Joanne Anderton, author of The Art of Broken Things – “The Measure of Sorrow is a beautiful, deeply unsettling collection that explores the horror and the mystery of what it is to be human. Heartbreaking at times and raw, these stories always feel immensely true, no matter how fantastical they seem. Ashley-Smith has a talent for creating worlds that are hauntingly familiar, echoes of our own edged with a darkness that we can only hope isn’t real.”

Matthew R. Davis, Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of Midnight in the Chapel of Love – “The soil of these stories is sown with the salt of night-sweat and grief-tears, and what it grows is resplendent in weird, wonderful riches. Bring home The Measure of Sorrow, let it take root in the grounds you walk alone, and cherish the bittersweet fruits of its seductive terrors for years to come.”

Eugen Bacon, World Fantasy Finalist and award-winning author of Danged Black Thing, Mage of Fools and Chasing Whispers – “The exquisiteness and gentleness with which J. Ashley-Smith swathes his darkest stories, entangled in the cornerstones of serrated humanity, leave you fact checking everything you thought you believed. The theme story ‘The Measure of Sorrow’ is literary horror that taps on angst—a father’s craving for his dead wife and pining to assuage his son’s lostness—to spill out the guts of a luminescent magnetar in animated doom. The juxtaposition of opalescence and gloom in deeply-etched longing and need echo in ink until you forget, and forget, that what you’re reading is horror, until—too late—it masticates you alive. For lovers of elegant literary horror.”