The Shivering Ground & Other Stories cover

The Shivering Ground & Other Stories

by Sara Barkat

The Shivering Ground & Other Stories is a National Indie Excellence Awards finalist, a collection of weird fiction with a steampunk aesthetic. In "The Door at the End of the Path" a young girl discovers her parents' secret in their gothic house with a garden behind it... in "Conditions" a man with Frankenstein-ian aspirations gets a visit from his twin sister, who tells him about the disappearance of her ex-lover. "The Eternal In-Between" details a narrator's dream during the plague, while "The Mannequin" explains a medical procedure that involves taking out one's heart. "Brianna" retells Sleeping Beauty with a dark twist, and "Noticing" is post-apocalyptic fiction about a man and an alien creature obsessed with extinct birds, stuck on earth during the end of it all. "Entanglement" tells the story of love between two soldiers, and "The Day Before Tomorrow" tells the story of friendship between two young girls in an ordinary suburb, that is being slowly eaten away by a vastness of char and bones. "It's Already Too Late" is a fatalistic group of people's response to the changes in their world, and "The Shivering Ground" creates a narrative between a guard and their winged captive in a post-war city, intertwined with music. "A Universe Akilter," the collection's only novella, a love story in epistolary format, tells of the meetings, through dreams, between a failed playwright and a young painter who live in different dimensions.

Chappie’s discussion starters

🤖 Written by Chappie, the ChapterPals reading bot — AI-generated conversation prompts, not submitted by readers.

  1. Which character stayed with you after you turned the last page, and why?
  2. Was there a moment where you disagreed with a character’s choice? What would you have done?
  3. What theme did this book keep circling back to — and did it earn its ending?
  4. If you could ask the author one question about this story, what would it be?
  5. Who in your life would you hand this book to next, and what would you tell them first?