Archaeologist Reed Taylor is called back to his hometown of Simpson Creeks, Kentucky—a town devastated by the collapse of a coal waste dam—to dig into the earth now covering his family’s old farm, and the bodies of his mother and father. But in a terrifying rendezvous with his own past he discovers that his memories of the dead are not only palpable, but capable of fantastic transformation. Praise for Excavation "Tem's extraordinary skill with words and images, as well as his tendency to write about the human qualities that really count, make this first novel a publishing event worth noting." -- Twilight Zone Magazine "The power of this novel flows from its coherence; it is constructed like a fine watch, and at the end, as the psyches of its guilt-ridden characters and the raging heart of its locale merge, Excavation attains a powerful, unusually moving climax." -- Fantasy Review

Each month The Dark brings you the best in dark fantasy and horror! Edited by award winning editor Sean Wallace and brought to you by Prime Books, this issue includes two all-new stories and two reprints:“Too Many Ghosts” by Steve Rasnic Tem“The Curtain” by Thana Niveau (reprint)“As Cymbals Clash” by Cate Gardner“The Absent Shade” by Priya Sharma (reprint)

Each month The Dark brings you the best in dark fantasy and horror! Selected by award-winning editor Sean Wallace and published by Prime Books, this issue includes two all-new stories and two reprints: "A is for Alphabet" by Steve Rasnic Tem"In the Smile Place" by Tobi Ogundiran (reprint)"Auscultation" by J.S. Breukelaar"Never Lie to Me" by Priya Chand (reprint)

City fishing is the long out of print short fiction collection by award-winning author Steve Rasnic Tem. This book collects 38 short stories drawn from the deep recesses of a very creative mind. Nominated for the Bram Stoker Award Winner, International Horror Guild Award, 2000 "The major collection his work has long deserved." -- The Denver Post "You're in for a treat!" -- Douglas Clegg "No critical analysis seems adequate to describe the twisted realities and unexpected terrors summoned by his fiction." -- William P. Simmons, Horrorfind "City Fishing constitutes a major work both in content and in sheer mass . . . While a master of nuance, Tem also knows when to achieve his desired effect through sheer, raw, power. There are moments when it's tempting to submit this author might be the world's most softspoken splatterpunk." -- Ed Bryant, Locus "These are new myths for the weird and dislocated times we live in . . . all [the stories] are excellent, and the best of them stand comparison with the best of any writer working in the field." -- Steve Duffy, All Hallows

Two interwoven memoirs of love, loss, and family with a haunted, frightening edge. In 2000, American Fantasy Press published an unassuming chapbook titled The Man on the Ceiling. Inside was a dark, surreal, discomfiting story of the horrors that can befall a family. It was so powerful that it won the Bram Stoker Award, International Horror Guild Award, and World Fantasy Award--the only work ever to win all three. Now, Melanie Tem and Steve Rasnic Tem have re-imagined the story, expanding on the ideas to create a compelling work that examines how people find a family, how they hold a family together despite incomprehensible tragedy, and how, in the end, they find love. Loosely autobiographical, The Man on the Ceiling has the feel of a family portrait painted by Salvador Dali, where story and reality blend to find the one thing that neither can offer alone: truth.

ABSENT COMPANY collects two of Steve Rasnic Tem's early books of ghostly, supernatural tales: the 33 stories in The Far Side of the Lake combined with his haunting exploration of the intersection of reality and delusion, the novelette Among the Living. "It's not uncommon to believe yourself awake when you are, in fact, sleeping. Far less common is to believe yourself sleeping when you are, in fact, awake." One of the most prolific and respected voices in modern supernatural fiction, Tem's stories reveal the enduring power of the past over a seemingly safe present day world in which both real and imaginary horrors lurk along the edges of vision. These books are hard to find except in expensive hardcover limited editions. ABSENT COMPANY is the only available source for the electronic editions of these tales.  Comments on some individual stories: "Crutches"--"an unforgettable surrealistic nightmare" -- Washington Post Book World  "The Sky Come Down to Earth"--"No one has written so well of the inward spirit of the unwanted child since Shirley Jackson." -- Stephen King   "Leaks"--winner of the British Fantasy Award  

The author’s second novel, The Book of Days consists of a short story told each day by a man trying to talk himself back to sanity. A kind of literary sampler quilt, these daily inventions emulate the styles of everything from traditional ghost stories to the works of O’Henry and James Whitcomb Riley, from westerns to fifties science fiction to boy’s own adventure stories. As a sequence illustrating the narrator’s deep internal struggle, these dark stories take on additional weight, making each one a sharp shock that builds to an electrifying whole.

The Deadfall Hotel is where our nightmares go, it’s where the dead pause to rest between worlds, and it’s where Richard Carter and his daughter Serena go to rediscover life — if the things at the hotel don’t kill them first. Think of it as the vacation resort of the collective unconscious. With the powerful prose that has earned him awards and accolades, Steve Rasnic Tem explores the roots of fear and society’s fascination with things horrific, using the many-layered metaphor of the Deadfall Hotel. Drawing inspiration from literary touchstones John Gardner and Peter Straub, Tem elegantly delves into the dark corners of the human spirit. There he finds not only our fears, but ultimately our hopes.

Daniel is trapped in Ubo. He has no idea how long he has been imprisoned there by the roaches.Every resident has a similar memory of the journey: a dream of dry, chitinous wings crossing the moon, the gigantic insects dropping swiftly over the houses; the creatures, like a deck of baroquely ornamented cards, fanning themselves from one hidden world into the next.And now each day they force Daniel to play a different figure from humanity's violent history, from a frenzied Jack the Ripper to a stumbling and confused Stalin, to a self-proclaimed god executing survivors atop the ruins of the world. As skies burn and prisoners go mad, identities dissolve as the experiments evolve, and no one can foretell their mysterious end.

A dark Southern Gothic vision of ghosts, witchcraft, secret powers, snake-handling, kudzu, Melungeons, and the Great Depression.Michael Gibson has returned to the quiet home of his forebears and now takes care of his grandmother Sadie – old and sickly, but with an important story to tell about growing up poor and Melungeon (a mixed race group of mysterious origins) in the 1930s, while bedeviled by a snake-handling uncle and empathic powers she barely understands.In a field not far from the Gibson family home lies an iron-bound crate within a small shack buried four feet deep under Kudzu vine. Michael somehow understands that hidden inside that crate is potentially his own death, his grandmother's death, and perhaps the deaths of everyone in the valley if he does not come to understand her story well enough.