Review: Divine in Essence by Yarrow Paisley

An irreverent and boundary-pushing collection of short stories, Divine in Essence by Yarrow Paisley is a burst of radical creativity with a heavy dose of darkness.

Playing artfully on the edge of perverse and profound, these tales descend into the casually macabre and disturbingly real, teetering between horror fiction and supernatural sci-fi. Each page brims with unearthly tales: a fever-afflicted daughter recounting visions from Hell to her mother, the soul of a young boy imprisoned in the dead eye of his father’s vexatious lover, the existential musings of a comedian’s corpse as it takes one more spin through the world, the echo-like life of a sentient reflection as it mirrors the passing of time. “The Life of Cherry,” a rapid-fire set of ten stories at the end of the collection, is a fitting microcosm of the whole – visionary, unpredictable, and exceptional fiction.

Couched firmly in the genre of transgressive fiction, but blurring its edges, Paisley’s writing is not for the faint of heart or the casual short story consumer; it deliberately drives a wedge between expectation and entertainment, immersing readers in surreal and often troubling waters. The pieces poke holes in the comfortable boundaries of reality, pushing readers into the discomfiting realm of the taboo, the anxious sweats of intrusive thoughts, and the unspoken fears that keep us awake in the night.

The prose is dense and intentionally elevated, peppered with esoteric vocabulary and visceral descriptions that maintain an unsettling mood throughout. Paisley effortlessly cultivates a chillingly calm vibe across all nine stories, but also writes with a playful confidence, tugging readers believably in one direction before pivoting sharply with a twist or shocking revelation in the final scenes, regardless of how horrific or jarring the subject matter may be for unprepared readers. This fluidity of the storytelling voice makes each new tale crisply enigmatic, which makes it disturbingly hard to stop reading.

Some of the narration comes off as high-brow recollections of terrible memories, while others have the panicked edge of a manic or fractured mind, such as young and tortured Gracie in “The Metaphor of the Lakes.” The grotesque and shocking moments in the prose – from cold-blooded violence and cannibalistic gore to forbidden pubescent desires and matricidal madness – are written to feel clinically detached and vaguely sociopathic, yet still remain vividly cinematic. Even readers who are familiar with the bizarre side of dark fiction will find their stomach in knots, or their mind twisted by the kaleidoscoping puzzles in the prose, which is a testament to the original power of this writing.

From a technical perspective, the entire collection is remarkably well edited, with every punctuated paragraph break and syntactical choice serving a mood-setting purpose, while maintaining a clear pace, which is difficult with such heady writing about harrowing subjects. The apparent thematic division of the book into three sections – “Divine,” “In,” and “Essence” – isn’t clearly mirrored in each section’s stories, but given the intentional subversion of clarity in this collection, a few enigmas are to be expected.

From the supernatural and hypersexual to the deeply divine and philosophical, this aggressively unique read expands the scope of the horror genre, asserting Paisley as an exemplary writer of dark fiction.