The Last Vanishing Man and Other Stories

Magic stops. Men vanish. Worlds end. Life goes on. The stories in The Last Vanishing Man start with the end of the world, as a narrator seeks to imagine how the actions of an American terrorist ripple through his family. American violence and masculinity are topics that weave through these stories, as characters of various genders and sexualities get scarred by the wounds of manhood. But though these stories bounce similar themes off each other, they are not narrow in focus or tone. Hard-edged realism lives alongside ghost stories and weird tales; the lyrical tragedy of “A Suicide Gun” sits beside the wild, filthy, absurdist romp that is “The Ballad of Jimmy and Myra”, a murder ballad that might be a lost Weird Al song for a John Waters movie. The collection winds down with an expatriot American living in the melting tundra of Siberia, seeking liberation from the forces that deranged his life, the same forces that shaped and warped the lives of all the other characters in the book.The Last Vanishing Man is organized in four sections. The first section tells tales of people seeking to make sense of history and their place in it, whether the history of a queer sanctuary in Canada or of the unfulfilled dreams of the Warhol star Candy Darling. The second section gives us characters who are each on a quest to understand someone who is gone, vanished into memory or worlds beyond, their stories closer to myth than history. In the third section, lonely men seek meaning in a world where they have lost their way. Their quests become philosophical, even spiritual, as they wander toward something greater than their own transient desires. The final section breaks the book open with extremes: extremes of feeling, extremes of strangeness, extremes of horror. The fiercely disturbing story “Patrimony” portrays a post-apocalypse where male power renders the procreation of humanity into torture. “On the Government of the Living” is also a post-apocalyptic story, also a story of children and humanity, but more haunting parable than horror, more Samuel Beckett than Clive Barker.The Last Vanishing Man is a book for readers seeking more than familiar genre conventions, readers seeking stories that challenge, unsettle, surprise, and sing. These are stories aware of the sufferings of the world, stories of characters tormented by unfulfilled desires and unfathomable violence, but also stories of compassion, of community, of humor, and of infinite possibilities beyond the prison of the self.

Ian Mond, Locus Magazine

"In my humble opinion, the best collection of 2023 was Matthew Cheney’s remarkable The Last Vanishing Man and Other Stories. It’s an assured, carefully composed collection that tends toward the grim and horrific but, importantly, is never an exercise in bleakness. Instead, Cheney’s clear-eyed, immersive prose provides a fascinating insight into obsession, violence, and loneliness. This is a collection that deserves award recogni­tion."

as they say

"Matthew Cheney’s most recent book, The Last Vanishing Man  is first-rate! I can't

Jeffrey Ford, World Fantasy, Nebula, Edgar, and Shirley Jackson Award-winning author of A Natural History of Hell

"Weird, dark, and wonderful visions and hallucinations from a wholly unique voice."

Franz Nicolay, musician The Hold Steady and author of The Humorless Ladies of Border Control and Someone Should Pay for Your Pain

“Brutal and beautiful.”

Ian Mond, Locus

"While grim and sad, the stories in The Last Vanishing Man are anything but an exercise in misery. There is a genuine beauty in Cheney’s clear-eyed prose, which immerses you in his world, even if the subject matter is challenging."

lost or irreparably harmed by modern life and the punishing ways masculinity is often shaped....By the end of this collection, we can easily answer those questions 'Who is to blame, though, for destruction? Who is to blame for life?

“A combination of wildly post-apocalyptic brutalism and deeply sympathetic studies of people

About the Author

Matthew Cheney’s debut collection of fiction, Blood: Stories, won the Hudson Prize and was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2016. His academic book Modernist Crisis and the Pedagogy of Form: Woolf, Delany, and Coetzee at the Limits of Fiction was published by Bloomsbury in 2020. About That Life: Barry Lopez and the Art of Community will be published by Punctum Books in the Fall of 2022. He is Assistant Professor and Director of Interdisciplinary Studies at Plymouth State University. His work has been published by Conjunctions, Woolf Studies Annual, One Story, English Journal, Weird Tales, Strange Horizons, Best Gay Stories 2016, Literary Hub, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He is the former series editor for the Best American Fantasy anthologies, and the co-editor, with Eric Schaller, of the occasional online magazine The Revelator.

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