I'm honestly not sure how or why I finished this. I liked one of the stories. Just one. It was hard to stay engaged, not particularly unsettling or haunting at all. Dreamy and dystopian, I think, but ultimately disjointed.

Concerning Those Who Have Fallen Asleep: Ghost Stories by Adam Soto

A one-armed Harlem Hellfighter goes in search of his specially altered military uniform while Influenza ravages Philadelphia. A man is bound to the bedside of his comatose girlfriend who haunts his mother’s dreams. A couple travels to Wyoming to visit a childhood friend who killed her abusive husband. A pair of Syrian sisters, refugees of the civil war, find themselves at a crossroads in the home of their European hosts while their dead father whispers to them words of comfort and guidance. This collection of short stories explores the quiet spaces where the living and the dead haunt one another through their choices, dreams, and institutions.

I hate giving bad reviews and would usually prefer to just not post any review than post a negative one. But as this is an advanced readers copy, I have to post something.

I’m not sure if the formatting on this copy was just weird, but I found the first few stories really hard to follow. I probably would have chosen to start the collection with a different story in order to avoid this confusion.

What disappointed me about this book is that a lot of the stories had really great ideas and occasionally even good execution at the start, but ended too abruptly or disjointedly to be satisfying. There isn’t one story that I loved from start to finish, although there were a few that I thought started out really well.

Overall, I think this was just not the collection for me. There are people who will enjoy it. I just don’t know that I can recommend it.

Favorite stories (these came so close!):

Sleepy Things
Immanuel
Ransoms

Rating: 1.5/5 stars

Content warning: infanticide (mentioned), rape (mentioned), war in Syria, suicide, pandemic, WWI (mentioned), wildfires, animal abuse, civil war, loss of a limb, domestic abuse (mentioned), sexual assault (mentioned), murder, immigrant child detention centers (mentioned)

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced copy of this book.

Alas, it happened again. I took a chance on NetGalley, and it blew up in my face.

Short ghost stories, what could go wrong?

Well, the fact that I had no idea what was going on or where most of the ghosts were for a start.

The writing, on a word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence level was not bad. I just felt like I was coming in too late and leaving too early to make any real sense of anything. And some of the stories were so short I didn’t even get a chance.

Not for me, and that’s not going to haunt me.

Thanks, NetGalley, as always, for the ARC.

Adam Soto’s short story collection Concerning Those Who Have Fallen Asleep gives the reader glimpses into strange worlds not far off from our own that explore the complexity of moving on at the end of things. Whether it’s the end of the world, relationships, or some form of an afterlife, Soto introduces characters in the midst of change and transition to focus on the brief denouements in life rather than the climaxes, which leaves the stories and their characters with a sense that there is always a new beginning.

This is an interesting collection of ‘ghost stories’ but not in a spooky or gothic sense. They are stories for a dystopian era, the writing is quite dreamy sometimes, often I didn’t realise a character was a ghost until it became obvious. People don’t usually react in a scared way, they have conversations with them in some of the stories. One is set in the future where Mars has been colonised, death conquered and AI bots carry on for any person who does die. It’s global, there’s disease in many of the stories, some violence, some set in the past or in a distorted present. There’s also lots of literary references (Borges, Kafka, Ballard and a lot more). Unfortunately some of the stories didn’t work for me at all, I just didn’t understand them but others were very good. My favourites ‘YA’ about setting up a bot to write YA books! and the title story about where people go after death, I really liked the atmosphere of this one.