Much of the paratext for Uncertain Sons, the debut story collection from Thomas Ha, centres on the act of looking. Zachary Gillan opens his adroit and witty foreword with the sentence: “To read a Thomas Ha story is to watch someone choose how to see the world.” Gillan is joined in this conviction by Brian Evenson, whose blurb says that Ha “offers glimpses of weird worlds,” and also by Ha himself: In a 2024 interview with Ivy Grimes, Ha said about his prose style, “[W]hat I’m really trying to do is less paint what I see in my head, and more suggest, conjure, and open up some experiential hallucination in someone else.”
It’s a reasonable thing to focus on. The act of looking, both towards and away, is indeed repeatedly foregrounded in these twelve stories. In the spirit of choosing where to look, however, I want to use this review to discuss some aspects of Ha’s writing that have received less attention in the critical conversation so far.
For a start, Uncertain Sons is a collection spanning six years of Ha’s career. Ha is best known today for stories in that unsettled-and-unsettling subgenre we call weird fiction, earning publication in anthologies such as Brave New Weird, Volume 2 (2024) and a nomination for a Shirley Jackson Award. While most of the stories included here are firmly in this tentacular tradition, Uncertain Sons also contains two stories originally published in 2020, both of which may seem surprisingly conventional to readers (like me) who know Ha primarily for his more recent work.
The first of these, “Where the Old Neighbors Go,” is a fantasy story about an elderly witch outwitting a demon. The protagonist, Mary, is vividly rendered, an obsessive rule-enforcer whom neighbours write off as a busybody. But she is of a recognisable supernatural type, as is her opponent, who is introduced with the cheeky opening sentence: “The man standing on the porch that night seemed like an ordinary gentrifier at first glance: young and tall and artfully unshaven.” Their battle of wills is stock fantasy material, and the story’s twist, with Mary tricking the demon into destroying himself with the use of a magic circle, is almost cinematic in the neatness of its setup and payoff. None of this is to denigrate the piece; it is a thoughtfully constructed and entertaining fantasy story. Rather, it is to highlight that Ha’s current slippery and enigmatic style emerges from a firm grasp of genre fundamentals.
Even in this early work, though, there is a hint of what is to come when the demon’s disguise falls away to reveal an inexplicable mass: “Mary always had trouble seeing the real faces of his kind, but he, like all of them, looked like a shifting pool of ink to her, blurred and shapeless.” This emergence of weirdness from familiar genre tropes is also evident in the second 2020 piece, “Balloon Season.” The story begins with the middle-aged protagonist fortifying his house in “preparation for sundown,” and gradually reveals a world where militias of “whalers” struggle against inhuman hordes. The iconography, and the protagonist’s motivation to protect his wife and children, are the stuff of a typical zombie apocalypse. Where “Balloon Season” distinguishes itself is with its brilliantly conceived monsters: Bloated balls of hairy, glistening flesh, the titular “balloons” are guided at ground level by semi-human “anchors” who try to gain access to the protagonist’s fortified home. The mechanics of infection are not spelled out until near the story’s end, with a surprise balloon attack at the big box store where the protagonist has gone for supplies:
I hear a scream down the street, just as a tether flings out from the glistening underside of the balloon and sinks into someone’s back. I don’t know if it’s a man or woman who falls to the ground, their body starting to swell, filling with liquid. I’ve seen the videos and know that the body is going to get rounder and rounder until it pops like an over-easy egg, the armless, dripping shape of a parasitic anchor emerging from inside, and I don’t need to stay to watch it happen.
Like everyone else, I start to run now.
The balloons are a fantastic invention, a disgusting and memorable twist on the undead. The story’s final beat, where the protagonist realises he is not the heroic monster fighter he and his family might want him to be, is another genre staple. But set against a threat as nightmarish as this, it hits with a force it might not have otherwise possessed.
“Balloon Season” is an early example of a horror setup Ha often plays with: the defence of an American-style nuclear family home against sabotage from within or without. This formula describes the sublime “Window Boy,” in which a privileged child in an apocalyptic future has his view of the world altered by “house filters” that obscure the monsters beyond some panes of glass. The story has been justly acclaimed (including by me), scooping four award nominations and a Best American reprint, but in the context of this collection it reads as just one example of Ha’s success among many. In “Sweetbaby,” another middle-class child is forced to endlessly repeat Christmas dinner with her scientist parents and monster brother. In “Alabama Circus Punk” the hive-mind of a robot family (with a “father-body,” “mother-body,” and “son-body”) is hacked by a spiteful human “repairman.” These stories, too, expose the empty rituals of American suburbia by displacing it into fantastical settings, an emptiness hinted at by the meaningless phrase “Alabama Circus Punk.”
This is not to say that Ha is opposed to family life. He consistently talks in interviews about his relationship with his children, and it’s often touching to read. In a 2023 interview for the Horror Writer’s Association, Ha states that:
… much of what I write is a kind of invisible, indirect, and long-term conversation with my children … My hope is that through writing—and the timeless form of telepathy that it is—that I might get to have that harder, second type of conversation.
This idea of communing with the next generation is a persistent theme in Uncertain Sons. The title story is narrated by a dead monster hunter who survives as a set of bones carried by his son. This leads to some humorous moments of imagined dialogue: “—Time to go, I’d tell you, if I weren’t just a skull fragment and a jawbone in your backpack.” The parental dynamic lends a tender poignancy to a story that is otherwise a surreal adventure in the vein of Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness” (1931). In between the tentacled blood parasites and fungi with the faces of dead children, Ha drops in lines that speak to recognisable fatherly anxieties: “We brought you into a world of terror, and I worry that all you’ll be is terrified.” It’s a remarkable contrast, with the story’s humanity and the story’s monstrousness each heightening the other.
A more literal form of intergenerational telepathy takes place in “The Sort.” The central characters are a father and son travelling across the US, who can communicate nonverbally with italicised internal dialogue. They pull into an anonymous small town in time for the titular “sort,” a ritual involving the burning of unpalatable “modified” garlic. We eventually learn that the father and son are themselves “modified,” with the father at pains to blend in: “[W]e never know who’s going to get upset when they find out we come from a place where there are still some modified families like us.” Several details of this setup, including the father’s insistence on “Words” rather than telepathy and the son wearing aviators to deal with sensory overload, suggest a metaphorical reading about the experience of being a neurodivergent parent to a neurodivergent child. But the story is never heavy-handed, and nor does it reduce itself to a crass allegory. Instead, it’s a patient, slow-burning character study that also includes a talking tiger.
The book’s finest story, however, brings us back to the optical aspect I have tried so hard to minimise in this review. In “The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video,” we are introduced to a world in which physical books come with “brightness settings” and “rechargeable port[s].” The plot is set in motion when the narrator stumbles across a volume called The Winter Hills, which does not respond to his prodding. He concludes: “The book was dead.” In this dystopian future, “living” books are printed on “pixelated pages,” and can be rewritten at will. It’s a scenario reminiscent of Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and like that novel it addresses censorship of literature by the tyranny of the free market (although its prose style is one of noirish understatement rather than exuberant floridity). The narrator is confronted with incentives to look the other way when a mysterious dealer named “Caliper John” approaches him with an offer to buy the “dead” copy of The Winter Hills. Caliper John treats the narrator to an expensive dinner, where the background details point to the story’s thematic concerns of overlooking and forgetting:
Across from us, a couple laughed. The woman bent over and vomited quietly into a little silver pitcher with a lid and daintily wiped her mouth. One of the waiters came by discreetly and picked it up off the floor and took it away. Other customers seemed to have an easier time averting their eyes than I did, familiar with erasing unpleasant things like these.
It’s a chilling detail of the world of wilful blindness that Ha creates. But to me the most interesting moment comes when the narrator picks up a “living reprint of The Winter Hills for comparison.” Where the “dead” copy is a gritty yet meditative western with a downer ending, “haunting, strange, and unfamiliar,” the “living” text is sanitised and anodyne:
There was a shootout in Copper Hawk like before, yes. But instead of the loss and the blood and the shame of the rider, the iron-handed sheriff was the one to take a bullet. The miners of the town staged a revolt against the metals company in the third act. They set fire to some of the shafts with an explosion at the end of the action, to punctuate the triumph. I could almost sense the hand of audience-score maximizer programs in the plot.
The most damning note of the exegesis, however, is this: “I felt better in some ways, having read the new, happier ending, but I forgot it promptly.” This incentive to forget the unpleasant things we see around us feels apposite to the times, but more personally it’s a vivid sort of horror to put in front of a literary critic. We are not always the best judges of what will be remembered: History is littered with critically acclaimed books that survive as mere footnotes today. But I am willing to bet that I will not forget “The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video” in a hurry, nor the extraordinary collection in which it appears. If you choose to read it, I doubt you will either. Ha has produced an engaging, kinetic, and profoundly well-crafted set of stories. To indulge once more in visual terminology, it marks him out as one to watch.