Strange Men in Pinstripe Suits & Other Curious Things [Paperback]

Cate Gardner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 24, 2010

Zombies, robots, and dragons, oh my! A collection of strange, surreal, and magical short fiction from Cate Gardner.

Product Details

• Paperback: 200 pages
• Publisher: Strange Publications; paperback / softback edition (July 24, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0982026641
• ISBN-13: 978-0982026649
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 8 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,767,728 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Cate Gardner is a British horror and fantastical author with over a hundred short stories published. Several of those stories appear in her collection Strange Men in Pinstripe Suits (Strange Publications 2010). She is also the author of two novellas: Theatre of Curious Acts (Hadley Rille Books, 2011) and Barbed Wire Hearts (Delirium Books, 2011).

Her chapbooks Nowhere Hall (Spectral Press 2011) and The Sour Aftertaste of Olive Lemon (Bucket 'O' Guts Press 2009) have now sold out, and she is currently working on a novel.

Her favourite authors are Robert Shearman, Joe Hill, Neil Gaiman, Gina Ranalli, John Wyndham and Lemony Snicket.

"...a rising purveyor of high literary strangeness..." Publishers Weekly

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Twisted, twisted, twisted. March 6, 2011

By J. Brooks

Format:Paperback

This is a great collection of twisted little tales...Cate has an incredible, seemingly limitless imagination, and a talent for building the most bizarre, surreal worlds and drawing you into a day-in-the-life of the often broken inhabitants. The unique storytelling makes you want to go back and re-read right away, just to get the full "what the **** did I just read" effect. Imagine Tim Burton doing lime jello shots with Aesop, and Cate was there to transcribe the discussions. Good, mind-bending read.

5.0 out of 5 stars Grotesque Dreams of the Very Best Sort August 26, 2012

By Oddity Specs

Format:Paperback

The stories in this book are like a succession of grotesque dreams of the very best sort, the sort where you wake up and wonder if they might not be untrue and perhaps await somewhere in some twist of the day; they haunt long after being read.
They are stories whose each peculiar flavour is not only worth savouring, but to which I feel that tearing through them would be a disservice to both their twisted brilliance and to oneself.
Miss Gardner's style is one of a kind, of a weird, fantastic, grotesque, surreal, brilliant kind, and if that description sounds at all intriguing you would render yourself a great boon to read anything she's written.

4.0 out of 5 stars When you are strange ... May 20, 2011

By Wag The Fox

Format:Paperback

If you're unfamiliar with Cate's work, I guess you could say she specializes in the weird, because many of her stories are told in such a way as if you're seeing them through a funhouse mirror. "Fantasy" is a broad brush that might not do her work justice, so I'll stick with "weird."

There's over twenty stories in this collection, of varying lengths and styles. After a nice introduction from Nathaniel Lambert, the book kicks off with a one page story called "Dandelion Fluff" that works well to set the tone for the rest of the book.

A few of the standout stories for me were "The Forest of Discarded Hearts", "The Sulphurous Clouds of Lucifer Matches", "Frog and the Mail Order Bride", "The Moth Brigade", and "Trench Foot". Some stories have been published before, like "Trench Foot", which I first read online at Fantasy Magazine, while others are brand new, appearing for the first time in this collection's pages. If I had to pick a favorite, I'd likely go with "The Moth Brigade" for its blend of science-fiction and fantasy--and I'm a sucker for a good robot story.

So many of the stories have a whimsical feel to them, they border on the surreal. And what stories don't start off with a feeling of falling down the proverbial rabbit hole, carry the sensation of having already face-planted into Wonderland with a resounding thwap. Cate's stories are invariably fun to read and I look forward to when she starts cranking out the longer works, as well.