“A speculative ghost story, a slow-burn mystery of the ages, and a poignant character excavation all wrapped in one, DEAD THINGS I GAVE BIRTH TO is written with lyrical prose and a haunting metafiction-esque direction.”

“Thematically, the manuscript is resonant and powerful, with the allegory of Demeter and Persephone pairing well with the frayed, troubled familial dynamics explored in the story.

In particular, the exploration of Victoria’s dynamic with her mother offers an emotional intensity and fluctuation—be it in the resentment or the subtle back-and-forths—that reads as grounded and all too real. Similar things can be said with the echoes of Victoria’s troubled family past…all lingering like ghosts in the wall of the farm.”

“The commentary about womanhood and abuse in a world that hungers for violence…is heartbreakingly portrayed. Here, the nonlinear structure of DEAD THINGS I GAVE BIRTH TO heightens the fragmented nature of the storytelling, adding impact in small, lethal doses.”

“Tonally reminiscent of works like EVERYTHING I NEVER TOLD YOU, with the fraught thematic exploration of BETTY and THE WOMEN and the prose and style of DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD,

DEAD THINGS I GAVE BIRTH TO is in some ways both an elegy and an ode. Its account of womanhood, both under the blanket allegory of Persephone and Demeter and through the unflinching diving into the violence enacted on both Victoria and the women in her life, is layered and realistically tangled in a way…”

“There is deep “interactivity” here, both in the metafiction and in the fractal and non-linear nature of the structure.

There are jailers and jailed, animals both symbolic and preserved, various ways of being a captive…and this is all without even getting into the implications of war and morality; there are doppelgangers, echoes of Rebecca in different women who are so beautiful that it becomes dangerous for them.

These women are also different parts of Victoria, angles of the same face.”

“There’s a lot here about safety, about home, about vulnerability and especially “care”—what it means to be vulnerable and taken care of, and to take care of something vulnerable in a chaotic and dangerous world which exploits that vulnerability.

Motherhood (in all its iterations) is a natural concept to spring from that—as is ‘barrenness,’ both in bodies and in landscapes—and what it means beyond the purely biological. This story is a trip to the attic, as well, a reckoning with boxes and the stories they contain, much of which have to do with male-made damage.”

“Here is another excellent ghost story, but this time, the haunting is the narrator’s past actions. The narrator’s matter-of-factness clobbered me, especially the lines: “I never knew his name, just his crime,” and “We could only see heat, so I didn't know what color his clothes were," as well as the impersonal, yet deeply meaningful, name the narrator gave the ghost–One. Oof. The title is also brilliant. It brings home the fact that the narrator and the ghost have an irrevocably intimate link despite not knowing each other. Describing his killing as a birth is a stunning, chilling truth.”

“This is the story you don’t want to read but you know you must. It stays with you whether you want it to or not. Truth is like that—hard to digest but even harder to ignore.”

“Sometimes you read a story that hits you hard, like a solid left to the gut.

Wow...this was a hell of a gut-punch - the kind of story that takes your breath away. All I can say is EXCELLENT....”