Jeremy Robert Johnson's Entropy in Bloom: A Collection of Stories

Kindle Customer: JRJ fiction has been one of my favorites for his sheer inventiveness in keeping the stakes and emotional tension high while avoiding cliches. Mindblowing ideas, neck-breaking speed and bewildering bizarreness while bleeding real emotions - that's what JRJ delivers on his pages.

A must read for any weird sci fi horror aficionados.

United States on May 05, 2023

des-m: Those stories are all fantastic! They really got under my skin. Very dark subject matter. I think I haven't read stories as dark as these before... Maybe I am just a newcomer to weird fiction, but I was frightened, disgusted and astonished by these stories! Very good collection, should have bought the hardcover! (maybe I will still get it as a used copy)

Germany on Oct 30, 2020

Sam: Amazing imagination and truly captivating stories for fans of horror

United Kingdom on Aug 22, 2019

Amazon Customer: Excellent collection of stories, some disturbing, some scary. Can't recommend highly enough.

United Kingdom on May 20, 2019

Mindi L Snyder: I picked this one up because my friend Sadie said that I needed it, and when Sadie says I need something she's never wrong. Boy, was she right about this one.

This is a collection of stories that will seriously be burned into my brain forever. They are all so disturbing, so unflinching, and unique! I've never read anyone like Jeremy Robert Johnson, and I can't believe it took me this long to discover him. I owe Sadie a huge thank you and one hell of a favor.

These stories are all so different, but definitely maintain a voice that is distinctive to Johnson. The collection starts of with a bang and offers the reader a dystopian future where body modification is so popular and extreme that a man admires a woman in a coffee shop after she's had her lips removed. Yep, you read that correctly.

This collection starts of bananas and just keeps upping the grotesque eeriness. Dissociative Skills is a story that is seared into my brain forever now. There's body horror in this one that will make you sincerely queasy. Snowfall is such an eerie and melancholy story about a deaf boy who wakes up to a very different world than the one he fell asleep in. When Susurrus stirs is...

United States on Apr 27, 2018

Amazon Customer: This was my first Jeremy Robert Johnson book, but it definitely won't be my last. This book was recommended to me via a friend on Instagram, as they know Chuck Palahniuk's 'Haunted' is one of my favourite books, and they rightly assumed that I'd love this.

Each story was beautifully written. Some of the tales were incredibly 'wacky' (for want of a better term) and yet were told in such a gritty and realistic way that I could kind of imagine them happening for real. I'd say this book rivals Clive Barker's Books of Blood in terms of original and terrifying concepts.

If I had one criticism, it's that each story left me wanting more. I wanted full, 300+ page retellings of each narrative. I was gutted every time I finished one, but excited to start the next. I really, really, didn't want this book to end.

It's hard to say which story was my favourite, but the one that stayed with me the longest was the last one, almost a novella. The helplessness and anxieties of the main character poured off the page and into me.

Every story in this collection is absolutely stand-out. There is absolutely no filler, no stories you're desperate to get to the end of so you can...

United Kingdom on Apr 13, 2018

Ben: Every story in this collection has a unique and sinister aura. There is incredible diversity among these stories. They manage to cover seemingly every dark corner of the human condition, while consistently being eerily relatable. Immense talent and creativity on display here, there are a few stories in particular that I won’t ever forget. You won’t regret it!

Canada on Feb 10, 2018

Michael C. Smith: If you are lucky then you already own his two other short story collections, Angel Dust Apocalypse and We Live Inside You. If not, Entropy In Bloom is a great collection of his best short stories, and also includes the novella "The Sleep of Judges." Both "The Sleep of Judges" and the first short story "The League of Zeroes" are prequels to his novel "Skullcrack City." Another gem is "The Sharp Dressed Man At The End Of The Line," about a man who makes himself a suit of cockroaches in an attempt to survive nuclear holocaust, from which his first novella, "The Extinction Journals," comes.

Johnson comes from the Bizarro literary movement, and the key principle of Bizarro is high-concept, low-budget. Most Bizarro books, one buys for the title alone. The writing itself is a crapshoot. Johnson's writing is never a crap shoot; it's great writing, maybe some of the best horror writing ever. Johnson knows how to write horror and loneliness, but most of all, he knows how to write heartbreak. He's not afraid to make his characters touchingly vulnerable, and in many ways this makes what happens to them that much worse. Perhaps the best in this collection is not a horror story at all....

United States on Sep 27, 2017

A.V. Bach: Reading a Jeremy Robert Johnson story is like getting into a car with a benevolent madman behind the wheel: you’re not sure where you’re going to go, but you know you’ll laugh, cringe, feel, and think along the way. And when the lunatic floors the gas and kills the headlights on that dark, desert drive, you just lean back, smile, and turn up the radio. Hell, you might even dance a little, because the tune is right.

“League of Zeroes,” for all its grotesque satire is probably one of the most poignant takes on dating, the role of the individual in society and the quest for bodily perfection as it pertains to the former two. “Persistence Hunting” is a tour de force of person storytelling, wherein you’re informed of the ending trainwreck in the opening passage, but, much like the main character, can do nothing but propel yourself faster and faster down the tracks to that carnal conclusion. The auto-vivisection of “Dissociate Skills,” rendered even more effective and breaking out from simple gore or genre by the tender heart beating at the center of it.

“When Susurrus Stirs” is a gleefully grotesque tale of parasites, body horror, and language:...

United States on May 09, 2017