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Scratch

Available for purchase on Amazon and Goodreads

Martin Blaskett moves to a small town to oversee construction of a housing development, where he encounters a shape-shifting figure from local legend—Scratch. He is taken under the wing of his new neighbor, a retired hunting guide named Gil Rose, and befriends a local woman named Alison. Along the way, trouble ensues as Scratch feels threatened by changes to the landscape, luring locals out into the woods, including Alison's son. As the blame for a range of events falls at Martin’---s feet, he is beset by increasingly inhuman dreams, and comes to doubt his own innocence. A literary novel of wilderness noir that engages the supernatural elements of folklore in the manner of magical realism, Scratch explores the overlapping layers of history, ecology, and storytelling that make up a place.

Steve Himmer is author of the novels The Bee-Loud Glade and Fram. His stories have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Hobart, Hawk & Handsaw, The Collagist, and Los Angeles Review, and in anthologies such as On The Clock: Contemporary Short Stories of Work and Re:Telling. He edits the webjournal Necessary Fiction and teaches at Emerson College in Boston.

"Scratch finds Steve Himmer doing what he does best—putting a magnifier to the fine line between human and beast, between what is tame and what is red in tooth and claw. Then he sets fire to any old platitudes about nature and man, creating a new mythology out of the ashes and shadows."

—Amber Sparks, author of The Unfinished World
"Scratch is not only a ripping tale—of dreams and darkness, humans and houses, and the creatures those houses are meant to keep out—but a contemplation of the beautiful dark mysteries of nature. Like a strange old story you overheard when you thought you were alone in the woods, Scratch is beguiling, haunting, and wild."

—Kate Racculia, author of Bellweather Rhapsody
"Steve Himmer's particular genius involves giving the minds of his characters room to roam. His take on literary horror might usefully be compared to that of Benjamin Percy or William Gay, but its roots reach back much further, through Shirley Jackson to Hawthorne and Poe. This book, this gift to us, is an absolutely essential reminder that every story starts at the edge of the forest."

—Roy Kesey, author of Any Deadly Thing

Paper Tigers

Available for purchase on Amazon and Goodreads

In this haunting and hypnotizing novel, a young woman loses everything—half of her body, her fiancé, and possibly her unborn child—to a terrible apartment fire. While recovering from the trauma, she discovers a photo album inhabited by a predatory ghost who promises to make her whole again, all while slowly consuming her from the inside out.

Damien Angelica Walters' work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2015, Year's Best Weird Fiction Volume One, Nightmare, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Shimmer, Apex, and Glitter & Mayhem. Until the magazine's closing in 2013, she was an associate editor of the Hugo Award-winning Electric Velocipede.

"Paper Tigers gathers the best from every childhood scary story—creepy antiques, haunted houses, seemingly friendly ghosts—and repackages them with the worst and most isolating of adult fears. Walters’ prose is vivid and gripping, luring you in, feeding you images that will leave you comforted by the light of your bedside nightstand; horror nostalgia at its finest."

—Rebecca Jones-Howe, author of Vile Men
"With Paper Tigers, Damien Angelica Walters has created a hauntingly elegant portrait of loneliness and longing for healing. But where she confronts real terror is in answering the question of what it costs the wounded to be whole again. This book is at once as beautiful and frightening as a scar on smooth skin or a scream with perfect pitch."

—Bracken MaCleod, author of Mountain Home and Stranded
"Damien Angelica Walters pulls you into the heart of her characters and traps you there until you’re not sure if the story is haunting you, or you’re haunting it. Wonderfully creepy and heartwarming, fear and sadness alternate and blend throughout in a story that’s packed with atmosphere. Keep the lights on and the tissues close."

—Sarah Read, editor of Pantheon Magazine

Vile Men

Available for purchase on Amazon and Barnes & Noble

Vile Men is a collection of fourteen short stories that are transgressive in nature, filled with heart and emotion, leaving you sweaty and spent, your heart pounding in your chest. Stolen moments on the subway, fear of intimacy, sexual perversion and dark fears come home to roost all unite in a powerful mixture of literary fiction, contemporary fairy tales, and late night confessions. Shocking and yet touching, unnerving and yet brutally honest, Rebecca Jones-Howe is an emerging author that you'll want to keep an eye on.

"Rebecca Jones-Howe’s Vile Men is an exciting, dark, sexy collection that is convulsively beautiful and bright. Each story digs a great hole and is filled with the most savage, brutal, human emotions: love, desire, addiction and the impossibility of satisfaction."

—Antonia Crane, author of Spen
"Rebecca Jones-Howe fearlessly tackles the ugliness most of us manage to hide. Each broken character blurs the lines between villain and victim as they bathe in sex, horror, dignity, want, resignation, and darkness. Vile Men is the handbook to uncovering your damage."

—Mercedes M. Yardley, author of Pretty Little Dead Girls

Exigencies: A Neo-Noir Anthology

Available for purchase on Amazon and Barnes & Noble

Includes "Wilderness" by Letitia Trent, "Monster Season" by Joshua Blair,"Cat Calls" by Rebecca Jones-Howe, "Ceremony of the White Dog" by Kevin Catalano, "The Armadillo" by Heather Foster, "The Last Manuscript" by Usman T. Malik, "Single Lens Reflection" by Jason Metz, "The Mother" by Nathan Beauchamp, "Everything in Its Place" by Adam Peterson, "When We Taste of Death" by Damien Angelica Walters, "Figure Eight" by Brendan Detzner, "My Mother’s Condition" by Faith Gardner, "Fragile Magic" by Alex Kane, "The Eye Liars" by Sarah Read, "Searching for Gloria" by W. P. Johnson, "And All Night Long We Have Not Stirred" by Barbara Duffey, "Dull Boy" by David James Keaton, "Brujeria for Beginners" by Marytza Rubio, "Heirloom" by Kenneth Cain, "The Owl and the Cigarette" by Amanda Gowin, "Desert Ghosts" by Mark Jaskowski and "Blood Price" by Axel Taiari.

Foreword by Chuck Wendig.

"From the shadows that dwell in some of the most creative, and gifted minds around, emerges a collection of short stories that will skulk across the footplate of literature for many years to come. Exigencies is the cloak thrown over the world, to show us that in darkness we can still find beauty, and will forever serve as a keepsake to great writing."

—Craig Wallwork, author of The Sound of Loneliness
"These pages house some of the most exciting writers you’ve never heard of—yet. They make the mundane terrifying, the poignant macabre, the violent touching. The only thing you won't find is the expected, because these stories will move the ground beneath your feet. Brace yourself."

—Nik Korpon, author of Stay God

The Doors You Mark Are Your Own
(Joshua City Trilogy)

Available for purchase on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Indiebound

Joshua City is one of seven city-states in a post-apocalyptic alternate reality where water is scarce and technology is at mid-twentieth-century Soviet levels. As the novel opens, the Baikal Sea has been poisoned, causing a major outbreak of a leprosy-like disease called necrosis. Against this backdrop of increasing violence and oppression, a struggle for control of the city ensues.

Okla Elliott is currently an Illinois Distinguished Fellow at the University of Illinois, where he works in the fields of comparative literature and trauma studies. He also holds an MFA in creative writing from Ohio State University. His work has appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, The Literary Review, New Letters, A Public Space, The Southeast Review, and Subtropics, among others. He is the author of a collection of short fiction, From the Crooked Timber, and a collection of poetry, The Cartographer’s Ink.

Raul Clement lives in Urbana, IL. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have been published in Blue Mesa Review, Coe Review, As It Ought to Be, and the Surreal South '09 anthology. He is an editor at New American Press and Mayday Magazine.

"The Doors You Mark Are Your Own is one of those intriguing, compelling books that defy description, or, the impact is a reflection of keen imagination, surprises, a new vision, but yet one that is rock-ribbed intriguing. All I can say is that you should read this and enjoy it, since it is a rare thing, a very rare thing indeed, when something new comes into the world."
— Craig Nova, author of Wetware and The Good Son

After the People Lights Have Gone Off

Available for purchase on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Indiebound

This collection of fifteen stories taps into the horrors and fears of the supernatural as well as the everyday. Included are two original stories, several rarities and out of print narratives, as well as a few "best of the year" inclusions. Stephen Graham Jones is a master storyteller. What does happen after the people lights have gone off? Crack the spine and find out.

With an introduction by Joe R. Lansdale, this collection includes "Thirteen," "Brushdogs," "Welcome to the Reptile House," "This is Love," "The Spindly Man," "The Black Sleeve of Destiny," "The Spider Box," "Snow Monsters," "Doc's Story," "The Dead Are Not," "Xebico," "Second Chances," "After the People Lights Have Gone Off," "Uncle," and "Solve for X."

WINNER, Best Collection of the Year, THIS IS HORROR
FINALIST, Best Collection of the Year, BRAM STOKER AWARDS
FINALIST, Best Collection of the Year, SHIRLEY JACKSON AWARDS

Foreword by Laird Barron.

"If I've read better horror writers than Jones, I've forgotten them. He's at the apex of his game. After the People Lights Have Gone Off is the kind of collection that lodges in your brain like a malignant grain of an evil dream. And it's just going to be there, forever."
— Laird Barron, author of The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

"Stephen Graham Jones is a true master of the horror short story. Inventive, quirky, unexpected and masterful."
— Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of Fall of Night and Bad Blood

ECHO LAKE

Echo Lake by Letitia Trent (June 2014)

Available for purchase on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Indiebound

30-something Emily Collins inherits her recently murdered Aunt's house, deciding to move to Heartshorne, Oklahoma, to claim it and confront her family's dark past after her dead mother begins speaking to her in dreams, propelling this gothic, neo-noir thriller toward terrifying revelations of murderous small-town justice when a horrible community secret is revealed through the supernatural pull of Echo Lake.

Letitia Trent grew up in Vermont and Oklahoma and spent her teenage years traveling with her flea-marketing parents. She received her MFA in poetry from Ohio State University. Her work has appeared in journals such as The Denver Quarterly, Fence, Folio, The Journal, Blazevox, and The Black Warrior Review. Her poetry collections include One Perfect Bird (2012) and You aren't in this movie (2012). She was the 2010 winner of the Alumni Flash Writing Award from the Ohio State University's The Journal and has been awarded fellowships from The Vermont Studio Center and the MacDowell Colony.

"Trent’s years as a poet serve her well in this heavily atmospheric novel, which deftly conjures up both evil and the small town’s complicit reluctance to face its past."

— Kirkus Reviews
"In Echo Lake, Letitia Trent, with deceptively simple, beautiful language, creates a small American town slowly self destructing under the weight of its secrets. Trent illuminates the mystery of family and community, the pain of loss, all the while spinning a tale of murder and suspense. It's at turns a lovely and bone chilling read."
— Paula Bomer, author of Inside Madeleine

THE NEW BLACK

The New Black edited by Richard Thomas (May 2014)

Available for purchase on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Indiebound

The New Black is a collection of 20 neo-noir stories exemplifying the best authors currently writing in this dark sub-genre. A mixture of horror, crime, fantasy, science fiction, magical realism, the transgressive, and the grotesque all with a literary bent, these stories represent the future of genre-bending fiction from some of our brightest and most original voices.

The table of contents includes the following authors and stories: Stephen Graham Jones, "Father Son, Holy Rabbit," Paul Tremblay, "It's Against the Law to Feed the Ducks," Lindsay Hunter, "That Baby," Roxane Gay, "How," Kyle Minor, "The Truth and All Its Ugly," Craig Clevenger, "Act of Contrition," Micaela Morrissette, "The Familiars," Richard Lange, "Fuzzyland," Benjamin Percy, "Dial Tone," Roy Kesey, "Instituto," Craig Davidson, "Rust and Bone," Rebecca Jones-Howe, "Blue Hawaii," Joe Meno, "Children Are the Only Ones Who Blush," Vanessa Veselka, "Christopher Hitchens," Nik Korpon, "His Footsteps are Made of Soot," Brian Evenson, "Windeye," Craig Wallwork, "Dollhouse," Tara Laskowski, "The Etiquette of Homicide," Matt Bell, "Dredge," and Antonia Crane, "Sunshine for Adrienne."

Foreword by Laird Barron.

"The New Black ought to be the New High Standard for dark fiction anthologies. It's loaded with intelligence and talent. Every one of the pieces in this extraordinary compilation is worthy of your full attention."

— Jack Ketchum
"There's depth to darkness, a richness waiting for those who have the patience to let their vision adjust to it. What is remarkable is what the writers in this book succeed in telling us about that darkness, what shapes they discern within it. A showcase of some of the most exciting writers at work today, The New Black is not to be missed."
— John Langan, The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies
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