After ‘Greener Pastures,’ fans of Michael Wehunt Can Dig Into “The Inconsolables”

Michael Wehunt is the kind of writer who is so immensely good and so incredibly unique, writing in a league of his own, that it makes writing book reviews of his work next to impossible. How does a reviewer, even as a fellow wordsmith and scribe, begin to try to capture the inner complexities and gravity of Wehunt’s work that make him so damn good? A once-in-a-lifetime kind of writer who deserves to occupy the same place of reverence of a Laird Barron or Nathan Ballingrud.

One of the ways I’ve tried to capture the breadth of Wehunt’s work is to say that he has both the shadows of Faulkner mingled with the ghosts of Flannery O’Connor haunt his work. The introduction by John Langan brings comparisons of Wehunt’s brilliant work to Cheever, Updike, Raymond Carver, and others who have shaped the American literary cannon with a distinctive power that is easy to recognize but almost impossible to embody. Wehunt is, at the end of the day, his own writer, “and a damned fine one at that,” according to Langan.

Wehunt is also a virtuoso of Southern Gothic, and definitely of quiet horror that sneaks up on the reader, then suddenly scratches claws down our faces when we least expect it. As with “Greener Pastures,” the author’s first short story collection, this new offering, “The Inconsolables” features a stellar gathering of his most recent best works. Although the scares in Wehunt’s stories are not of supernatural entities like werewolves or vampires gone awry, he does actually have a story here called “Vampire Fiction,” which I thought was cool because it isn’t a straightforward tale. None of his works are, really. He writes of hidden family horrors, of terrible secrets gone awry, and so much more.

And I would be remiss if I did not praise the haunting and evocative artwork by Trevor Henderson featured throughout the book as well.

“Vampire Fiction,” despite the title, is not a story where the stakes are about someone being hunted by a creature of the night, and the reader having to wonder how they’ll escape that. It’s more in the same vein of “Let the Right One In.” The protagonist explains that the tortured, noble souls of Anne Rice “had never interested him much, not even when the prose so often dripped into the erotic.” He goes into a kind of literary analysis about why he wished that the “unknowable stain” of the vampire would infect her words. This guy, Fulton, wants vampire of “tombs and wet dark and rot.” And he wants a vampire suspended above him so that it’s too late for him to do anything or escape. He also analyzes Dracula, then onto Stephen King, and all the while he’s doing this, he’s having family issues as well, mostly related to his obsession with vampires, which develops into a sort of mania. Very interesting tales.

“Holoow” revolves around a woman, Claudette, who has been placed in an institution by her daughter. The acute pain of no longer being able to play piano after years of it is something that Wehunt captures very well with the onset of Claudette’s arthritis. Every sentence from him is a gift, like this one:

“The piano went into storage, a useless ghost hunched under a bed sheet.”

It takes an incredible amount of skill to take something with a mundane premise that’s certainly sad, but not bold or energetic and to sustain the reader’s interest throughout because the stakes are there, but they’re not “in your face,” so to speak. Wehunt does that without batting an eyelash.

“The Pine Arch Collection” starts off with an email exchange from December 2017 about the title. Someone is giving commentary on a video of something that may have happened in the woods. A creature, perhaps. This story had a lot of “Archive 81” connections, which I loved including that the Pine Arch Research is a group of filmmakers according to the story, who are locally based. The recipient is also instructed to breathe into the camera with their own personal terror. And something equally disturbing about cult status being guaranteed. It’s definitely difficult to pull off stories that are in the epistolary format but with email exchanges. Nonetheless, Wehunt pulls it off with aplomb.

One of the other themes embodied in Wehunt’s work is that of fractured relationships between couples. This comes through in “The Tired Sounds, a Wake.” One of the things dividing the couple in this story is time spent apart but all that he’s never cared for children, nor for their sheer drama. Stories that revolve around paintings in horror are also difficult to generate excitement for, because they’re overdone and trope-y. Again, Wehunt takes things in a different direction and presents subtler terrors. Lorne and Gwen’s relationship dips and veers into unexpected events, and it plays with timeline in very interesting ways so that the reader is always questioning what has really happened.

“A Heart Arrhythmia Creeping into a Dark Room” is about as creepy and unsettling as you would expect from the title. ‘The sun lowers until it’s caught and torn on the mountains.’ Then it goes into what seems like the author writing his own autobiography or an autobiographical, fourth-wall account because he talks about the anthology called ‘Miscreations: Gods, Monstrosities & Other Horrors’ edited by Doug (Murano), which Michael Wehunt, the real author, is in. So I questioned: where is he going with this? He talks about a clumsy decay that has set in with ‘creative rust,’ which any writer can relate to instantly. Because of the virtue of this autobiographical story, there were so many points when I just wanted to burst out crying after the author’s health and the scares,

“aware of the squirming organ in my chest as an owl is aware of the animal it snatches into its beak, the texture of warm flesh, the movement of the small bones down its throat.”

It is a story about the fear of sudden mortality–that it can happen at any moment, a “disease of the heart walking upright.” Wehunt beautifully and viscerally captures the pain of this situation and it will hurt for the reader. The way he captured PTSD was also painful but so apt. Monsters and metaphors in this story combine for a heady mix that will mess with your head.

“The Teeth of America” starts as a future publication by someone in 2025, an academic perhaps. Very quickly, it becomes apparent that the Teeth of America, which dissolved in 2024, had reached about 200 members. Readers know all too well the real-life groups whose disgusting names I won’t list here, are filled with hate and their purpose is to destroy and to weaponize their hate and their anger. It’s clear from the context that this Teeth of America is one of those. And in order to get in, you had to be a member of the Pale Cross. The thing is that even though this is fiction, the sad state of the world and of the United States is such that we don’t have to stretch our imaginations that far in order to understand that groups like this have been and are very, horrifyingly real.

The story becomes a sort of investigation on books that have interviewed these sickening groups, like the Proud Boys, and exploring some of them going into occult explorations. There are transcripts of YouTube videos. Understanding the mindset of these sick, warped individuals is not pleasant. Yet it is something that we must bear witness to in the sense of understanding how they operate to dismantle them. This story revolves also around a kind of pyramid that the Teeth of America are or were building, and yes, the Klan are mentioned. It’s a very difficult story to which one bears witness, but Wehunt uses the same “Archive 81”-esque structure to great success for what is, indeed, a tale that doesn’t have to try to be horrifying, because it intrinsically is.

Meanwhile, “It Takes Slow Sips” is another story of investigations, of characters receiving mysterious information and figuring out what to do with it, and the consequences of their choices to poke further. This leads to “Is There Human Kindness Still in the World?” (trigger warning: several attempts of men to assault a woman) starts in 1997 about a couple, Jesse and Rob, and a tragedy that unfolds. Her grief morphs over time, more peaceful to “mourn in motion.” But there are dark things on those interstates and areas where she drives to try to outrun her grief. Cosmic horror takes over to complement the real-life horrors from men that Jesse deals with. Time passes. Things go in more unexpected directions, and make for an interesting story.

“An Ending (Ascent)” reminded me of the words of a museum tour guide explaining spirits to us and how even when someone has visited a town, they’ve left a mark. People asking about them after they’ve left is evidence that their spirit remains behind. It was an interesting theological discussion (even if the person we were talking about was a celebrity who had come through and filmed something here). This piece talks about how our graves will be museums. The protagonist wonders what people will think as they pass by his grave, then of the infidelity he experiences from his wife, and then onto aging, letting people die in peace, and more more.

Wehunt’s rural settings take the ordinary and make them very memorable somehow, which is not an easy thing to do. Throughout this collection, Wehunt demonstrates again that he is one of those artists who makes his craft look easy, but that is agonizingly painstaking and one feels his dedication to each story; the intentionality behind each tale. While fans of “Greener Pastures” will be happy to read even more of Wehunt’s short fiction, this new collection is a distinct entity of its own and should be on the TBR pile of every horror fan. Wehunt’s exquisite artistry deserves all the praises shouted from every rooftop.