Shifts into the Weird

A review of Lydia Peever’s Pray Lied Eve: Tales of the Untoward (Hora Minor Productions, 2013)
By Derek Newman-Stille

Cover image from Pray Lied Eve courtesy of Lydia Peever
Cover image from Pray Lied Eve courtesy of Lydia Peever

Lydia Peever’s short story collection Pray Lied Eve is deeply psychological, exploring the inner recesses of her characters’ minds as their worlds are shifted slightly into The Weird. Her characters are whirled up in plots beyond them, motivated by forces outside their understanding and forced to explore the meaning of their selfhood as their worlds are shaken.

Her characters are pushed into places of unfamiliarity as their mundane worlds are altered, shifted, and changed. From demonic interventions into a small farm house and a little girl’s small town life, to a man’s obsession with church bells that may be tolling a major change for his world, to a woman’s discovery that apparitions are roaming through her house, Peever takes the ordinary and makes it extraordinary and opens windows for an abnormal undercurrent to her readers’ everyday observations of the world around them. With her deep descriptive style, her world becomes real and her vision shared with readers. Readers become enwrapped in a spell of revelation, showing them the potential for oddity in all of the norms that they create and that allow them to feel comfortable about their world.

To find out more about Lydia Peever and her short story collection Pray Lied Eve, visit her website at http://nightface.ca/portfolio/ .

You can explore some reviews of individual stories from Pray Lied Eve at

http://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2013/08/28/trapped-by-destiny/

http://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2013/08/17/haunted-by-nostalgia/

Derek Newman-Stille

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