A review by richardleis
We Are Here to Hurt Each Other by Paula D. Ashe

dark emotional mysterious sad tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I was not prepared for the twelve short stories in Paula D. Ashe's gorgeously written and disturbing collection, and that suited me just fine, because I've been challenging myself with my horror selections the past few years in an attempt to better understand the genre and my interest in reading and writing it.

Being unprepared and disturbed made for a slow read, though. One story made me stop reading the collection for a significant period of time because of its challenging content: "Bereft." When a woman at a caregiving facility is found dead in her bed after killing herself with an overdose of sedatives, her older sister arrives to sit with her body and work through why she might have committed suicide. As we learn more about the sisters' traumatic past, the older sister becomes more intimate with her sister's body. The story breaches taboos and plumbs psychological depths leading to shattering truths, and, perhaps, absolution. Or maybe not.

These tales of insanity, transgression, self-destruction, serial killers discovered too close to home, violence against and murder of children, taboo subjects, and trauma reach toward nihilism and cosmic horror, but Ashe keeps each story grounded to find sympathy for her characters in unexpected places. These characters may succumb to or survive trauma or the evil around them, but at the moment of revelation, during the worst pain, when all hope is lost and the monster or monstrous has won, they become achingly, heartbreakingly, utterly human, whether they can go on or not.

Perhaps my favorite story in the collection is the last one, "Telesignatures from a Future Corpse." As the story unfolds to a pace set by the lines in the poem "The Second Coming" by W. B. Yeats, Ashe's exquisite writing is on full display. I loved, for example, how the dialogue between the protagonist, Liselle Loudon, and her detective partner, Sean Simmons, reveals these complicated, world-weary characters, while the rest of the prose paints detailed tableaus of both characters and the world around them. 

Sean Simons, the last of the dapper detectives. Handsome son of a bitch. [...] I can't see his dark dress socks but I know they're there. [...] Unnecessarily splashes English Leather onto his throat and beneath it still smells like cigars, brandy, sawdust, every good grandpa who ever existed.

As the detectives race against time to stop a child killer, gruesome and shocking clues add elements of history, science fiction, and perhaps the supernatural to the narrative, while Loudon's home life with her wife and son becomes wrapped up in the investigation in surprising ways, too. It all unfolds at a fast pace with a matter-of-fact tone, lush details, and a foreboding atmosphere that suggests Seven or Hellraiser, though those comparisons are too constraining; there's more here, too, about family, friendship, partnership, and motherhood, that is both moving and heartbreaking, life-affirming and horrifying.

Nothing is easy in these collected tales, including their endings, though Ashe's beautifully crafted prose is clear, concise, and matter of fact or lyrical in turn. Ultimately, We Are Here to Hurt Each Other suggests to me that we must remember death, violence, pain, and trauma are part of the human experience. If we forget this, the distance between the tiny spark of light we maintain on this gruesome wet orb and the cold dark voids of the universe (including our own psyches?) could collapse entirely.