Praise for ANONYMA:
“Anonyma is a lush phantasmagoria as well as an all too real nightmare. The talent and strength of Farah Rose Smith shines on the pages as it shines through the darkness.”
– Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Cabin at the End of the World
“Anonyma is a hallucinogenic, decadent vision-quest in response to severe physical and emotional abuse and existential dread. The literary landscape behind this novella is astonishing in its scope and in the genius of its imagination. At times, I was favorably reminded of Les Chants de Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont—or rather a brilliantly feminist response to that surreal, visionary work. There’s a dark triumph in Anonyma’s visceral and supernatural suffering and (at times) self-defeating exploration of identity, which is paradoxically inspiring. Anonyma evokes a plaintive yearning for the nurturing of life, both the wounded persona’s own and the lives of those female multitudes inside of her.”
– Jon Padgett, author of The Secret of Ventriloquism
"ANONYMA is an explosion of language and imagery, dense and uncompromising. Filled with beauty, horror, and a cleansing rage, this book casts a searing eye over the corrupted relationship between women, men, and Art. A decadent treat."
-Nathan Ballingrud, Author of THE VISIBLE FILTH and NORTH AMERICAN LAKE MONSTERS
The history of art is littered with Great Men and the Muses they use as stepping stones to brilliance. In this shockingly lyrical, endlessly rich and luxurious nightmare of a novel, the Muse turns. Yet, it is not so much a tale of vengeance or comeuppance as it is a heroine's journey, as Anonyma survives doomscapes almost beyond imagination and the transgressions of mere men, mere artists, survives the horrors imposed upon the feminine to rediscover her own magic and power. Anonyma, novel and narrator, holds up a dark mirror to our paradigm of art as a kind of device for reducing women to Platonic ideals while staging theophanies for men. But she also holds the mirror to herself, her sisters, even, daring to hope, a daughter. Full of blood and love and despair and courage, this is a novel like few others I have encountered.
– Jayaprakash Satyamurthy, Author of WEIRD TALES OF A BANGALOREAN
"Farah Rose Smith’s Anonyma is both passionate and despairing, showcasing a distinct point of view and a powerful aptitude for the relationship between content and form. Smith’s writing evaluates the darkest possibilities of artistic narcissism and self-loathing, bolstered by bleak philosophical insight and gorgeously lyrical prose. Essential reading for admirers of dark literature.”
– Mike Thorn, Author of DARKEST HOURS
"The painful intensities that Farah Rose Smith choreographs in her fiction are genuine, and urgent. For sensitivity, and for focus on the power of individual words, she is unmatched."
-- Michael Cisco, author of UNLANGUAGE AND ANIMAL MONEY
"Formidable would be an understatement, if one were talking about Farah Rose Smith's recent narrative ANONYMA, which retains a reality of its own, singular in that Jacksonian sense, and perpetuating a personal mythology that speaks of haunts in several senses. You better get this before it gets you."
—Duane Pesice, Author of BEFORE CRAZYTOWN and Itinerant Editor
Praise for OF ONE PURE WILL:
"I have become a huge fan of Farah Rose Smith. This collection of haunting, lyrical, visceral stories is a maximalist writer's dream come true. These stories will hypnotize you, transform you, fill you with longing, and set you free in a never-ending forest filled with awful possibilities."
—Richard Thomas, author of DISINTEGRATION, and BREAKER (a Thriller Award nominee)
“In Of One Pure Will, Farah Rose Smith deftly intertwines the oneiric, the mystical, and the brutally physical. This is a dark, elegiac collection from a powerful and unique new voice.
- Matthew Bartlett, author of GATEWAYS TO ABOMINATION
Of One Pure Will is a haunted mirror in a palace ballroom: it gilds and filigrees the ghosts of the familiar with an opulent darkness, populating its reflected world with shades of uncanny and elegant horror. An echoing fanfare of fever dreams, the lush density of imagination and intoxicating craft on display establish Smith as an unmistakable talent.
—Gordon B. White, author of AS SUMMER'S MASK SLIPS and ROOKFIELD
"In the eerie fiction of Farah Rose Smith we see a vital, unsettling voice, meticulous in the darkly intricate phantasmagorical labyrinths she presents. She guides readers through a world of unusual birds and curious machinery, uncertain dreams and weird moments you must experience for yourself. Of One Pure Will provides an excellent introduction to her work for new readers while her regular readers will be delighted to have so many of her finest stories collected together in one volume. From the titular "Of One Pure Will" to a "Delirium of Mothers" or "Rithenslofer (The Corpses of Mer)" these are elegant tales of chilling beauty that accomplish much in their frequent brevity.. Dance, art, waves and pain, whatever she turns our attention to, she consistently transforms into something just short of a majestic poem rumbling, ominous raven-stuffed storm clouds at the periphery of your imagination. They'll linger with you long after you've put this book down. Not to be missed!"
—Bryan Thao Worra, Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association President (2016-2022)
“Written in dense and luminously poetic prose, Of One Pure Will reads like a series of hypnotic dream-visions. Steeped in fantastical imagery, these stories contend with humankind’s capacities for cruelty and deception, pulsing with an undercurrent of weird Gothic romance. Farah Rose Smith is a highly talented, compelling, and distinct voice in the world of dark speculative fiction.”
—Mike Thorn, author of SHELTER FOR THE DAMNED and DARKEST HOURS
"To read Farah Rose Smith's prose is to walk through a dark, ornate museum. The walls are covered in vivid, decadent paintings of surreal nightmares. A low cacophony of discordant music, screams, and ancient languages echo through the halls. Take the tour."
—Ben Arzate, author of ELAINE
“With her splendid collection Of Pure Will, Farah-Rose Smith manages to reinvent cosmic horror with an idiosyncratic world of her own. Slow apocalypses, haunted parallel worlds, charismatic monsters and shattered personalities will haunt the reader for a long time, like a delicious and rare poison. If Anais Nin had written horror instead of erotica, she could have penned down such stories. Both luxurious and unforgiving, Of Pure Will is an instant and welcome classic in a genre that craved both renewal and a genuinely original feminine touch.”
—Seb Doubinsky, author of MISSING SIGNAL, THE INVISIBLE and PAPERCLIP.
Praise for THE IRRATIONAL DRESS SOCIETY:
"A delirious, reeling historical burlesque composed of linguistic bullets and gemlike rhetoric"
-Michael Cisco, author of UNLANGUAGE AND ANIMAL MONEY
"Putting down a copy of The Annotated Oscar Wilde and picking up this manifesto, this "vintage from another world", I seem not to have skipped a beat. Out of The ID of one Farah Rose Smith comes this call to arms for Irrational Dress and Self-Creation as The Highest Form of Style, while at the same time a decadent wish-list for imagination's boudoir."
-The joey Zone, Somewhere in The 19th C.
"A curious and wonderful fable in which the odd is beautiful, the beautiful is dark, the ideas are strange, the strangeness is bittersweet, and the conclusion is deeply satisfying."
- Rhys Hughes, Author of ORPHEUS ON THE UNDERGROUND
Praise for THE ALMANAC OF DUST:
“In the shadows of a vast, mysterious Silver City, a scholar struggles to interpret the secrets of a mystical almanac, while his wife burns away into the dark and deadly visions that embrace her…Farah Rose Smith’s THE ALMANAC OF DUST is a voluptuous tale of obsession, seduction, repulsion, and love, a meticulous wonderkammer of prose that will draw you in, seduce you, then leave you wandering its pages, lingering over every beautiful word and phrase with as much awe as that bewitched scholar. THE ALMANAC OF DUST is a perfect jewel of decadent fiction.”
-Livia Llewellyn, author of FURNACE and THE ONE THAT COMES BEFORE
"Reading THE ALMANAC OF DUST by Farah Rose Smith is akin to ingesting a hatful of magic mushrooms while blithely traipsing through the haunted ruins of Petra. You will emerge--if you ever do--utterly and forever transfigured. Her elegant, baroque, yet meticulous prose vividly and somberly limns a tortured love story, an alchemical quest, and a civilizational apocalypse. The alternately febrile and desultory ramblings of Bhodi Xeussofi--both across fantastical landscapes and through arcane spiritual and intellectual dimensions--will recall to the lucky reader the work of such past giants as William Hope Hodgson, J. K. Huysmans, Tanith Lee, Ben Hecht and, of course, Poe. Among her living peers, I find resonances with the stellar work of Darren Speegle, Brendan Connell, Michael Cisco and Jonathan Carroll. Smith's novella is destined to rank among the best weird writings of the early twenty-first century."
-Paul Di Filippo, author of THE STEAMPUNK TRILOGY, A MOUTHFUL OF TONGUES, and others
“Farah Rose Smith’s THE ALMANAC OF DUST is filled with loss, longing, obsession, dissolution, and philosophy that rings of truth one moment, madness the next, and sometimes weirdly both at once. The story culminates in a truly breathtaking escalation of gorgeous and macabre, fantastical imagery. A decadent, poetic, powerful fable from a literary artist worth your notice.”
–Jeffrey Thomas, author of PUNKTOWN
“THE ALMANAC OF DUST is a savage tale of an alchemical romance gone wrong worthy of Orpheus and Eurydice. Once you become immersed in the soft, grey darkness of Farah Rose Smith's prose, you won't look back."
-Selena Chambers, author of CALLS FOR SUBMISSION
“A gorgeous seductive dream, loosed from the grand era of the decadents that has been circling ever out of reach, only now captured and pinned on the written page. Impossible? No, viciously possible, if I might steal a haunting phrase from THE ALMANAC OF DUST.”
-Eric Schaller, author of MEET ME IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AIR
“Dear sick soul, you have met the universe.” Farah Rose Smith’s THE ALMANAC OF DUST is a stunning work of visionary imagination reminiscent of the great Angela Carter. This numinous, experimental novelette presents the dissolution and loss of a couple’s intimate relationship, all set in a dust-choked world, like a nightmare-hybrid-landscape of Beckett’s Endgame and Hodgson’s The Night Land. In the background—via intersectional notes about and quotes from the titular, fictional tome—a bleak philosophy emerges, driven by a paradoxically dynamic, melancholic mental illness. An uncanny environmental/metaphysical catastrophe (internalized as self-neglect, grief, violence, and regret) dominates Smith’s wonderfully disjointed, powerful story/treatise. The Almanac of Dust is a book to cherish, and Farah Rose Smith is a distinctive, literary talent to watch.”
-Jon Padgett, author of THE SECRET OF VENTRILOQUISM and founder of Thomas Ligotti Online
THE ALMANAC OF DUST is hypnotic, surreal, a kaleidoscope whose colors are a thousand shades of black. Here Farah Rose Smith has wrought a fine gothic parable of illness and loss, regret and separation, peppered here and there with tantalizing aphorisms from the mythical almanac that gives the story its title. The Silver City, the setting of the story’s shattering climax, is itself worth the price of admission - a grim Tartarus of death and decay that lingers long after the reader turns the final page.
-Matthew M. Bartlett, author of GATEWAYS TO ABOMINATION and CREEPING WAVES