Reviews
Review by: Grey Wolfe LaJoie, author of LITTLE ONES - June 2, 2025
"There is a cold clarity to the world of HERMITS DIE ON THURSDAY, as if each story were etched into a slab of mountain quartz and left to hum under moonlight. At times Gregory Ariail's characters--plague saints, fungus queens--emerge familiarly from Appalachia. At other times they seem to rise up from the old, slow-ticking cosmos where grief is currency and time runs crooked. Reading this book, I kept asking: what century am I in? What species? And does it even matter? These stories bend genre and undo history, tilting the reader into surreal terrains where a goat might fuse with a cliffside or a plague might carry not death, but mercy. These stories are funny. They’re also reverent--toward the land, the body, and the stubborn human hope that persists in the face of silence. Ariail has written a book that feels ancient and freshly struck all at once."
Review by: Ander Monson, author of PREDATOR: A MEMOIR, A MOVIE, AN OBSESSION - June 2, 2025
"These stories feel like they were found on the underside of a rock that's probably never been moved in a remote part of the world, the old world, the world underneath our own that we forgot the name of a hundred years ago. I approach them with caution, myself. They changed me. Read them slowly and at your own risk."
Review by: Robert Gwaltney, award-winning author of THE CICADA TREE - June 2, 2025
"From Appalachia to medieval England, clear across the North Atlantic to Iceland, Gregory Ariail's HERMITS DIE ON THURSDAY explores solitude and mysticism. Gleaming brilliantly at its surrealist edges, Ariail's short story collection stupefies and delights, reimagining the hermit myth, turning it upside down, and making it his own."