery. It perfectly encapsulates the feeling of reading this book: walking among the bones of the dead, leaning close, and hearing what they have to say.… (mehr)