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 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. ( )