And here are some awfully kinds words about the book:
Each of the stories in Blake Kimzey’s astonishing chapbook Families Among Us are intricate, beautifully written universes unto themselves. These stories blur the lines between what is real and what is possible yet they are also intimate and familiar because they are stories about people and connection and the very human desire to be a part of something greater than ourselves. —Roxane Gay, Author of An Untamed State and Bad Feminist
These stories are like tiny portholes into worlds teeming with rich, surprising life. Blake Kimzey is a master miniaturist. —Ramona Ausubel, author of No One is Here Except All of Us and A Guide to Being Born
Blake Kimzey has given us all the pleasures our imagination can bear, six stories to savor slowly, to break our hearts and then mend them. I wanted more of these good things. —Kyle Minor, author of Praying Drunk and In the Devil's Territory
These imagined worlds conjure not some other space but the forgotten weirdness of the world we know, revealed here in all its wondrous everyday magic. —Matt Bell, author of Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods
Following the likes of Orson Welles and his radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds, Rod Serling and the television series The Twilight Zone, and John Carpenter and his film The Thing, Blake Kimzey and his chapbook collection of short stories Families Among Us delve deep into different, yet equally mysterious phenomena. Kimzey’s collection proposes that we need look no further than our own homes and communities for the source of the curious and the bizarre, and it is through these otherworldly, yet earthly, creations that we discover that which binds us all. -Colorado Review, Center for Literary Publishing
Without ever resorting to one-to-one symbolic resonances, or hyperbolic strangeness, these stories strike a balance that leaves me feeling both recognized, and impossibly far from home. I also end up wondering how Kimzey walks this line so well. -Green Mountains Review
An entire universe lives within these forty pages, spun into existence with the sincere cadence of an ancient origin story. For readers, this chapbook is a welcome pause from realism, a chance to give in to and live briefly in the fantastical. -PANK
Lovely and Majestic. Kimzey has fashioned six allegories about the inevitability of change, people trying to love what is different from themselves, and the hardship and heartbreak that comes with being part of a family. -The Small Press Book Review
Families Among Us is a daring book. As with Kafka’s work, after living in these stories for a couple days, they get even stranger, and new layers emerge. -Fiction Southeast
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