”all our memories will one day come unspooled like so much string...”
— Mary Hollow, from the story A Letter to Bianca Rose
No One Came For Me is a collection of horror stories by Mary Hollow, published in 2023.
It falls firmly in the Cosmic Horror or New Weird genres, with shoutouts to Thomas Ligotti and Shirley Jackson.
Stories in No One Came For Me:
- “Into the Tandrid Loom”: a girl loses her mind in a forest.
- “A Letter to Bianca Rose”: a cryptic letter from an unnamed narrator to a lost friend.
- “Gnaw”: in the early 19th century, a Con Man underestimates his competition.
- “Coming Around”: an old stroke victim revisits the school where she was bullied as a teen.
- “The Slough Room”: the narrator reconnects with a friend to talk high school memories, leading him to discover disturbing secrets bigger than both of them.
- “Neural Mechanisms of Analgesia”: a detailed and academically sourced exposition on how pain and analgesia work.
- “The Door”: two boys break into their school and get lost in a maze of impossible geometry.
- “Sorrow’s Embrace”: set Dark Age Europe, an abbess investigates a haunted manor.
- “Glory”: a young woman shares a cab with an aging anthropologist who begins to confess his sins.
- “White Noise”: a young girl has a dark sexual awakening.
Tropes in the stories:
- Asshole Victim: The narrator in Gnaw (who is even described using this trope in the
writer’s commentary in the extended edition). - Body Horror: All over the place, but peaks with the eventual fate of the narrator in Gnaw.
- Cosmic Horror Story: Glory.
- Curiosity Killed the Cast: The Gnaw narrator escapes the danger once, but decides to go back for this.
- Disproportionate Retribution: What Maude intends to do to Susan in Coming Around is arguably already an example of this; but then it is inadvertently turned up to eleven.
- The Heretic: Bianca Rose refers to herself as such in A Letter to Bianca Rose.
- Homage: The Door is a Bloodier and Gorier adaptation of a 50's horror comic by the same name.
- Humanoid Abomination: Mass-produced in The Slough Room.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Discussed in White Noise.
- Mind Screw: It's anybody's guess what is actually happening in Into the Tandrid Loom.
-
Nightmare Fuel: Neural Mechanisms of Analgesia, once it gets into "the problem with general anesthesia". - Nun Too Holy: Carla/Margaret in Sorrow's Embrace.
- Teens Are Monsters: "I should have died around twelve", says Maude in Coming Around, because: "By high school the other kids have learned how to detach; if they despised you in life, they’ll outright hate you once you’re dead".
