WHAT READERS ARE SAYING ABOUT
A GREEN GLOW ON THE HORIZON

“Lauren Ambrite, the National Association of Tourist Attraction Survivors editor of A Green Glow on the Horizon, is a serial collector of sorts who satisfies her greedy soul by collecting the stories of fellow Tourist Attraction Trauma survivors starved of significance in a world that consigns to the shadows individuals who ‘feel too deeply.’

“Standing behind this earnest but sometimes scary editor—who, according to a fellow character and former classmate, spent her teenage years as a serial killer—is author Dawn Burns, a writer who dares to expose the complicated, often contradictory yearnings and compulsions, griefs and grievous missteps of fellow human beings. Burns’ dazzling range of storytelling—satiric caricature, social realism, myth making, and even stark horror story—serves the ‘sudden rush of sadness for all the stories people [are] unable to tell,’ as one of her conflicted characters puts it. GGOTH will take your breath away by its too-too-real characters, its social candor, and above all else, its unashamed love of our ever-yearning ever-misfit humanity and the stories we attempt to make of ourselves.”
–Mary Catherine Harper, author of A Found Object Imagines a Life

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“A Green Glow on the Horizon is as daring as a high-wire act, and Dawn Burns walks that wire with no pauses and no missed steps. Somehow she holds the satirical and the affectionate in perfect balance. This is the rare book that manages to be wildly inventive, serenely wise, and delightfully zany.”
   — Valerie Sayers, author of The Age of Infidelity 

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“I always enjoy when Dawn Burns visits and introduces me to her friends—real, imagined, and amalgams. In A Green Glow On the Horizon, Dawn’s friends are as fascinating as I would expect her friends to be. Both ephemeral and eternal, they include what-if lovers who bond over angelic “water cats,” and a thirteen-year-old more worried about her mom’s wellbeing than about a potential intergalactic alien stepfather. They might be hyperdontic, hypertrichotic, or Oscar Wilde (making an in-absentia cameo).

“A Green Glow On the Horizon is gently and lovingly curated—steeped with earnestness, hopefulness, copious amounts of humanity, and just the right infusion of whimsy. These characters would be fine company over a cup of Celestial Seasonings peppermint tea.

“I know that in a myriad of alternative universes—ones that Dawn must surely have visited—a version of me would be a card-carrying member of the National Association of Tourist Attraction Survivors. But until I find the portal, I am grateful for her sharing this travelogue.”
–Scott Harris, Everybody Reads Books and Stuff, Lansing, Mich.

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“Dawn Burns’ A Green Glow on the Horizon: Tales from the National Association of Tourist Attraction Survivors is a polyphonic ode to all those who dwell in the places that become the bizarro footnotes in other people’s road trips. Featuring a multitude of narration styles and unruly characters like real-life serial killer Belle Gunness and heiress Sarah Winchester, Burns takes us on a wild ride through small-town America, from places like Hell, Michigan, to The World’s Only Corn Palace in South Dakota. A Green Glow is teeming with modern midwestern fairytales and conspiracies alike that locate the fullness in the seemingly desolate, find the zaniness in the seemingly banal, and leave you basking in the afterglow.”
— Elise Jajuga and Christine Peffer, A Novel Concept, Lansing, Mich.

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“With delicious humor and a masterful perception of the strangeness of the human condition, Dawn Burns writes characters you will never forget because they will haunt your dreams and follow you on road trips. They will persuade you to stop at their tourist attractions and help you look past the kitschy facades to see them in their weirdly fascinating lives. You will be pulled in by their unique voices and their very human desires and fears, and you will find yourself in places you never thought you’d be but that ultimately feel all too familiar. With Burns’ latest, you will definitely laugh, probably cry, and wish this book would never end.”
–Cait West, author of Rift: A Memoir of Breaking Away from Christian Patriarchy

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“In turns wryly funny and heart-twisting, these compelling vignettes revel in their raw oddities. While each tale brings home its own unique souvenir, the common denominator among all the stories is an aim at understanding our deepest, truest selves. As Burns writes, ‘In the end we are all characters in each other’s stories, aren’t we?’”
–Colleen Alles, author of Close to a Flame: Stories

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Reader, to say you are about to embark on a spiritual journey would not begin to prepare you for the cross-country metaphysical trek Dawn Burns takes you on. These stories–testaments to joy and love, testimonies of insecurity and fear–ask you to bear witness to a great sewing together of threads into a perfectly unique, odd, unsettling-yet-comforting quilt of humanity. This is no carnival sideshow, though. As Lauren Ambrite, the fictional editor of this collection states, “I gather these stories… not to show off people’s weirdness but to validate their individual selves.” From emotionally lost mothers looking for love in the stars, to the double afterlives of a serial killer turned imaginary friend, from the traumas of religious isolationism to the many–contradicting–truths one tells themselves once they have healed, A Green Glow on the Horizon is “a celebration of who we are and what we do” as perfectly blemished beings looking for salvation. Nestled in these stories, Burns asks, “what kind of redemption can come without furious pain and suffering?” Reader, you’re about to find out. 

— R. S. Deeren, Michigan Notable Book Winning Author of Enough to Lose

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“No writer I know of captures the essential surrealism of childhood and adolescence better than Dawn Burns. She gives voice to marginals: kids we grew up with and never really knew yet we see every time we look in the mirror. They wrestle with demons and angels in surprising places, finding horror, humor, and grace in a phantasmic landscape where nuance lies tucked under outrageous overstatement.

“In the array of stories that comprise A Green Glow on the Horizon, appropriate arrangement of the attractions is part and parcel of the whole. The roadmap takes us from from Roswell to Hell, with the editor’s insights as the GPS helping us to be mindful of the journey and the direction it takes. It cannot be the other way around, for to begin in Hell and end in Roswell would be Hell indeed: an alien place where good dreams do not come true. But basking in the neighborly warmth of Hell? That’s a heck of a wonderful way to end the journey.

“A Green Glow on the Horizon is a compelling concoction of reality and compassionate, shimmering imagination, breathed into life on the page by a master storyteller. The world is our Tourist Attraction, and we are so much richer for sharing it with Burns and her unforgettable characters.”

–Jan Maher, author of Earth as it Is and Heaven, Indiana

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“Meet me at the crossroads of Sublime and Surreal, the Cartesian spring of genius that is cartographer Dawn Burns’ A Green Glow on the Horizon. Here’s the Bally: These tales are Double-took Dispatches for a Convention of Tricksters. This book is a Matryoshka of Defamiliarized Detours. Turns out there is a there there, and you can get there from here.” 

–Michael Martone, author of Table Talk & Second Thoughts and Plain Air: Dispatches from Winesburg, Indiana

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“Dawn Burns’s dream of America is a circus sideshow of small-town roadside attractions, and behind the scenes at these iconic museums and glorified gift shops, we find families profoundly devoted to whatever is on display. As Burns ostensibly explores tourist destinations, she is actually exposing the wider problem of spiritual abuse, engendered by blind faith and the plain old-fashioned refusal to see beyond one’s own walls. Her tender and funny insights into the relationships between people and their beliefs reveal the way American religiosity so easily morphs into consumerism, cultural misappropriation, and absurdity. While some characters in these fabulist tales succumb to their worst impulses, the author never gives up on them, but instead, through masterful narrative, carries us all into the imaginative realm with humor and compassion that honors community and human complexity.”

–Bonnie Jo Campbell, National Book Award finalist and author of The Waters