“Lloy’s stories are surprising yet relatable, giving us all we need to know about her characters in a few short pages.”

“Shuffling through the brief snapshot of each story, I was swept up in the intense nostalgia Lloy is adept at conveying.”

“Lloy’s But When We Look Closer is a unique collection of short stories set in North America and Europe where her characters struggle with drugs, sex, art, money, mental illness and, most importantly, loss.”

“In But When We Look Closer, her debut collection of eighteen short stories, Susan E. Lloy establishes a literary version of film noir”

Deep Breaths of the Inanimate is a stunning collection of short stories, inhabited by a cast of quirky characters, whose pasts catch up with them, told in conventional, sci-fi, gothic story within a story, and multi-perspective narratives. They feature unexpected reunions, final, irreparable decisions, and also new adventures - Lloy’s finest collection yet.

In these ominous, unsettling tales, Susan Lloy casts a broad net and a spell over all of us all, drawing up to the light humanity’s darkness and the desires that make our species so strangely resilient. Deep Breaths of the Inanimate is a trippy read: prepare for a mind-bending journey from the exotic to the down-home, from deviance to ever-shifting targets of ‘normalcy’. Lloy’s characters face entrapment, betrayal, isolation, and life’s bizarre twists of fate, exhibiting a beautiful toughness in their bids for freedom - the toughness that lets the luckiest survive their Scratch ‘n’ Win world. There’s an indelible truth to these fearless stories. Starting on the surface, it works its way deep down under the skin.

Susan Lloy’s newest collection, Deep Breaths of the Inanimate, is a not-to-miss medley of stories ringing with pitch-perfect lyricism and a meticulous attention to how the best ideas are artfully constructed of crafted, yet simple sentences. (Lloy’s stories’ first sentences never fail to delight.) Each of her tales establishes context immediately, and we quickly find ourselves in the capable hands of a master storyteller whose prose leads to an exploration of how human relationships dramatically mirror what nature has to teach. Her characters are idiosyncratic yet familiar, sometimes arch but ultimately irresistible, like the haunting images of the creatures she creates as foils of the humans around them: “…these travellers of time and space and the multitudes of happenings that occur between spring and fall: death, birth, war, plagues, revolutions, droughts and the list goes on. Each year these silhouettes spread across the skies as if painted by an ink-soaked brush. I wonder if my worries and woes will hitch a ride with them. Taking them far from me and this earth. In wait again for their homecoming next springtime. Hoping that an awakening will land with them.” Long after close her book, you will be thinking of Lloy’s stories.

“Veteran short story virtuoso Susan Lloy brings her distinctive magic to her fourth collection, Deep Breaths of the Inanimate, a meticulously wrought and resonant exploration of human loss and longing. Lloy’s characters grapple with secrets of the past: a son who discovers that his late mother worked as a professional escort; two elderly friends whose lives are haunted by a newborn they abandoned as teenagers; a legislative aide whose career is derailed by a compromising video and finds solace in a community beset with fornicating rabbits. In sixteen poignant and memorable tales, set in that liminal emotional territory between regret and rebirth, Deep Breaths of the Inanimate charts a course straight to the reader’s heart.”