Daniel Mills

Would your tenth grade English class have been more enjoyable if The Scarlet Letter was a better-written book? Probably. I wish Dan Mills's Revenants could replace The Scarlet Letter and show young minds what literature can really do. The Scarlet Letter's innovations and epic wordsmithery were muddled by flat characterization and action and insight that are told and not shown. In Revenants, Dan Mills creates a fully-realized world, richer and more captivating than Hawthorne's empty Boston. show more Mills fills that world with real people, people with histories, nuances, deep desires, and ancient guilts. They are a people of early America, and they are also you and your neighbor. And once this vivid world and characters are in place... things happen. Disappearances, strange sightings, adventures, heroic and desperate acts with consequences. A third of the way into the book, a series of events forces the men of the village to enter the woods. Hawthorne's woods are only a barely realized symbol; Mills's woods are a place where our own passions and evils follow us and gain voice and misty reality...depicted so clearly that you will scarce believe your chair is still under you. You will wade through a frigid October bog, you will scramble between the sodden fir trees... and when the characters encounter terrors, be they imagined or real, you will know them yourself. If you invest yourself in this book's world, you can learn something of fatherhood, something of passion, and you will know more fully how our actions shape us much more than our lifelong guilts or fears do. You might also encounter your own revenant. show less

In my opinion, there is nothing quite like this being written, anywhere, in literature today. It can't be classified, so it will not be appearing on end-caps at your local bookstore or be optioned for film. It is not horror, it is not historical fiction, it is not fantasy or science fiction. It is not "weird fiction". It is not easy to read, either. It is literature that encases one. Reading the works of Dan Mills is like being wrapped in a cocoon, almost against your will. While inside you show more are transformed through a wet, claustrophobic process. You'd rather not think about what is happening to your torso, your abdomen, your feet, as the inexorable progress of nature mulches what you were and creates something different. Whether moth or butterfly, you can't help but fly after putting the book down. If you hate opera, country music, or bagpipe music even though you've never actually listened to more than a couple of minutes of any of them, then you may be unable to read Dan Mills. If you step into the dark corners of your own mind, if you can breath musty, uncomfortable scents that you have never encountered before and perhaps smear a bit of them on your cheek and walk away with a burning sensation, scarred but better for it, then this book is for you. show less

If you fancy yourself an old soul, someone born several centuries too late, and you are of a dark and rainy disposition, Daniel Mills' debut collection is likely to be your bag, and it should fit as snugly on you as the hangman's rope from the creaking gibbet. Mills transports us back to a time when America was still in its infancy and all the woods bordering New England were pregnant with infernal strangers and shadows that bore physical weight. He writes in the refined style and manner of show more all the old, dead masters, and he does it so wholly and so thoroughly that you might be convinced that this isn't some homage published three short years ago but a dusty, mold-eaten omnibus of fevered confessions and whispered prayers from the long-ago days of Puritans and putrefaction. His talent is best exemplified in strange and quietly unsettling tales like "John Blake," "MS Found in a Chicago Hotel Room," and "The Wayside Voices," but for this reader the pinnacle of his form comes through in "Whistlers' Gore," a tale told entirely through the cryptic epigraphs chiseled on the faces of gravestones in a crumbling cemetery. It perfectly encapsulates the feeling of reading this book: walking among the bones of the dead, leaning close, and hearing what they have to say. show less

Among the Lilies is a rather singular collection by a writer whose prose style and recurring themes might almost be mistaken for those common to 19th-century weird and horror fiction. Daniel Mills and his protagonists amble in delicate menace through the tangibly-described natural scenery of a New England that no longer quite exists, leaving a tapestry of subtle terror creeping in their wake.

The triumph of this collection is the weight of dread that builds and builds as one progresses show more through its stories. Mills’s impeccable prose wastes nary a word as he spins his webs of enigmatic fear, entangling readers in mysteries without explanation that somehow reveal the world as a place both inexplicable and horrifying. Readers who appreciate beautiful writing will find much to admire here.

The only jarring note for me in an otherwise seamless collection was the sequencing that placed a story set partly in 1997 after several stories set in what sometimes appears to be and is sometimes explicitly stated to be the mid-to-late 1800s. While the tone of that story, “The Lake,” settled into something that fit the book, its rather more 20th-century themes of boys and bikes and traumatic coming-of-age experiences felt a little at odds with the other stories’ recurring themes of ill, dying, mad, and illicitly—often incestuously—sexual women and the men who are in some way ruined by proximity to such women’s pregnancies, birthings of children, and inevitable deaths. I also could not help feeling a little put off by the collection’s preoccupation with the horrors adjacent to female sexuality and illness—why is it that men must always find such horror in feminine existence?—though Mills certainly does not treat these horrors lightly, and I will add that my distaste and unease in some ways served to make the stories even more frightening, which may well have been the author’s intent.

Ultimately, though I did not always enjoy this collection’s themes, I could not help being swept away by its captivating style and the sheer quality of its sentence-level writing. I imagine I will keep an eye out for other books by Mills, and will recommend this volume to readers in search of something both excellently written and truly frightening.

I received a free digital advance copy of this title from Undertow Publications via Edelweiss+ in exchange for my review. show less