Naben Ruthnum is the author of "A Hero of Our Time," and "Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race." He lives in Toronto and also writes thrillers as Nathan Ripley.
"A grotesquely beautiful, deeply unsettling, and utterly beguiling
Kafkaesque novella ... A reading experience that will linger long
after the final page is turned."- Starred Review, Library
Journal
"An odd, mysterious and at times revolting medley of body horror
and weird fiction."
Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Author of Mexican Gothic, and Velvet Was the
Night.
"Through hauntingly concise prose, Helpmeet both acutely disturbs
and captivates. This outstanding novella is a morbidly engrossing
exploration of moral and physical decay and the shifting boundaries
of love and devotion. The tight, incisive narrative is a chilling
dive into mysterious forces that transcend the basic binary of good
and evil, and the inherent depravity that humans themselves can't
comprehend until it's too late." - Waubgeshig Rice, Author of Moon
of the Crusted Snow
"Naben Ruthnum's Helpmeet is a remarkable throwback. The style, the
precise prose, the lush imagery, the dreadful sense of wheels
turning just past the reader's sightline-I devoured it in a few
delighted hours and it took me back to my teenage years, to
afternoons squirreled away in the corner of my local library
reading Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Chambers, Algernon Blackwood and
the other great elder wordsmiths I cut my horror teeth on."- Craig
Davidson, Author of The Saturday Night Ghost Club
"At the bitter end of the 19th century, a loyal wife cares tenderly
for her dissolute husband as he nears his death from a mysterious,
gruesomely corrosive disease. Helpmeet by Naben Ruthnum is a
sumptuous excursion into surreal body horror and an unsparing
exploration of the extreme frontiers of connubial devotion. Ruthnum
delivers a uniquely unsettling Gothic love story-and it is first
and foremost a love story-evoking the grisly Edwardian tales of
W.W. Jacobs, William Hope Hodgson and Algernon Blackwood, while
drawing in such modern masters as Barker, Del Toro and Cronenberg.
Brief enough to be read in an evening, it holds certain images so
grotesque that they will linger in your dreams for weeks."- David
Demchuk, Award-winning author of The Bone Mother, and RED X
"An everyday tragedy spirals into a medical mystery and then into
something much darker and more disquieting, executed in prose that
glitters like candlelight on an open wound. I loved this intensely
claustrophobic study of a complicated marriage twisting itself into
something monstrous." - Premee Mohamed, Author of the Beneath the
Rising Trilogy
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