Howard Phillips Lovecraft may have been a writer for only a short time, but the creations he left behind after his death in 1937 have shaped modern horror more than any other author in the last two centuries: the shambling god Cthulhu, and the other deities of the Elder Things, the Outer Gods, and the Great Old Ones, and Herbert West, Reanimator, a doctor who unlocked the secrets of life and death at a terrible cost. In Lovecraft Unbound, more than twenty of today's most prominent writers of literature and dark fantasy tell stories set in or inspired by the works of H. P. Lovecraft. 9 • Introduction (Lovecraft Unbound) • essay by Ellen Datlow 11 • The Crevasse • short story by Dale Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud 31 • The Office of Doom • [Dust Devil] • short story by Richard Bowes 43 • Sincerely, Petrified • short fiction by Anna Tambour 73 • The Din of Celestial Birds • (1997) • short story by Brian Evenson 85 • The Tenderness of Jackals • short fiction by Amanda Downum 99 • Sight Unseen • short fiction by Joel Lane 113 • Cold Water Survival • short story by Holly Phillips 139 • Come Lurk With Me and Be My Love • short fiction by William Browning Spencer 161 • Houses Under the Sea • (2006) • novelette by Caitlín R. Kiernan 195 • Machines of Concrete Light and Dark • short story by Michael Cisco 213 • Leng • short fiction by Marc Laidlaw 239 • In the Black Mill • (1997) • short story by Michael Chabon 267 • One Day, Soon • short fiction by Lavie Tidhar 277 • Commencement • (2001) • novelette by Joyce Carol Oates 305 • Vernon, Driving • short fiction by Simon Kurt Unsworth 315 • The Recruiter • short fiction by Michael Shea 331 • Marya Nox • short fiction by Gemma Files 347 • Mongoose • [Boojum] • novelette by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette 375 • Catch Hell • short fiction by Laird Barron 413 • That of Which We Speak When We Speak of the Unspeakable • short fiction by Nick Mamatas

     A Victorian Englishman summons a strange puppet-like being to an old Colonial Inn. A doctor returns from the Great War and discovers a mysterious naked woman at the edge of the Atlantic. A contemporary collector of arcane books retraces the steps of these other men -- adventurers who sought out the mysteries of neighboring dimensions. In THE SEA OF ASH, Scott Thomas takes us along as three men from three different centuries experience the wonders and horrors of an unknown New England. "Never had the universe felt so vast, and I so small within it. I had, through circumstance, been made aware of something, but of what? Something either too horrible or too beautiful for humans to know." —From The Sea of Ash

     In this acclaimed first volume, four sequential novellas and one bonus short story chronicle the weird adventures of THE MERKABAH RIDER. In THE BLOOD LIBEL, The Rider fights to save the last survivors of a frontier Jewish settlement not only from a maddened lynch mob, but from a cult of Molech worshippers hiding in their midst. In THE DUST DEVILS, a border town is held hostage by a band of outlaws in league with a powerful Vodoun sorcerer. In HELL'S HIRED GUN, The Rider faces an ex-Confederate sharpshooter who has pledged his allegiance to Hell itself. In THE NIGHTJAR WOMEN, The Rider drifts into a town where children cannot be born. Here an antediluvian being holds the secret to his fugitive master's insidious plan; a plot that threatens all of Creation. Finally, never before collected, THE SHOMER EXPRESS. On a midnight train crossing the desert, a corpse turns up desecrated. Someone stalking the cars has assumed its shape, and only The Rider can stop it.

    From sadistic bosses with secret fears to a woman trapped in a mime’s imaginary box, and from a post-apocalyptic misidentified Messiah to unwitting portraitists of the dead, the mind-bending world of this modern-day Edgar Allan Poe exposes the horror contained within our daily lives.

    When his new roommate's brother dies tragically, the unnamed narrator of A JELLO HORSE offers to drive him home to the Midwest. Feeling anxious and displaced, he embarks on another roadtrip to visit the bizarre attractions and quirky museums in America's heartland. Matthew Simmons has found a beautiful and extraordinary way to tell a story about the sweetness of sadness and the aloneness of loneliness--Michael Kimball, author of Dear Everybody.

    It is a truth found by all the characters in Mark Valentine’s new full collection of stories since Masques & Citadels. Carden, the quester after lost languages, finds there are some things that cannot be named. The narrator in "The Seer of Trieste" finds the old city harbours an image that has pervaded the most advanced literature of our time, while the strange and tragic secrets of another liminal city are explored in "The Seven Treasures of Bucharest". The voyages of "The White Sea Company" seem to sail beyond any mortal shore, while the smouldering sunrise in "The Dawn at Tzern" brings different illuminations to a priest, a postmaster, a prophet and a soldier. In "Their Dark & Starry Mirrors", a blind Moorish poet receives messages from the Master of Night. In "Undergrowth" a searcher after rare works finds it is possible to get truly lost in books, and in "White Pages" we learn that even blank books have their secrets. And which author should have won "The 1909 Proserpine Prize" for dark literature – Blackwood, Shiel, Hodgson, Stoker, Marjorie Bowen – or another ? As well as these tales, two more curious pieces appear: "The English Leopard" eavesdrops on a conversation about a great lost heraldic beast, while "The Left Temple" provides six startling experiments in evoking the rites of dusk. The author of The Connoisseur stories and editor of Wormwood offers a book of wonder, where neither light nor shadow are ever all they seem. Two years in the making, The Nightfarers is not only the most eclectic and exquisite Mark Valentine collection to date but also his finest. We here at Ex Occidente Press trust this is one of the very few contemporary masterpieces of the weird and the fantastic.ContentsThe 1909 Proserpine PrizeCarden in CapaeaWhite PagesThe Inner SentinelThe Dawn at TzernThe White Sea CompanyUndergrowthThe Seer of TriesteTheir Dark and Starry MirrorsThe Bookshop in Nový SvetThe English Leopard: An Heraldic DialogueThe Box of IdolsThe Axholme TollThe Seven Treasures of BucharestAbout the StoriesThe Nightfarers is a sewn hardcover book - 21 x 27 cm! - of 191 pages with deluxe endpapers and a full-page original frontispiece. Edition strictly limited to 300 copies.

    If crooked branches have rapped upon your window at night, it has summoned you... If your dreams are plagued by half-glimpsed terrors, it has claimed you... From one of the most gruesomely original voices in contemporary horror comes this book of thirteen nightmares. Richard Gavin will plunge you into underworlds of Hellish beauty; give you flight on Dread-Moths' wings; tend for you a thicket that blooms with feral children. More than a volume of horror tales, this collection offers visions of a realm whose splendours are as illuminating as they are dark.

    Through its dusty passages are to be heard only the muffled, shivering voices of its ghosts, like the last lingering echoes of some forgotten passion in a lunatic asylum. It has been said that, in the grounds of this ruin, was a hothouse where Romanticism showed its last, grotesque bloom in the form of H. P. Lovecraft, since when the grey desolation of realism has swept over all in a fungoid blight. And yet, there remains a kind of life here, perhaps stranger still than previous blooms, in a weedy and overgrown flowerbed, under the name of Quentin S. Crisp. All God’s Angels, Beware!, the fourth collection of fiction from the contemporary British master of dementia, gathers together for the first time ten examples of Crisp’s own unique species of decayed Romanticism.“Karakasa” is an Orientalist masquerade of decayed futurity. “The Were-Sheep of Abercrave” offers a shaggy-dog tale of such shagginess that its coat has been shaped into a bizarre topiary maze. “Asking For It” sketches a picture of sad singledom amongst the rootless of Tokyo. “The Fox Wedding” brings Far Eastern folklore to a modern setting, with some unpleasant surprises. “Italiannetto” is a sunny, nostalgic love story with Neapolitan style. In “Troubled Joe”, a ghost tethered to this world by chains of resentment searches for someone to hear his story. “Mise en Abyme” presents an escheresque trompe-l’aeil in prose, while in the stunning novella “Ynys-y-Plag” you will discover a weird tale in the tradition of Blackwood and Machen.In these and other stories, Crisp draws equally from East and West to create a vision of the macabre like nothing else in literature. Discover here fleurs du mal of hybrid decadence, whimsy, exoticism, gothickry, horror and beauty.ContentsTroubled JoeThe Were-Sheep of AbercraveYnys-y-PlagKarakasaA Cup of TeaAsking For ItThe Fox WeddingMise en AbymeItaliannettoSuicide Watch

    300 copies. (Out of print).Reality is a thin translucent membrane that separates this world from the one beyond, and that membrane bends and buckles as we thrust ourselves against it. Through the barrier we see distorted visions, the merest glimpse of which is enough to infect our minds. . . . Thirteen tales of strangeness and surrealism await the reader of this book; stories of loss, despair, and what happens when those without hope meet that which they cannot understand. Two women vacationing far away encounter the mysteries of island life. . . . A trip north of the city to woods and a lake and a sky hungry for more. . . . Snow is falling, reminding the dying of all they've lost, or the young of all they have yet to lose. . . . The other world, it awaits you in the dark, cold to the touch. Contents: 'Under the Overpass', 'The Other Village', 'The Uninvited Guest', 'A Seed on Barren Ground', 'Writing on the Wall', 'A Chorus of Yesterdays', 'The Sweetest Song', 'Pinholes in Black Muslin', 'Fading Light', 'Poor Stephanie', 'Like Falling Snow', 'Here’s to the Good Life', 'Cold to the Touch, and 'Afterword'.

    They live in an underground world filled with lollipop forests and gumdrop goblins. During the day, while you are away at work, they come above ground and prowl our streets for food. Their prey: your children. They lure young boys and girls to them with their sweet scent and bright colorful candy coating, then rip them apart with razor sharp teeth and claws. When he was a child, Franklin Pierce witnessed the death of his siblings at the hands of a candy woman with pink cotton candy hair. Since that day, the candy people have become his obsession. He has spent his entire life trying to prove that they exist. And after discovering the entrance to the underground world of the candy people, Franklin finds himself venturing into their sugary domain. His mission: capture one of them and bring it back, dead or alive. Cannibals of Candyland is an erotic horror story for the bizarro reader. Dark, disturbing, and absurd; this isn't the board game version of candy land you used to play as a kid.

    P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, the two authors continue their wide-ranging discussion of such central issues as the relative value of barbarism and civilization, the virtues of the frontier and of settled city life, and other related issues. Lovecraft regales Howard with his extensive travels up and down the eastern seaboard, including trips to Quebec, Florida, and obscure corners of New England, while Howard writes engagingly of his own travels through the lonely stretches of Texas. Each has great praise for the other's writings in Weird Tales and elsewhere, and each conducts searching discussions of literature, philosophy, politics, and economics in the wake of the depression and Franklin D. Roosevelt's election. World affairs, including the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, also engage their attention. All letters are exhaustively annotated by the editors, and the volume concludes with an extensive bibliography of both writers as well as the publication of a few letters to Lovecraft from Robert E. Howard's father, Dr. I. M. Howard, in the wake of his son's tragic and unexpected suicide.

    They have been published in a variety of places online and in short story compilations, and are also available as audio plays on Drabblecast.In the future, humanity has established space stations throughout the solar system using a combination of mechanical and organic technology. Life is a constant struggle: danger comes not only from competition over limited resources and the remorseless vacuum of space, but also inter-dimensional predators, brain-stealing aliens, Space Pirates in Living Ships, feuding between various ideological sects and cults, and the warped creations of their own eldritch science turning against them.Each story is stand-alone, featuring a different protagonist and containing only passing reference to the others. There are three stories in the Boojumverse so far:- "Boojum"- "Mongoose"- "The Wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward"

    Evenson’s Baby Leg and Tremblay’s The Harlequin and the Train appeared in limited editions that are largely unavailable. Now Another Way to Fall brings these fantastic, award-winning writers together—and puts these haunting novels in the eager hands of new (and generous) readers.In Baby Leg, a mysterious man awakes one morning in an isolated cabin with no memory of how he’s gotten there—or why he’s missing a hand. The book has been described as “the kind of thing that might have happened if David Goodis and Jim Thompson tried to write a mad scientist story in the middle of a bender.” Powerful and profoundly eerie, Tremblay’s The Harlequin and the Train spins the surreal tale of a young train engineer, a commuter train accident, and its disturbing aftermath. As novelist Laird Barron put it, Tremblay “pierces the veil of prosaic suburban life to reveal its dark heart.” Brian Evenson is the author of a dozen books of fiction, most recently the story collection A Collapse of Horses and the novella The Warren. Paul Tremblay is the author of seven novels including Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, The Little Sleep, and the forthcoming The Cabin at the End of the World.

    Sesqua Valley, modeled on North Bend and the Snoqualmie Valley in the Pacific Northwest, is home to Wilum Pugmire's created world of supernatural forces and eldritch beings, attracting mere mortals who feel its call. While inspired by the work of H.P. Lovecraft, Pugmire uses Lovecraftian elements for his own ends, expressing a unique creative and poetic vision that sings of the liberating, if at times terrifying, power of transformation that lies within all of us.

    Book by Ronald Kelly

    Young men in search of adventure... explorers driven to investigate the ends of the earth... a girl trying to find the perfect hiding place... a curiosity-seeker drawn to an abandoned amusement park. All of them are looking for something -- and unfortunately, they usually find it. For the very unlucky, it sometimes finds them! In these ten spellbinding stories by World Fantasy Award winner Barbara Roden, very little is as innocent as it seems; but much is haunting, enigmatic, and terrifying. Where the Twilight Zone ends, the Northwest Passages begin.