Mike Thorn is the author of Shelter for theDamned, Darkest Hours, andPeel Back and See. His fiction has appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies, and podcasts, includingVastarien, Dark Moon Digest, and The NoSleep Podcast.His books have earned praise from Jamie Blanks (director of Urban Legend and Valentine), Jeffrey Reddick (creator of Final Destination), and Daniel Goldhaber (director of Cam). His essays and articles have been published in American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper (University of Texas Press), The Film Stage, and elsewhere.
Clive Barker transcends the subgenre label of “splatterpunk,” infecting an array of lofty speculative traditions with mutilation and viscera. The author’s prose style is elegant, often gorgeous, and his depictions of violence connect to a provocative, career-long interest in the cosmic, glimpsed often by means of extreme physical experience. For my money, "The Midnight Meat Train" is one of the great horror stories of the late twentieth century.
Rediscover the true meaning of fear in this collection of horror stories from Clive Barker, New York Times bestselling author and creator of the Hellraiser series.
Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red.
In this tour de force collection of brilliantly disturbing tales, Clive Barker combines the extraordinary with the ordinary, bringing to life our darkest nightmares with stories that both seduce and devour. As beautiful as they are terrible, the pages of this volume are stained with unsettling imagery, macabre humor, and visceral dread. Here then are the…
Thomas Ligotti is one of the few writers whose work genuinely, profoundly scares me. His vision is underscored by an all-too-convincing commitment to pessimistic philosophy (which is accessibly detailed in his 2010 book The Conspiracy Against the Human Race). Songs of a Dead Dreameris haunted by the philosophical outlooks of E. M. Cioran, Arthur Schopenhauer, H. P. Lovecraft, and Edgar Allan Poe, but Ligotti’s fixation on marionettes, dolls, and the illusory nature of human agency is singular and distinctive. This is a masterpiece of existentially disturbing dark literature.
Thomas Ligotti's debut collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, and his second, Grimscribe, permanently inscribed a new name in the pantheon of horror fiction. Influenced by the strange terrors of Lovecraft and Poe and by the brutal absurdity of Kafka, Ligotti crafted his own brand of existential horror, which shocks at the deepest levels. In decaying cities and lurid dreamscapes tormented by the lunatic pageantry of masks, puppets, and obscure ritual, Ligotti's works lay bare the sickening madness of the human condition.
From his dark imagination emerge stories like "The Frolic" and "The Last Feast of Harlequin," waking nightmares that…
Kathe Koja changed everything with the release of The Cipher in 1991, emerging as the most exhilarating new voice in American dark fiction since the arrival of Stephen King nearly two decades prior. Her work is characterized by hyper-sensory immersion into complex subjectivities, achieved by an inimitable, modernism-tinged voice. Koja is a master novelist, and it’s a rush to read her style within the more condensed form of short fiction; once you’re finished with Extremities, be sure to pick up her genre-expanding 2020 collection, Velo/Cities.
Blending elements of horror, fantasy, and science fiction, an imaginative anthology of seventeen short stories by a Bram Stoker and Locus Award-winning author includes "Disquieting Muse," "Anels in Love," "Bird Superior," and "The Neglected Garden." IP.
This book's heightened literary consciousness suggests a lifetime of practice, but it is, in fact, Gwendolyn Kiste's debut (she has quickly become one of contemporary dark fiction’s most celebrated, leading figures). Throughout Untether, the author examines both societal and individual forms of suffering (e.g. depression, dissociation, and the dangers of socially imposed normativities). My favorite piece is “Skin Like Honey and Lace,” which depicts a group of women who achieve social induction by taking skin from strangers and applying it to their own bodies. A staggeringly accomplished collection.
A murdered movie star reaches out to an unlikely fan. An orchard is bewitched with poison apples and would-be princesses. A pair of outcasts fail a questionnaire that measures who in their neighborhood will vanish next. Two sisters keep a grotesque secret hidden in a Victorian bathtub. A dearly departed best friend carries a grudge from beyond the grave.
In her debut collection, Gwendolyn Kiste delves into the gathering darkness where beauty embraces the monstrous, and where even the most tranquil worlds are not to be trusted. From fairy tale kingdoms and desolate carnivals, to wedding ceremonies and summer camps…
Scarlett R. Algee’s debut collection is an exemplar of concision, comprised of stories that have been sanded down to their unsettling essences for maximally chilling impact. Bleedthrough deftly navigates the space where beauty and horror intermingle, often boldly upending genre conventions in the process. These pieces are vivid and absorbing, drawing fully realized worlds before exposing the terrible things that lurk on the peripheries.
A virtual-reality getaway stirs up latent malice. A lingering illness hides a truly monstrous malady. A young girl realizes her new stepmother is something other than human, while a dying man’s last wish bestows his ghoulish lover with the most intimate of gifts. A solitary occultist wakes to find his summoning ritual gone horribly awry, a mother’s grief leads her into a resort’s troubled past, and a teenage girl’s growing pains mark the beginning of an otherworldly change.
These and other stories await in Bleedthrough and Other Small Horrors, the debut collection of dark short fiction…
Between the covers of Mike Thorn’s debut collection,Darkest Hours, you will find academics in distress; humans abusing monsters; demons terrorizing people; ghostly reminiscences; resurrected trauma; and occult filmmaking. Ranging from satirical to dreadful, these sixteen stories share a distinct voice: urgent, sardonic, and brutal.
I’m an old guy. I say this with a bit of cheek and a certain amount of incongruity. All the books on my list are old. That’s one area of continuity. Another, and I’ll probably stop at two, is that they all deal with ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances—those curveballs of life we flail at with an unfamiliar bat; the getting stuck on the Interstate behind a semi and some geezer in a golf cap hogging the passing lane in a Buick Le Sabre. No one makes it through this life unscathed. How we cope does more to define us than a thousand smiles when things are rosy. Thus endeth the lesson.
Nine Stories Told Completely in Dialogue is a unique collection of narratives, each unfolding entirely through conversations between its characters. The book opens with "God on a Budget," a tale of a man's surreal nighttime visitation that offers a blend of the mundane and the mystical. In "Doctor in the House," readers are plunged into the emotionally charged moment when an oncologist delivers a life-altering diagnosis to a patient. The collection then shifts to "Prisoner 8086," a story about the unlikely friendship that blossoms between a prison volunteer and a habitual offender, exploring themes of redemption and human connection.
Nine Stories Told Completely in Dialogue is a unique collection of narratives, each unfolding entirely through conversations between its characters. The book opens with "God on a Budget," a tale of a man's surreal nighttime visitation that offers a blend of the mundane and the mystical. In "Doctor in the House," readers are plunged into the emotionally charged moment when an oncologist delivers a life-altering diagnosis to a patient. The collection then shifts to "Prisoner 8086," a story about the unlikely friendship that blossoms between a prison volunteer and a habitual offender, exploring themes of redemption and human connection.
