Farah Rose Smith (she/her)

Kendell Reviews (2019)

Ginger Nuts of Horror (2019)

Lackington’s Magazine (2018)

The Unnerving Podcast (2018)

Blood and Stardust (2018)

Filmmaking Fool (2016)

Legends of Tabletop (2016)

Praise for ANONYMA:

 

“ANONYMA is an explosion of language and imagery, dense and uncompromising. Filled with beauty, horror, and a cleansing rage, this book casts a searing eye over the corrupted relationship between women, men, and Art. A decadent treat.”

-Nathan Ballingrud, Author of THE VISIBLE FILTH and NORTH AMERICAN LAKE MONSTERS

 

The history of art is littered with Great Men and the Muses they use as stepping stones to brilliance. In this shockingly lyrical, endlessly rich and luxurious nightmare of a novel, the Muse turns. Yet, it is not so much a tale of vengeance or comeuppance as it is a heroine’s journey, as Anonyma survives doomscapes almost beyond imagination and the transgressions of mere men, mere artists, survives the horrors imposed upon the feminine to rediscover her own magic and power. Anonyma, novel and narrator, holds up a dark mirror to our paradigm of art as a kind of device for reducing women to Platonic ideals while staging theophanies for men. But she also holds the mirror to herself, her sisters, even, daring to hope, a daughter. Full of blood and love and despair and courage, this is a novel like few others I have encountered. 

– Jayaprakash Satyamurthy, Author of WEIRD TALES OF A BANGALOREAN

 

“Farah Rose Smith’s Anonyma is both passionate and despairing, showcasing a distinct point of view and a powerful aptitude for the relationship between content and form. Smith’s writing evaluates the darkest possibilities of artistic narcissism and self-loathing, bolstered by bleak philosophical insight and gorgeously lyrical prose. Essential reading for admirers of dark literature.” 

– Mike Thorn, Author of DARKEST HOURS

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“The painful intensities that Farah Rose Smith choreographs in her fiction are genuine, and urgent.  For sensitivity, and for focus on the power of individual words, she is unmatched.”

— Michael Cisco, author of UNLANGUAGE  AND ANIMAL MONEY

 

“Formidable would be an understatement, if one were talking about Farah Rose Smith’s recent narrative ANONYMA, which retains a reality of its own, singular in that Jacksonian sense, and perpetuating a personal mythology that speaks of haunts in several senses. You better get this before it gets you.”

—Duane Pesice, Author of BEFORE CRAZYTOWN and Itinerant Editor

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Praise for THE IRRATIONAL DRESS SOCIETY:

 

“A delirious, reeling historical burlesque composed of linguistic bullets and gemlike rhetoric”

-Michael Cisco, author of UNLANGUAGE  AND ANIMAL MONEY

 

“Putting down a copy of The Annotated Oscar Wilde and picking up this manifesto, this “vintage from another world”, I seem not to have skipped a beat. Out of The ID of one Farah Rose Smith comes this call to arms for Irrational Dress and Self-Creation as The Highest Form of Style, while at the same time a decadent wish-list for imagination’s boudoir.” 

-The joey Zone, Somewhere in The 19th C.

 

“A curious and wonderful fable in which the odd is beautiful, the beautiful is dark, the ideas are strange, the strangeness is bittersweet, and the conclusion is deeply satisfying.” 

– Rhys Hughes, Author of ORPHEUS ON THE UNDERGROUND

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Praise for THE ALMANAC OF DUST:

 

“Reading THE ALMANAC OF DUST by Farah Rose Smith is akin to ingesting a hatful of magic mushrooms while blithely traipsing through the haunted ruins of Petra.  You will emerge–if you ever do–utterly and forever transfigured.  Her elegant, baroque, yet meticulous prose vividly and somberly limns a tortured love story, an alchemical quest, and a civilizational apocalypse.  The alternately febrile and desultory ramblings of Bhodi Xeussofi–both across fantastical landscapes and through arcane spiritual and intellectual dimensions–will recall to the lucky reader the work of such past giants as William Hope Hodgson, J. K. Huysmans, Tanith Lee, Ben Hecht and, of course, Poe.  Among her living peers, I find resonances with the stellar work of Darren Speegle, Brendan Connell, Michael Cisco and Jonathan Carroll.  Smith’s novella is destined to rank among the best weird writings of the early twenty-first century.”

-Paul Di Filippo, author of THE STEAMPUNK TRILOGY, A MOUTHFUL OF TONGUES, and others

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“Farah Rose Smith’s THE ALMANAC OF DUST is filled with loss, longing, obsession, dissolution, and philosophy that rings of truth one moment, madness the next, and sometimes weirdly both at once. The story culminates in a truly breathtaking escalation of gorgeous and macabre, fantastical imagery. A decadent, poetic, powerful fable from a literary artist worth your notice.”

–Jeffrey Thomas, author of PUNKTOWN

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“THE ALMANAC OF DUST is a savage tale of an alchemical romance gone wrong worthy of Orpheus and Eurydice. Once you become immersed in the soft, grey darkness of Farah Rose Smith’s prose, you won’t look back.”

-Selena Chambers, author of CALLS FOR SUBMISSION

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“A gorgeous seductive dream, loosed from the grand era of the decadents that has been circling ever out of reach, only now captured and pinned on the written page. Impossible? No, viciously possible, if I might steal a haunting phrase from THE ALMANAC OF DUST.”

-Eric Schaller, author of MEET ME IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AIR

“Dear sick soul, you have met the universe.” Farah Rose Smith’s THE ALMANAC OF DUST is a stunning work of visionary imagination reminiscent of the great Angela Carter. This numinous, experimental novelette presents the dissolution and loss of a couple’s intimate relationship, all set in a dust-choked world, like a nightmare-hybrid-landscape of Beckett’s Endgame and Hodgson’s The Night Land. In the background—via intersectional notes about and quotes from the titular, fictional tome—a bleak philosophy emerges, driven by a paradoxically dynamic, melancholic mental illness. An uncanny environmental/metaphysical catastrophe (internalized as self-neglect, grief, violence, and regret) dominates Smith’s wonderfully disjointed, powerful story/treatise. The Almanac of Dust is a book to cherish, and Farah Rose Smith is a distinctive, literary talent to watch.”

-Jon Padgett, author of THE SECRET OF VENTRILOQUISM and founder of Thomas Ligotti Online

 

THE ALMANAC OF DUST is hypnotic, surreal, a kaleidoscope whose colors are a thousand shades of black. Here Farah Rose Smith has wrought a fine gothic parable of illness and loss, regret and separation, peppered here and there with tantalizing aphorisms from the mythical almanac that gives the story its title. The Silver City, the setting of the story’s shattering climax, is itself worth the price of admission – a grim Tartarus of death and decay that lingers long after the reader turns the final page.

-Matthew M. Bartlett, author of GATEWAYS TO ABOMINATION and CREEPING WAVES