"Chilling . . . Reminiscent of Shirley Jackson . . . If you loved
The White Ribbon--or the trope of sinister children generally--Stefan Kiesbye's
Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone is essential reading." --
The Paris Review Daily "Chilling . . . inflicting both terror and wonder. . . . Kiesbye digs deep . . . and comes up with horrific gold. . . . There is just one word potent enough to describe [it]: the novel is sublime." --
BookPage "As in Shirley Jackson's 'The Lottery, ' the vague setting heightens the narrative tension. . . . Too subtle to be lurid yet too spooky for comfort, this book should appeal to readers of psychological fiction and literary tales of the supernatural." --
Publishers Weekly "[A] wicked novel . . . Stunning . . . [There is a] quiet, unnerving effect [to] Kiesbye's Brothers Grimm-like prose. . . . An episodic, poetic, nightmarish offspring of Grace Metalious's
Peyton Placeand Ray Bradbury's
Something Wicked This Way Comes." --
Booklist "Nearly always startling . . . Quietly savage . . . Clinically dispassionate and chilling . . . Smack[s] of shades of Shirley Jackson and Stephen King . . . In an age when 'torture porn' still makes regular returns to the multiplex every Halloween, it's worth being reminded that novelists, especially gifted ones, can make the trespasses we inflict on others just as ghastly as any chain-saw massacre." --
Kirkus Reviews "A very elegant nightmare, so appalling and so beautiful." --
Audrey Niffenegger, author of
The Time Traveler's Wife and
Her Fearful Symmetry "By turns creepy, sensitive, unsettling, and beautifully written, but best of all, it provokes dark stirrings while always providing great pleasure. Stefan Kiesbye would be a writer to watch out for if he had not so clearly already arrived." --
Daniel Woodrell, author of
Winter's Bone "Creepy in a way that actually made me quite nervous." --
Ben Loory, author of
Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day "With a chilling twist here and there, a sly, stark wit, and a fascinating cast of lost boys and girls,
Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone is part nostalgia trip and part horror show, as honest and heartfelt as
The Virgin Suicides in its portrait of adolescent yearning, anxieties, and heartbreak." --
Timothy Schaffert, author of
The Coffins of Little Hope "A brilliant amalgam of Faulkner, the Brothers Grimm, and Günter Grass as if condensed for intensity." --
Josip Novakovich, author of
Fiction Writing Workshop and
Writing Fiction Step By Step "Quick, hypnotic, and intensely creepy. The characters are all doomed. 'Doomed to what?' is the only question, and you won't put the book down until you find out." --
Christopher Buehlman, author of
Those Across the River and
Between Two Fires "Full of dark folk magic and frightful, lurid wonder. It casts a spell, winking all the way through every grim detail and shadowy secret." --
Paul Elwork, author of
The Girl Who Would Speak for the Dead
Stefan Kiesbye has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan. Born on the German coast of the Baltic Sea, he moved to Berlin in the early 1980s. He studied drama and worked in radio before starting a degree in American studies, English, and comparative literature at Berlin's Freie Universitat. A scholarship brought him to Buffalo, New York, in 1996. Kiesbye now lives in Portales, New Mexico, where he teaches creative writing at Eastern New Mexico University. He is also the arts editor of Absinthe: New European Writing. His stories and poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and his first book, Next Door Lived a Girl, won the Low Fidelity Press Novella Award and was praised by Peter Ho Davies as "utterly gripping," by Charles Baxter as "both laconic and feverish," and by Robert Olmstead as "maddeningly powerful."