Praise for Periphylla and Other Deep Ocean Attractions

Thematic threads may connect the stories in Periphylla, and Other Deep Ocean Attractions, but Garrett Ashley creates a discrete narrative voice for each story and distinct environments in tales that finish, but do not necessarily end. In the often-macabre intensity of the stories, they also manage to celebrate the variety of a feral world and the cycles of life. One narrator describes himself as “paranoid and lonely … alone, alone, alone,” but, when it matters most, he embarks on a selfless act of escape, maybe redemption, or, more likely, just a change of scenery and threat. These stories triumph; they rise above the mire. 

—Edward Journey, Alabama Writer’s Forum (review)

Periphylla, and Other Deep Ocean Attractions is an intense read, it is teeming with life in so many forms: sea creatures (obviously) but also yak, pigs, reptiles, peacocks, snails, spiders, even single-celled organisms. Each story has its own strong voice, and in each story, Ashley manages to create a separate, memorable world. More often than not, the boundaries between human and animal life become permeable, if not invisible.

—Annette C. Boehm, Outside of a Cat (review)

Periphylla, and Other Deep Ocean Attractions is alive in every sense of the word: the writing is beautiful, the stories surprising and bright, and the pages are also crawling with creatures and our own wild, creaturely human selves.

—Ramona Ausubel, author of The Last Animal and A Guide to Being Born

Rarely have I encountered an author capable of balancing the absurd and the heartfelt as Garrett Ashley. Periphylla, and Other Deep Ocean Attractions plunges us into the depths of Ashley's vivid imagination, serving up conceits both fantastic and outrageous. Here can be found worlds where strange creatures live side by side with even stranger humans, and Ashley's best trick is humanizing his oddballs, seemingly with little sleight of hand. This is a thoroughly enjoyable and exciting debut, unflinching and unforgettable.

—Michael Czyzniejewski, author of The Amnesiac in the Maze: Stories

Garrett Ashley has created a panorama of tales with Periphylla, and Other Deep Ocean Attractions. This is a striking collection that shifts between worlds, from the creatures that inhabit the land and sea, to the two-legged humans who walk around troubled and confused, fighting to make sense of it all. These stories are a reminder that there is much beauty, and pain, in all creation.

—Michael Farris Smith, author of Salvage This World and Desperation Road

A fever-hot exhalation of wonder. In these stories, aquariums hold leviathans, amoeba people burst through fake human skins, bruises ache from past lives, and the dead return as pigs. Heady, blistering, and tender as a wound.

—Micah Dean Hicks, author of Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones

Periphylla, and Other Deep Ocean Attractions is an intense read, it is teeming with life in so many forms: sea creatures (obviously) but also yak, pigs, reptiles, peacocks, snails, spiders, even single-celled organisms. Each story has its own strong voice, and in each story, Ashley manages to create a separate, memorable world. More often than not, the boundaries between human and animal life become permeable, if not invisible."

—Annette C. Boehm, author of The Apidictor Tapes

An unsettling bestiary of narratives for SF and horror readers with a taste for unease . . . These tales raise shudders of the existential dread rather than ‘Halloween-boo!’ scares, despite such Lovecraftian mainstays as tentacles, ichthyic environments, and creature-metamorphoses. —Kirkus