Home Before Dark: The Collected Cedar Hill Stories [Hardcover]

Gary A. Braunbeck (Author), Deena Warner (Illustrator)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 429 pages
• Publisher: Earthling Pubns (October 30, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0976633906
• ISBN-13: 978-0976633907
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,555,759 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Gary A. Braunbeck is a prolific author who writes mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mainstream literature. He is the author of 20 books -- evenly divided between novels and short-story collections; his fiction has been translated into Japanese, French, Italian, Russian, German, Czech, and Polish. Nearly 200 of his short stories have appeared in various publications.

He was born in Newark, Ohio; the city that serves as the model for the fictitious Cedar Hill in many of his novels and stories. The Cedar Hill stories are collected in Graveyard People, Home Before Dark, and the forthcoming The Carnival Within, all published by Earthling Books.

His fiction has received several awards, including 5 Bram Stoker Awards: the first for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction in 2003 for "Duty"; the second -- also for Superior Achievement in Short Story -- in 2005 for "We Now Pause for Station Identification"; his collection Destinations Unknown won the Stoker for Superior Achievement in Fiction Collection in 2006; and 2007 saw Gary winning 2 Stoker Awards; the first for co-editing the anthology 5 Strokes to Midnight, and the second for his novella "Afterward, There Will Be a Hallway." His novella "Kiss of the Mudman" received the International Horror Guild Award for Long Fiction in 2005.

As an editor, Gary completed the latest installment of the Masques anthology series created by Jerry Williamson, Masques V, after Jerry became too ill to continue.

He also served a term as president of the Horror Writers Association. He is married to Lucy Snyder, a science fiction/fantasy writer, and they reside together in Columbus, Ohio.

Gary is an adjunct professor at Seton Hill University, Pennsylvania, where he teaches in an innovative MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction.

His nonfiction writing book Fear In A Handful Of Dust: Horror As A Way Of Life has been used as a text by several college writing classes. (A revised and expanded edition of the book will be coming out in late 2010/early 2011, from Apex Books.) Gary has taught writing seminars and workshops around the country on topics such as short story writing, characterization, and dialogue.

His work is often praised for its depth of emotion and characterization, as well as for its refusal to adhere to any genre tropes; some joke that the term "cross-genre fiction" may have been invented to describe his work -- a rumor he does everything in his power to propagate.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Continues the Cedar Hill legacy, March 25, 2006

By 

Craig Clarke "Living After Midnight: Hard and... (New England) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Home Before Dark: The Collected Cedar Hill Stories (Hardcover)

Speaking as a writer, Gary Braunbeck makes me angry. He's simply too good at what he does. It's not fair that, when talent was handed out, Braunbeck got a double portion while some of the rest of us were stuck with what we could scrape off the bottom of the bowl. As a reader, however, I could not ask for better, and his Cedar Hill stories are the best example of his inimitable skill.

All roads, it seems, lead to Cedar Hill, Ohio. All the stories in Home Before Dark: The Collected Cedar Hill Stories, Volume 2 have been reworked from their original publication to better fit within the town's myth. (Volume one, entitled Graveyard People is also available, and five total volumes are expected in this series from Earthling Publications.)

Cedar Hill, like most towns, carries a lot of pain, and that pain is Braunbeck's focus. That he doesn't sensationalize it is all the more remarkable. The best stories can actually bring real tears from the right reader, his skill at expressing human emotion within the limitation of words is so true. "Safe," a novella of how an incidence of mass murder resonates with the family's survivors (and others), is one of these. It is a thing of beauty, the story that Braunbeck calls "the central piece in the Cedar Hill cycle." (It was also based on an event he experienced.)

A lot of the pain, as can be expected, comes from familial relationships. Family emotions play a large role in the stories in Home Before Dark. In "Safe," for obvious reasons, and also in "After the Elephant Ballet," with is a sort of Field of Dreams, except with a mother and a circus. "Duty," a Bram Stoker award-winner, houses more than its fair share of familial guilt (so much that it must be at least semi-autobiographical). There are also a couple of "holiday" stories ("Palimpsest Day" and "Dinosaur Day"), both of which feature dysfunctional families. These arrive at their conclusions by opposite means while both illustrating that Braunbeck likes to help those who can't help themselves.

"Safe" is the second entry and is a hard act to follow; few could really compare. The story with that unfortunate position, "In the Direction of Summers Coming," doesn't even come close. Another story of the streets that appears later, "That, and the Rain," succeeds much more fully, even when things take a decidedly fantastic turn. "The Box Man" doesn't feel like it belongs here at all, but in some sort of themed tribute anthology. It is so reminiscent of many other classic stories in the genre (shades of Dickens, Bradbury, and Poe), that there is little room for the author's own stamp. Also, unfortunately, the ending is no shocker, having been telescoped from almost the very beginning.

The centerpiece of Home Before Dark is the novella "Kiss of the Mudman" (published here for the first time anywhere) -- a story of music, stardom, death, and the combination of notes that brings dirty destruction to the Cedar Hill halfway house. Along the way, a visit from the "ulcerations" of Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, John Entwistle and Keith Moon, Kurt Cobain, and Billie Holiday enlighten the legend of just why the greatest guitar player that ever lived was a woman. Music fans will love it, and Braunbeck's fans should not miss it. It has all the things that make his work special: the pain, the despair, and the fear, all combined but with each one allowed its own moment in the sun, each one getting its own time with your nerves before they all come crashing down, leaving you with just enough energy to turn the page.

"Rami Temporalis," about a man with "one of those faces," was, in my opinion, the best entry in From the Borderlands, an anthology with a lot of great stories. It is also included here in case you missed it, or just wanted to read it again. It's just as good the second time around.

On the surface, "Some Touch of Pity" is a Werewolf / Indian tale, but there is much more going on. In fact, it just may be too powerful for its own good; I couldn't wait to be done with it (and it does go on a little too long). The central event of the rape of a teenage boy by other teenage boys is so graphically depicted as to inject the victim's physical pain and emotional trauma into the reader. I shudder to think how I would have been affected if I identified with the situation....

"The King of Rotten Wood" discovers that someone has to be the recipient of the hidden knowledge of the dead, and why shouldn't it be the fellow who creates their memorial videos? "The Sisterhood of Plain-Faced Women" gives Amanda a opportunity to see how the other half lives (and loves, in one very effectively-written scene); she quickly discovers that "beauty gets what beauty wants." And the book closes with "The Circus of Central Motion," which is told partially in verse(!). Rhythmically, the poetry is uneven, but the content ties up the collection nicely.

Also included in Home Before Dark are excerpts from A Visitor's Guide to Cedar Hill, and a page torn directly from the local newspaper, The Cedar Hill Ally. The art of Deena Warner is represented both by a full-size illustration on the cover and by smaller, but no less evocative, accompaniments to each story's title. Some of these are particularly effective in setting the mood, and all of them are worthy of deeper perusal. The details that went into these is astonishing, especially considering that many readers will ignore them outright.

I simply can't get over how utterly true these stories feel; more so than anything I've read in a long time. Very few of the contrivances that often distract from the experience of good writing appear here. The stories in Home Before Dark are pure, as if they -- to borrow a cliche -- are being told through Braunbeck, and not simply by him. You owe it to yourself to visit Cedar Hill. Just be happy you don't live there.