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A November release!
by Laura Argiri
Small dreams can damn as much as full-blown nightmares, as proven in the short stories Laura Argiri has written in her debut collection, Guilty Parties. Small town life can host the bitterest gossip, and and small-minded folk can offer the cruelest taunts and regrettable deeds. A mother dwells on how broken her only daughter is, and whether her grandchild is all the crueler for it. A man's obsession with bettering his lot in life to impress a woman develops a fascination instead for poisonous snakes. A young wife is confronted by her husband's former boarding school roommate, a demented man whose misogyny has convinced him that she tore a rightful pairing apart. Guilt is the mortar between these enthralling tales.
Paperback, 198 pages
“A scintillating walk on the dark side." – Lionel Shriver, author of We Need to Talk About Kevin
“Guilty Parties features a cast of characters worthy of Twin Peaks—a stalker, a hoarder, a teenage ghost, a Swedish shaman, high-end male prostitutes, Goebbels’s favorite daughter, a madam for a pedophile ring, space aliens living undisturbed for generations in a quaint English village. The touching, disturbing, and often amusing struggles of this uncanny circus of saints and sinners are brought vividly to life by Laura Argiri’s gift for gripping prose and riveting storytelling. Anyone who thinks that fiction is a dying art form needs to read this stunning collection. I couldn’t wait to see what outrage would happen next!” – Lisa Alther, author of Swan Song and Washed in the Blood
“Laura Argiri’s stories gambol about like charming baby velociraptors that suddenly grow up, and proceed to eat you alive.” – Lewis Gannett, author of The Living One
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by Philip Fracassi
When Jim's big brother Jack is released from prison, the brothers—along with their broken father and Jack's menacing best friend—decide to charter an ocean fishing boat to celebrate Jack's new freedom. Once the small crew is far out to sea, however, a mutant species rises from the deep abyssal darkness to terrorize the vessel and its occupants.
As the horror of their situation becomes clear, the small group must find a way to fend off the attack and somehow, someway, return to safety; but as the strange parasitic creatures overrun them, they must use more extreme—and deadly—measures to survive.
Paperback, 90 pages
"Sacculina is a smart, terrifying, and poignant tale of creeping menace. I devoured it in one frenzied sitting... this Fracassi guy is damn good." - Richard Chizmar
"Very scary... lean and nightmarish and uneasy... will definitely be reading more of this guy." - Ben Loory
"Trust me, this is intense stuff with some sequences definitely not for the faint-hearted. The pacing here is superb, exciting and frantic." -- Dark Musings UK
"Philip Fracassi is one of those names that will keep popping up to any fans of modern horror. Not only is he relentless with his output, but every published work seems to be getting better and better.... Sacculina is not only a damned fine yarn but a perfect gateway drug into Philip Fracassi's fiction." - This Is Horror
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by John Mantooth
The end of the road can be a haunted place. These genre-bending stories are set against a backdrop of sudden violence and profound regret, populated by characters whose bleak circumstances drive them to the point of no return...and sometimes even further. A high school track star faces a betrayal she cannot outrun. Two friends take a journey to find the dead alien hidden in the belly of a water tower. A high school senior learns about defiance on a school bus and witnesses a tragedy that he won't soon forget. Six survivors in an underground bunker discuss the possibility of the apocalypse being an elaborate hoax. Brothers take a walk on the dark side of the wheat field and discover that some bonds are stronger than death. And in the title story, a former train conductor must confront the ghosts of his past while learning that it's not the dead who haunt the living, but the other way around. Traversing the back roads of the south and beyond, these stories probe the boundaries of grief as well as imagination.
Please note that this collection may have the same title of the 2012 release, but the table of contents has some significant differences:
Paperback, 226 pages
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by Steve Berman, featuring an Introduction by Holly Black
On a chilly, autumn night, on a lonely New Jersey highway, a teenager meets the boy of his dreams dressed in vintage clothing. When the boy vanishes, the teenager discovers he’s encountered the local legend, the ghost of a young man who died four decades earlier and has haunted that stretch of road ever since. Curious and smitten, the next evening the teen returns with his best friend. So begins an unusual story of boy-meets-ghost complete with Ouija boards, hours spent in cemeteries, scares and macabre humor. This new edition of the book, to celebrate its thirteenth anniversary, features a new introduction by New York Times best-selling author Holly Black.
“With Vintage, Steve Berman took well-worn tropes of both young adult and speculative fiction and refocused them through a queer lens, creating a story that was groundbreaking, haunting, and deeply moving. It deserves to be remembered as a queer classic.” - Michael Thomas Ford, Five-time Lambda Literary Award-winning author of Lily and Suicide Notes
"Gay teen readers who've been hankering for a horror story all their own will be thrilled with all of the creeps, crawls, chills, and eyeliner that Berman has to offer." - School Library Journal
"Berman has succeeded admirably in writing a powerful and poignant coming-out story." - Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books
"Jarboe’s debut collection careens from tongue-in-cheek body horror to incisive science fiction populated by characters on the margins of society and ranging in tone from the incandescently furious to the devotional. Featuring emotional climate apocalypses, playful riffs on Kafka, and tenderly imagined space colonies, this collection is an outstanding showcase of an exciting new voice in genre fiction."
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