“Fully embodied stories in which the struggle within mirrors and multiplies the terror outside until it’s impossible to say which is worse or even to distinguish where one starts and the other begins. Deft and painfully honest and utterly convincing, Singing the Song of My Unmaking is a startling, momentous debut.”
— Brian Evenson, Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy Award-winning author of Song for the Unraveling of the World

“Singing the Song of My Unmaking is a collection that hits me where I live. Tough, elegiac, and hewn close to the bone, these stories may well signify a shift in contemporary weird fiction and horror.”
— Laird Barron, author of Swift to Chase

“The stories in Christopher Ropes’ Singing the Song of My Unmaking create a strangeness which is unique, moving. And ineffable. Their weirdness comes not from some received tradition of horror but from an idiosyncratic re-imagining of suffering in which deeply alienated characters seek clues to meaning in random stains, scratches, and realities too traumatic to be seen clearly.”
— Steve Rasnic Tem, author of Figures Unseen: Selected Stories

“Christopher Ropes is a writer with dexterity, subtlety and most of all—strange as it may seem in a collection that deals so frankly with isolation, depression, suicide, and the void—tremendous heart. Their stories sit in a space between the contemporary and the timeless, between mold-stain and murder, between dumpster diving and dream quest. Not only does the sacred touch the profane in these stories, it’s often impossible to tell which is which. And every word is haunted by compassion.”
— Carrie Laben, Shirley Jackson Award-winning author of A Hawk in the Woods

“The heartbreaking sadness of these stories by Christopher Ropes is mitigated by a deeply felt empathy, an intimate understanding of the many possible tragedies anyone can encounter through no fault of their own. The collection calls for something readers in a competitive, go-getter society are seldom asked to do: Take a deep dive into the constricted world of a person in no danger of becoming an influencer. The regularity with which we ignore the daily struggles of anyone too ill or too poor or too marginalized to be on our vapidly constructed A list—this is the unspoken horror lurking in the background. This is such purposeful writing. Ropes doesn’t study the characters, but instead places those who suffer and ‘fail’ by cruel social standards directly into the protagonist’s seat. We are denied the cozy comfort of viewing them through the lenses of our own relative success and performative pity. These are extraordinarily moving and often excruciating tales, told by a writer with the craftsmanship and sincerity to keep us wanting more.”
— S.P. Miskowski, author of I Wish I Was Like You

“The stories of Christopher Ropes brim with catharsis and genuine compassion. Collected together here, they sing like a choir of wounds. Singing the Song of My Unmaking is a sharp debut from a writer who is unafraid to gaze unflinchingly into the neglected corners of life and convey what they found lurking there.”
— Richard Gavin, author of grotesquerie

“Christopher Ropes invokes the coldest season in these twelve stories of mental illness and religious doubt, broken families and cosmic despair. Singing the Song of My Unmaking is as bracing and bleak as a snowy night in January but possessed of the same otherworldly beauty. The effect is dizzying, disorienting, recalling long drives in the dark when the snowflakes hang in your high beams, dazzling, so bright you can almost believe they are stars. A harrowing debut.”
— Daniel Mills, author of Moriah and Among the Lilies

“Ropes’ voice is resplendent with sorrow, aching with emotional trauma. Reading their debut collection was like looking into a seer stone that summons the otherworldly through a prism of depression, beauty, and distress. Their stories left me with the impression of meeting my own ghost in a dream, only to be wholly aware I wasn’t dreaming but the world has been asleep the whole time. An important writer to keep an eye on.”
— Christopher Slatsky, author of The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature

“The fiction of Christopher Ropes often encompasses the horrors of working class life, disability, and how the body and mind can betray the soul within. Their tales of body horror and the ambiguities of madness are striking and refreshing. The supernatural serves as an amplifier to the terror and tragedy of humanity, something that Ropes writes about with precision and visceral emotional depth. Singing the Song of My Unmaking is an excellent and authentic debut collection.”
— Farah Rose Smith, author of Anonyma and book reviewer at Publishers Weekly

“In Singing the Song of My Unmaking, Christopher Ropes uses weird fiction to write with heartbreaking, bleeding honesty. The worlds of these stories are the most intimate ones imaginable, where the strange intersects with the loves, the sufferings and the immeasurable hurts of human life. For all of this, the stories betray a feeling of optimism that gives the sense that readers are neither alone nor doomed regardless of whatever despair claws at their ankles. The full spectrum of emotion is opened, vivisected and put on display in bleak winter night in this debut collection which reads as much like a confession as it does a cautionary fable. Certain to satisfy fans of Ligotti, Barron, Kiernan and to solidify Ropes’ place as an unparalleled master of the contemporary weird.”
— S.L. Edwards, author of The Death of an Author

“Christopher Ropes’ work resides in the space where lushness, madness and fear live comfortably under the skin. Ropes’ work in Singing the Song of My Unmaking is embodied, tender and full of creeping dread. This is beautifully written work that never slaps the reader into fear but guides them with grace and fearlessness. Ropes has given us a dark, glorious gift for which I am, as a fan, deeply grateful.”
— Shannon Barber, author of Gasoline Heart