Filaria
by Brent Hayward
Four inhabitants of a crumbling world:
- a drug-addled boy, living in dank recesses, sets out in an ancient car to find his ex, who has mysteriously vanished overnight;
- a privileged girl, obsessed with the past, and exiled by her esteemed father, learns more about her long-vanished ancestors than she ever could have wished for;
- an old man, on his hundredth birthday, deserts his quiet post as an elevator operator, climbing the great shaft in hopes of seeing the fabled topmost level before he dies;
- and a fisherman, seeking answers to why his once-vibrant wife is now chronically ailing and wasting away, begins a quest to find and confront the god of all gods.
Reviews - What's Being Said About Filaria
From its gorgeous cover to the typesetting, Filaria looks and feels like a book that should have been published by a major house—no small feat for the first outing of a start-up publisher. . . . Filaria is a startlingly original and unsettling vision of humanity's possible future, blending post-apocalyptic SF with the suspense and weirdness of Lovecraftian horror.
– Chadwick Ginther, McNallyRobinson.com
Filaria is a great read, crackling with invention, energy, and suspense.
– Alex Good, Quill & Quire
(Filaria) handles the basics of entertaining storytelling so well, balancing plot, character, setting, prose, and pacing, while encompassing core themes of both SF and horror. . . . The initial impression is of a Gene Wolfe novel, a Whorl-like generation starship or a tower on a dying Urth; or perhaps a VanderMeerian Venis . . . (Filaria is) horrific because there is no external threat, nothing supernatural. The spotlight is front and center on human nature: how tenuous the human species is, the things we do that compromise our own chances, and the self-destroying roles we force individuals to play in our fight for survival. And yet, this in turn leads directly to the optimistic side of Filaria: the idea that the science of our technology and the science of our biology may both work to carry us into the future.
– Matt Denault, Strange Horizons
A disquieting, claustrophobic, compelling hybrid of China Miéville and J. G. Ballard. I first read Filaria almost two years ago: its subterranean imagery has been stuck in my midbrain ever since.
– Peter Watts, author of Starfish and Blindsight
Filaria has adventure, sense of wonder, love, excitement and the characters' arcs are very well done and quite moving.
– Liviu Suciu, Fantasy Book Critic
HorrorScope: "Filaria might be described as a Gothic Science Fiction. It's Titus Groan riding in an electric car... If William Gibson or Bruce Sterling wrote a fairy tale it might be a little like this." [Full Review]