SUMMARY: Places can sometimes become sentient: a collection of impressions of all the life and death contained within their limits. The city of Quantabraxis is a charismatic sociopath. Its very foundation was based on murders. It has a soul. She is beautiful, glittering, with emptiness and gleeful destruction at her core. Come to close and she will draw you in like a sinkhole drawing everything into the abyss.
The BookViral Review: Genre – Horror Stories
Effectively building dread and emotional tension as each story from Quantabraxis unfolds J B Williams gives us a haunting medley of the tragic and bizarre as she adopts a deterministically grim mindset to bring her fictional city to life. Gripping all the way, Strange Kingdom is one of those rare anthologies that leave you feeling emotionally drained but mysteriously moved by its vivid and mercurial human and otherworldly encounters with tightly wired plots and powerful themes. Structured in non-chronological fragments that form a fascinating overarching image of Quantabraxis Williams writes with such directness and such a good ear for dialogue that the characters seem real and plausible after only a few words. All of them uniformly strong without a hint of cliché as a mosaic of images gradually resolve themselves into a powerful tale of death and despair in all their twisted forms. In long-form fiction, the central precept of Quantabraxis might have become overextended and overwrought but Williams has pitched it perfectly and no doubt every reader will have their favourite story. Be it the spectacle of execution in Afternoon Viewing, the haunting I Once Was Lost or the macabre Alexia, each is chillingly vivid and lingers in the mind long after the last page is turned!
Highly original and a must-read for avid readers of the Horror genre Strange Kingdom proves a fine introduction to the mind and prose of J B Williams and is recommended without reservation.
