"Here is how monstrous humans are." A sentient, murderous prosthetic leg; shadowy creatures lurking behind a shimmering wall; brutal barrow men--of all the terrors that populate The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, perhaps the most alarming are the beings who decimated the habitable Earth: humans. In this new short story collection, Brian Evenson envisions a chilling future beyond the Anthropocene that forces excruciating decisions about survival and self-sacrifice in the face of toxic air and a natural world torn between revenge and regeneration. Combining psychological and ecological horror, each tale thrums with Evenson's award-winning literary craftsmanship, dark humor, and thrilling suspense.

In Criminal Enterprise, Thomas Chase wakes up from cryosleep to his first day at a new job - as a pilot for a contraband drug company dropping a shipment on Fantasia, a rock-planet terraformed to hide an elaborate drug manufacturing operation. Everything from synthetic heroin to MX7 is cooked here, in protected caves guard-dogged by the savage Aliens. When Chase's craft touches down on Fantasia, a chain of events begins that cannot be stopped. As criminals and competitors try to take over the drug-empire from the dangerous kingpin, Chase and his brother Pete are caught in the crossfire... with the Aliens adding blood to the mix.

No Exit tells the story of Detective Anders Kramm, awakening to a changed world after thirty years of cryogenic sleep. The alien threat has been subdued. Company interests dominate universal trade. Terraforming is big money now, with powerful men willing to do anything to assure dominance over other worlds. But Kramm has a secret. He knows why The Company killed twelve of its top scientists. He knows why the aliens have been let loose on the surface of a contested planet. He knows that the information he has is valuable, and that The Company will do everything it can to stop him from telling his secret to the world. Haunted by memories of the brutal murder of his family, Kramm is set adrift amid billion dollar stakes . . . with aliens around every corner, waiting for him to make a mistake!

"Brilliant...Evenson manages to capture madness with a masterful tone. The specific genius o"f Fugue Sta"te rests in subtlety, in Evenson's ability to maintain suspense, dread and paranoia through utter linguistic control.""--Time Out New York""""19 satisfying and surreal stories...packed with subtly hilarious sentences."--"Cleveland Plain Dealer""Brian Evenson is one of the treasures of American story writing, a true successor both to the generation of Coover, Barthelme, Hawkes and Co., but also to Edgar Allan Poe."--Jonathan Lethem"The stories in this collection will thrill, unsettle, and captivate. Like lanterns in dark rooms, paper boats carried down on subterranean waters, they lead the reader into mysterious and perilous territory. Read at your own risk."--Kelly Link

Illustrated by graphic novelist Zak Sally, Brian Evenson's hallucinatory and darkly comic stories of paranoia, pursuit, sensory deprivation, amnesia, and retribution rattle the cages of the psyche and peer into the gaping moral chasm that opens when we become estranged from ourselves. 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.

Brian Evenson is the author of the Edgar and International Horror Guild award-nominated novel "The Open Curtain." Visit his website at www.brianevenson.com.

Fiction. This is the story of the Willoweed family and the English village in which they live. It begins mid-flood, ducks swimming in the drawing-room windows, "quacking their approval" as they sail around the room. "What about my rose beds?" demands Grandmother Willoweed. Her son shouts down her ear-trumpet that the garden is submerged, dead animals everywhere, she will be lucky to get a bunch. Then the miller drowns himself...then the butcher slits his throat...and a series of gruesome deaths plagues the villagers. The newspaper asks, "Who will be smitten by this fatal madness next?" Through it all, Comyns' unique voice weaves a text as wonderful as it is horrible, as beautiful as it is cruel. Originally published in England in 1954, this "overlooked small masterpiece" is a twisted, tragicomic gem.

"[Evenson's] scary fictional treatment of church hypocrisy has the feeling of a reasoned attack on blind religious obedience."-Publishers Weekly Provost Eldon Fochs may be a sexual criminal. His therapist isn't sure, and his church is determined to protect its reputation. Father of Lies is Brian Evenson's fable of power, paranoia, and the dangers of blind obedience, and a terrifying vision of how far institutions will go to protect themselves against the innocents who may be their victims.

A newborn's absent face appears on the back of someone else's head, a filmmaker goes to gruesome lengths to achieve the silence he's after for his final scene, and a therapist begins, impossibly, to appear in a troubled patient's room late at night. In these stories of doubt, delusion, and paranoia, no belief, no claim to objectivity, is immune to the distortions of human perception. Here, self-deception is a means of justifying our most inhuman impulses--whether we know it or not.

Evenson is a major figure among writers who straddle the line between genre forms and literary concerns, and he was recently the subject of a 5 x 5 interview (five interviewers, and spread over five full-length conversations) with The Believer bringing his work to an even wider audience Evenson's straight genre work is published by Tor, and there's a large cross-over audience primed to enjoy his more literary work. Evenson's work has been compared to that of J. G. Ballard, Jorge Luis Borges, Paul Bowles, Franz Kafka, Cormac McCarthy, Robert Coover, Edgar Allan Poe. Evenson has also won the ALA RUSA Award for Best Horror Novel and was a finalist for the Edgar Award. Last Days will be published alongside two other re-releases (The Open Curtain and Father of Lies) as well as a new collection, A Collapse of Horses all with a unified design and new introductions This is Evenson's foray into hard-boiled detective fiction, but it still circles around his concerns with the abuse of power and the danger of organized religion

Each author has extensive fanbase Each author has been nominated for and/or has won numerous awards. Most recently Jesse Ball was long listed for the National Book Awards. A great Halloween or Day of the Dead book

Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature “Annie Ernaux’s work,� wrote Richard Bernstein in the New York Times, “represents a severely pared-down Proustianism, a testament to the persistent, haunting and melancholy quality of memory.� In the New York Times Book Review, Kathryn Harrison concurred: “Keen language and unwavering focus allow her to penetrate deep, to reveal pulses of love, desire, remorse.�   In this “journal� Ernaux turns her penetrating focus on those points in life where the everyday and the extraordinary intersect, where “things seen� reflect a private life meeting the larger world. From the war crimes tribunal in Bosnia to social issues such as poverty and AIDS; from the state of Iraq to the world’s contrasting reactions to Princess Diana’s death and the starkly brutal political murders that occurred at the same time; from a tear-gas attack on the subway to minute interactions with a clerk in a store: Ernaux’s thought-provoking observations map the world’s fleeting and lasting impressions on the shape of inner life.  

Evenson is a major figure among writers who straddle the line between genre forms and literary concerns, and he was recently the subject of a 5 x 5 interview (five interviewers, and spread over five full-length conversations) with The Believer bringing his work to an even wider audience Evenson's straight genre work is published by Tor, and there's a large cross-over audience primed to enjoy his more literary work. Evenson's work has been compared to that of J. G. Ballard, Jorge Luis Borges, Paul Bowles, Franz Kafka, Cormac McCarthy, Robert Coover, Edgar Allan Poe. Evenson has also won the ALA RUSA Award for Best Horror Novel and was a finalist for the Edgar Award. Collapse will be published alongside three re-releases (The Open Curtain, Father of Lies, and Last Days, all with a unified design and new introductions

"There is not a more intense, prolific, or apocalyptic writer of fiction in America than Brian Evenson."-George Saunders "A contemporary gothic tale about the apocalyptic connection between religion and violence."-Publishers Weekly When Rudd, a troubled teenager, embarks on a school research project, he runs across the secret Mormon ritual of blood sacrifice, and its role in a 1902 murder committed by the grandson of Brigham Young. Along with his newly discovered half-brother, Rudd becomes swept up in the psychological and atavistic effects of this violent, antique ritual.

Dark Discoveries - Issue #27 Dark Mystery All new Fiction by: Douglas Clegg, Brian Evenson, Maurice Broaddus, John R. Little, Bentley Little, Tom Piccirilli Interviews with: Brian Evenson, Jeffrey Sackett, and Tom Piccirilli Articles on: The Italian Connection: Crime Films of the 1970s by James R. Beach, Nightmare on Main Street: The Mad Slasher Pulps by Frank M. Robinson & Lawrence Davidson, Hannibal Lecter's Reign of Terror by Aaron J. French Jade Sky Comic by: Joe McKinney and Patrick Freivald with artwork from Chris Bell