Thursday, April 12, 2007

Accolades

"Literate horror fans who have yet to encounter Canadian author Richard Gavin are in for a treat. The lyrical prose is often at a higher level than usual presentations of otherworldly demons and malevolent forces. Gavin has a knack for original plotlines. The author easily creates a feeling of cosmic dread."
--- Publishers Weekly

"Like Blackwood and Machen before him, Richard Gavin knows the inhuman yet seductive rapture of the deep woods; he has heard the ancient music on the hills. In his stories of 'sylvan dread,' his protagonists explore uncanny ravines and hillside clefts, take part in sacrilegious rites, encounter maenads and goatbrides and Lovecraftian horrors. Gavin’s prose is always quietly controlled, carefully crafted, but it inexorably leads his men and women into realms of terrifying otherness, where they are changed, changed utterly."
--- Michael Dirda, Pulitzer Prize-winning literary critic

"Richard Gavin is one of the bright new stars in contemporary weird fiction. His richly textured style, deft character portrayal, and powerful horrific conceptions make every one of his tales a pleasure to read."
--- S.T. Joshi

"Gavin demonstrates that he can pay reverent homage to the pioneers of weird fiction while forging and developing a distinctive voice all his own. Accordingly, his stories sweat and bleed the eldritch, fluidly and often beautifully."
--- Rue Morgue

"With the debut of Richard Gavin's first collection, it seems clear that a renaissance of the horror story has secretly been taking place in the small presses. These are stories that bear witness to a Golden Age of the past and evidence a new resolve in the present. Gavin's writing serves as a testament that great masters once crafted great stories...and as evidence that they shall do so again."
--- Thomas Ligotti

"Gavin's storytelling can be masterly. As with Machen and Blackwood at their best, an epiphany or illumination is achieved, though Gavin's mysticism is darker and distinctly his own."
--- Wormwood: Literature of the Fantastic, Supernatural, and Decadent

"Terrific writing and a powerful imagination on full power to the last page, delivering a sense that something vast, though often unseen, is close to each story. Outstanding."
--- Adam Nevill

"Richard Gavin is someone who can shake up horror's world with a whisper."
--- Hellnotes

"Richard Gavin's tales are genuinely evocative of the strange and alien."
--- Ramsey Campbell

"Gavin's prose is a refined instrument capable of evoking whatever person, mood, or time period he chooses."
--- Dead Reckonings

"Richard Gavin is one of the most distinctive writers of weird fiction to emerge in the past few years, with a voice that has echoes of Lovecraft, Thomas Ligotti and Clark Ashton Smith in its prose sensibility and baroque imagery, but remains uniquely his own."
--- Black Static

"Richard Gavin pens tales of grimness and melancholy, of ghosts and things much darker than ghosts...He knows how to get under your skin and haunt you."
--- Laird Barron

“Richard Gavin is probably the best horror writer in Canada. If you hear some saying, ‘Numinous,’ ‘Terrifying,’ or ‘Beautiful,’ they are either talking about the Northern Lights or the work of Richard Gavin."
--- Don Webb

"Gavin’s prose is at once poetic and powerful, confident and sublime, lyrical and muscular; his voice is that of an older era, assured, regal and stately. The words are wholly fitting for their subject matter and create a sense of dreamy languidness, which lulls the reader into a comforting embrace that often is anything but [...]Finally, the reader is forced to conclude that this is, indeed, horror, but of a literary, artistic, and subtle kind, requiring as much from the reader as it gives. Yes, there is darkness here, but it is ever shifting and occludes as much as it reveals. It is Pagan, Cosmic, and Weird. And it is wonderful."
--- This Is Horror

"[Gavin's] voice blends hints of Arthur Machen, M.R. James and H.P. Lovecraft, yet updates all three of them ably into the 21st century. Like Poe and Ligotti, he’s fond of declarative statements which sound normal on first reading, then twist into something dreadful and alien when you try to parse them further."
--- Gemma Files

"Gavin has the narrative strength and the imaginative power of a veteran."
--- Horror World