Praise for Michael Stone
“Like Cat and Dog by Michael Stone rips us out of the heavy, solemn atmosphere of its preceding piece, throwing us headfirst into a maelstrom of imagination and shape-shifting action. Stone creates a vivid, fast-paced world that is both tremendously fun and relentlessly brutal. Stone’s seedy underworld of canines, felines and “mundanes” is so tight and sharp, we’re left begging for more. Another hundred pages wouldn’t have been too much.”
Back in the present day, if not quite present reality, an upper class man is hunting game in a bleak Scottish glen (Michael Stone’s The Devil’s Fauna), while interspersed with his hunt are sections from a book called The Fauna Satanica describing how certain animals – foxes, crows, weasels – are the devil’s minions. As the day progresses we begin to wonder who is hunting who, and then more worryingly in this fine and creepy tale, what is hunting what.
“Brit Michael Stone offers phantasmagoric visions of transformation in The Reconstruction of Kasper Clark. Easily the strangest piece in the book, this truly weird story is more hallucinatory and enigmatic than Jacob’s Ladder. You’ll be sure to reevaluate that facelift you’ve been considering after reading this.”
Cemetery Dance
“In The Reconstruction of Kasper Clark, every ounce of ridiculousness is played with tongue firmly in place in cheek, giving this pitch-black comedy enough of a toothy bite for any horror fan.”
“Michael Stone uses humour to put a fresh spin on an old story with his tale The Reconstruction of Kasper Clark in which a man does a deal with the devil in an effort to fix his imperfections. Stone combines surreal images, unsettling horror and social satire to create an engaging and rewarding read.”
“The Reconstruction of Kasper Clark by English author Michael Stone is a delightful romp through Hell, portrayed as a clinic specializing in plastic surgery… Stone teases, twists and tantalizes the reader from the first page to the last…”
“In this issue of the Cellar, standouts are Thursday’s Children by Lawrence R. Dagstine for its sheer freakishness and Speaking in Forked Tongues by Michael Stone for descriptions that are like watching really great special effects in action.”
Inhuman Imagination
“The shyness of the main character in Clob is handled sensitively, subtly and substantially.”
“Clob by Michael Stone continues the string of hits, with the tale of a young man and his invisible friend, who helps out when our hero needs a date, the feel good factor overcoming the essential silliness of what is going down.”
“Soapocryphal by Michael Stone takes us into a future in which people can (and do) watch their favourite soap on screens built into their wrists. The protagonist, Philip, pays much more attention to the ongoing soap than to his wife – until he becomes aware that, Truman Show-like, the events in the soap seem to be echoing the events of his own life, or even preceding them. When he finally stirs himself to check up on his wife’s visit to the ‘bingo’, going to a house with the same number as one in the soap, and finds her with another man, things turn violent. Something has gone wrong with the script. And continues to go wrong. The story, part satire, part horror, works well because soap and ‘real life’ don’t exactly complement each other, and because the central question is left unanswered. The interweaving of the show and Philip’s movements is cleverly done.”
