Search Worlds Without End

On a Midwestern campus in the 1960s, a charismatic guru and his young acolytes perform a secret ritual in a local meadow. What happens is a mystery-all that remains is a gruesomely dismembered body and the shattered souls of all who were present. Forty years later, one man seeks to learn about that horrifying night, and to do so he'll have to force those involved to examine the unspeakable events that have haunted them ever since.

Unfolding through their individual stories, A Dark Matter is an electric, chilling, and unpredictable novel that proves Peter Straub to be the master of modern horror.

WFA nominated novella. It originally appeared in the anthology Borderlands 4 (1994), edited by Elizabeth E. Monteleone and Thomas F. Monteleone. The story can also be found in the anthology Dark Terrors: The Gollancz Book of Horror (1995), edited by David Sutton and Stephen Jones. It is included in the collection
Magic Terror: Seven Tales (2000).

The terrors afflicting the sleepy town of Hampstead, Connecticut, were beyond imagination. Sparrows dropping dead from the trees like rotten fruit, disfiguring diseases spreading like wildfire, inexplicable murders and child drownings shattering the lives of the citizens - never can such a list of horrors have afflicted one town. But the evil madness had a long history. A catastrophe had struck Hampstead every thirty years since its foundation 300 years before - yet only Graham Williams, a writer and descendant of one of the original founders, had looked into the 'black summers' and their mysterious origins. When he discovers that descendants of the three other original settlers are back living in the town, he knows it will be the blackest summer yet...

In life, not every sin goes unpunished.

For four aging men in the terror-stricken town of Milburn, New York, an act inadvertently carried out in their youth has come back to haunt them. Now they are about to learn what happens to those who believe they can bury the past -- and get away with murder.

Peter Straub's classic bestseller is a work of "superb horror" (The Washington Post Book World) that, like any good ghost story, stands the test of time -- and conjures our darkest fears and nightmares.

These psychic and horror fictions - seven of them short-shorts - reveals Straub at his spellbinding best. Two tales (first installments of his Blue Rose trilogy), are linked to Koko and Mystery and exactingly probe the consequences of boyhood clashes with evil.

In "Blue Rose," sadistic Harry Beevers, 10, hypnotizes and destroys his younger brother; the tale leaps ahead to the ironic verdict in Harry's court-martial for wreaking atrocities in Vietnam.

In the outstanding "The Juniper Tree," a novelist relives a harrowing, seductive summer when, at age seven, he was sexually molested in a movie house by drifter Stan, a seedy Alan Ladd lookalike.

"The Buffalo Hunter" fastidiously chronicles the fixations of a 35-year-old who numbs his fear of women by sucking his coffee and cognac from baby bottles.

In the ambitious gothic thriller/academic spoof "Mrs. God," a fatuous professor is lured to a creepy English mansion crammed with grisly secrets to research the papers of his poet ancestress; dead babies provide a subtheme.

Wry and riveting, "A Short Guide to the City" fuses and parodies two genres: the self-congratulatory tourist blurb with a news alert on the "viaduct killer."

Table of Contents:

• She Saw a Young Man - (1990) - short fiction
• Blue Rose - (1985) - novella
• Interlude: In the Realm of Dreams - (1990) - short fiction
• The Juniper Tree - (1988) - novelette
• Interlude: Going Home - (1990) - short fiction
• A Short Guide to the City - (1990) - short story
• Interlude: The Poetry Reading - (1990) - short fiction
• The Buffalo Hunter - (1990) - novella
• Interlude: Bar Talk - (1990) - short fiction
• Something About a Death, Something About a Fire - short story
• Interlude: The Veteran - (1990) - short fiction
• Mrs. God - (1990) - novella
• ...Then One Day - (1990) - short fiction
• Author's Note - (1990) - essay

In his latest soul-chilling novel, bestselling author Peter Straub tells of a famous children's book author who, in the wake of a grotesque accident, realizes that the most basic facts of her existence, including her existence itself, have come into question.

Willy Patrick, the respected author of the award-winning young-adult novel In the Night Room, thinks she is losing her mind - again. One day, she is drawn helplessly into the parking lot of a warehouse. She knows somehow that her daughter, Holly, is being held in the building, and she has an overwhelming need to rescue her. But what Willy knows is impossible, for her daughter is dead.

On the same day, author Timothy Underhill, who has been struggling with a new book about a troubled young woman, is confronted with the ghost of his nine-year-old sister, April. Soon after, he begins to receive eerie, fragmented e-mails that he finally realizes are from people he knew in his youth - people now dead. Like his sister, they want urgently to tell him something. When Willy and Timothy meet, the frightening parallels between Willy's tragic loss and the story in Tim's manuscript suggest that they must join forces to confront the evils surrounding them.

An American icon renowned for his bestselling novels, Peter Straub displays his full and stunning range in this crowning collection. He has consistently subverted the boundaries of genre for years, transcending horror and suspense to unlock the dark, unsettling, and troubling dissonances that exist on the edges of our perception. Straub's fiction cracks the foundation of reality and opens our eyes to an unblinking experience of true horror, told in his inimitable and lush style with skill, wit, and impeccable craft.

With uncanny precision, Straub writes of the city and of the Midwest, of the depraved and of the righteous, of the working class and of the wealthy--nothing and no one is safe from the ever-present darkness that he understands so well. "Blue Rose" follows the cycles of violence and power through the most innocent among us, leading to a conclusion that is audacious and devastating. In the darkly satirical masterpiece "Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff," a stern estate lawyer known as the Deacon hires a pair of "Private Detectives Extraordinaire" to investigate and seek revenge on his unfaithful wife. "The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine" follows a man and his much younger lover as they explore their decadent and increasingly sinister fantasies aboard a luxurious yacht on the remotest stretch of the Amazon River.

Interior Darkness brings together sixteen stories from twenty-five years of dazzling excellence. It is a thrilling, highly entertaining, and terrifying testament to the prodigious talent of Peter Straub.

Table of Contents:

• Blue Rose - (1985) - novella
• In the Realm of Dreams - (1990) - short fiction
• The Juniper Tree - (1988) - novelette
• Going Home - (1990) - short fiction
• The Buffalo Hunter - (1990) - novella
• Bar Talk - (2005) - short story
• A Short Guide to the City - (1990) - short story
• Ashputtle - (1994) - novelette
• Pork Pie Hat - (1994) - novella
• Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff - (1997) - novella
• Little Red's Tango - (2002) - novelette
• Lapland, or Film Noir - (2004) - short story
• Mr. Aickman's Air Rifle - (2004) - novella
• Mallon the Guru - (2010) - short story
• The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine - (2011) - novella
• The Collected Stories of Freddie Prothero - (2013) - short story

In a house in London a woman starts a new life, trying to put tragedy behind her. Then a pretty blonde child runs into view, bringing with her an inexplicable suggestion of evil.

Once Julia Lofting had a husband and a daughter. But everything has changed since she bolted from her marriage, in flight from the unbearable truth of her daughter's death. For Julia, there is no escape. Another child awaits, another mother suffers, and a circle of the damned gathers around her. The haunting has begun...

A woman commits suicide for no apparent reason. A week later, her son– fifteen-year-old Mark Underhill–vanishes. His uncle, novelist Timothy Underhill, searches his hometown of Millhaven for clues that might help unravel this horrible dual mystery. He soon learns that a pedophilic murderer is on the loose in the vicinity, and that shortly before his mother’s suicide, Mark had become obsessed with an abandoned house where he imagined the killer might have taken refuge.

No mere empty building, the house whispers from attic to basement with the echoes of a long-hidden true-life horror story, and Tim Underhill comes to fear that in investigating its unspeakable history, Mark stumbled across its last and greatest secret: a ghostly lost girl who may have coaxed the needy, suggestible boy into her mysterious domain.

No one tells a story like Peter Straub. He dazzles with the complexity of his plots. He delights with the sophistication and eloquence of his prose. He startles you into laughter in the face of events so dark you begin to question your own moral compass. Then he reduces you to jelly by spinning a tale so terrifying-and surprising-you wind up sleeping with the lights on.

With Magic Terror, the bestselling author of Ghost Story and The Talisman (with Stephen King) has given us one of the most imaginatively unsettling collections in years. The terrain of these extraordinary stories is marked by brutality, heart-break, despair, wonder, and an unexpected humor that allows empathy to blossom within the most unlikely contexts.

"Bunny Is Good Bread" takes us into the mind of a small boy trapped in grotesque circumstances to portray the creation of a serial killer in a manner that compels pity, sorrow, comprehension, and grief-as well as judgment. "Hunger, an Introduction," narrated by the ghost of a pompous, self-pitying murderer, evokes a profoundly beautiful vision of earthly life, one appreciated far more by the dead than the living. The award-winning novella "Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff," a masterpiece of black comedy, draws upon Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" to create a revenge tale in which torture is a moral art and the revenger undergoes a transforming, albeit painful, education.

In the words of Mrs. Asch, the visionary narrator of "Ashputtle," "The main feature of adventure is that it goes forward into unknown country." Straub's devotees will be entranced by what their fearless guide has in store for them. Those as yet uninitiated are in for a harrowing literary journey. Enjoy the ride.

Table of Contents:

• Ashputtle - (1994) - novelette
• Isn't It Romantic? - (1998) - novelette
• The Ghost Village - (1992) - novelette
• Bunny is Good Bread - novella
• Porkpie Hat - (1994) - novella
• Hunger, an Introduction - (1995) - novelette
• Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff - (1997) - novella

Stoker Award winning and World Fantasy Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in the anthology Murder for Revenge (1998), edited by Otto Penzler. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Twelfth Annual Collection (1999), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 10 (1999), edited by Stephen Jones. The story is included in the collections Magic Terror: Seven Tales (2000) and Interior Darkness (2016).

Every year on his birthday, Ned Dunstan is cursed with visions of horror committed by a savage figure he calls "Mr. X." This year, Ned's visions will become flesh and blood.

A dreadful premonition brings Ned home to find his mother on her deathbed. She reveals the never-before-disclosed name of his father and warns him of grave danger. Driven by a desperate sense of need, Ned explores his dark past and the astonishing legacy of his kin. Accused of violent crimes he has not committed and pursued by a shadowy twin, Ned enters a hidden world of ominous mysteries, where he must confront his deepest nightmares....

From New York Times bestselling author Peter Straub, the tale of a literary sojourn that turns into something far more sinister.

Esswood House. Home and estate of the Seneschal family, aristocratic patrons of the literary arts for well over a hundred years. D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, and Henry James were privileged to call themselves guests. There was always talk of a hidden secret in Esswood's past, and the Seneschal children were often so pale and sickly, but don't all English manor houses have a few ghost stories to call their own?

When Professor William Standish receives the rare honor of an Esswood Fellowship, and the chance to study the estate's private manuscripts at close hand, he is thrilled beyond his wildest ambitions. But something seems amiss at Esswood House. He hears faint laughter in the halls, the pitter-pattering of small feet in the night; strange faces appear in the windows of the library, and there are those giant dollhouses in the basement...

Perdido, a fragment from a never completed longer work, is a rare and unexpected gift for Peter Straub's legion of fans. Even in this fragmentary form, it offers the sort of vivid, unexpected pleasures that only the finest imaginative fiction can provide.

On one level, Perdido tells the story of a troubled family: a discontented husband and wife and the teenaged son who was-but is no longer-a musical prodigy. On another, it is the story of the isolated Norwegian resort known as Perdido, and of the impossible, dreamlike things that happen there. Perdido is a place where the rules of ordinary life no longer apply, where reality is malleable and infinitely strange. It is a place where "you get what you didn't know you wanted" and where lives are altered forever. For the unhappy couple invited to attend-and for the teenaged son awaiting their return-it is the place where a marriage ends and a life filled with alternate possibilities begins.

Mysterious, evocative, and always superbly written, Perdido offers readers something genuinely special: a visit to an imaginary landscape that only Peter Straub could have created.

Table of Contents:

• Hunger, an Introduction - (1995) - novelette by Peter Straub
• Styx - (1995) - short story by Norman Partridge
• Jubilee - (1995) - short story by Kathe Koja
• Not Far From Here - (1995) - short story by Tim Smith
• Mamma Ghost - (1995) - novelette by Alan Rodgers
• Daddy's Girl - (1995) - short story by Gordon R. Ross
• Coventry Carol - (1995) - novelette by Chet Williamson
• And He Who Mourns - (1995) - short story by David B. Silva
• His Mother's Hands - (1995) - novelette by Clark Perry
• Bill Smith's Sleigh Ride - (1995) - short story by Tyson Blue
• Sotto Voce - (1995) - short story by Lawrence Greenberg
• A Real Babe - (1995) - short story by Brad Linaweaver
• Looking for Mr. Flip - (1995) - novelette by Thomas F. Monteleone
• Present in Spirit - (1995) - short story by Don D'Ammassa
• The Wedding Party - (1995) - novelette by Paul M. Sammon
• The Authors - (1995) - essay by uncredited

Peter Straub--bestselling author and 8-time Bram Stoker Award winner--has gathered here 24 bone-chilling, nail-biting, frightfully imaginative stories that represent the best of contemporary horror writing.

Table of Contents

• Dan Chaon "The Bees"
• Elizabeth Hand "Cleopatra Brimstone"
• Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem "The Man on the Ceiling"
• M. John Harrison "The Great God Plan"
• Ramsey Campbell "The Voice of the Beach"
• Brian Evenson "Body"
• Kelly Link "Louise's Ghost"
• Jonathan Carroll "The Sadness of Detail"
• M. Rickert "Leda"
• Thomas Tessier "In Praise of Folly"
• David J. Schow "Plot Twist"
• Glen Hirshberg "The Two Sams"
• Thomas Ligotti "Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story"
• Benjamin Percy "Unearthed"
• Bradford Morrow "Gardener of Heart"
• Peter Straub "Little Red's Tango"
• Stephen King "The Ballad of a Flexible Bullet"
• Joe Hill "20th Century Ghost"
• Ellen Klages "The Green Glass Sea"
• Tia V. Travis "The Kiss"
• Graham Joyce "Black Dust"
• Neil Gaiman "October in the Chair"
• John Crowley "Missolonghi 1824"
• Rosalind Palermo Stevenson "Insect Dreams"

IF YOUR SHADOW DOESN'T MOVE WHEN YOU DO, THEN YOU'RE IN SHADOWLAND.

In a private school in New England, a friendship is forged between two boys that will change their lives for ever. As Del Nightingale and Tom Flanagan battle to survive the oppressive regime of bullying and terror overseen by the sadistic headmaster, Del introduces Tom to his world of magic tricks. But when they escape to spend the summer holiday together at Shadowland - the lakeside estate of Del's uncle - their hobby suddenly takes on much more sinister tones. After a summer exploring the mysteries and terrors of Shadowland nothing will be the same.

Peter Straub masterfully weaves horror and suspense into a love story unlike any other: the ballad of Ballard and Sandrine.

Ballard and his considerably younger lover Sandrine have been brought together by a shared erotic obsession of the darkest kind. As they travel down a remote part of the Amazon River on a luxurious yacht, they spend their days indulging in their macabre pastime. Through a haze of pain and pleasure, the lovers are witness to a series of increasingly sinister portents, dreams and visions that haunt their claustrophobic and disturbing world. With Peter Straub's signature, breathtaking twists and an astonishing climax, you'll never forget The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine.

WFA winning novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology MetaHorror (1992), edited by Dennis Etchison. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Sixth Annual Collection (1993), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 4 (1993), edited by Ramsey Campbell and Stephen Jones. It is included in the collection Magic Terror: Seven Tales (2000).

They are dying, one by one: wealthy middle-aged women in an exclusive Connecticut suburb. Their murderer remains at large. Nora Chancel, wife of publishing scion Davey Chancel, fears she may be next. After all, her past has branded her a victim....

Then Davey tells Nora a surreal story about the Hellfire Club, where, years before, he met an obsessed fan of Chancel House's most successful book, Night Journey - a book that has a strange history of its own....

Suddenly terror engulfs Nora: She must defend herself against fantastic accusations even as a madman lies in wait. And when he springs, Nora will embark on a night journey that will put her fears to rest forever, dead or alive....

In The Process (is a Process All Its Own), Peter Straub brings back Tillman Hayward, a latter day Jack the Ripper familiar to readers of The Skylark and A Special Place. Tilly, known for good reasons as The Ladykiller, stands at the dark heart of this astonishing novella.

Tilly is a classic serial killer, and we watch him go about his "work" in the American Midwest of the 1950s. His story is one of madness and bloodlust artfully concealed beneath a thin, civilized veneer. In keeping with his nickname, he leaves a trail of mutilated female corpses behind him wherever he goes.

Straub tells Tilly's story in a clear, unflinching voice that is at once enthralling and disturbing. At the same time, Straub sets that story against the larger story of a world filled with enigmatic occurrences and impossible encounters. It is a world in which the dead reappear, in which language carries its own peculiar properties, and "a hateful and discordant music" surrounds everything. It is a world which only Peter Straub could have evoked with such clarity and power.

Moving from the American Heartland to the stately homes of England, and from the arid worldview of Tilly to the fevered sensibility of Henry James, this nexus of connected stories is one of the strangest, most unsettling creations of a long, distinguished career. The Process (is a Process All Its Own) is the clear product of a modern master. Expect it to haunt you for a very long time to come.

From early on, American literature has teemed with tales of horror, of hauntings, of terrifying obsessions and gruesome incursions, of the uncanny ways in which ordinary reality can be breached and subverted by the unknown and the irrational. As this pathbreaking two-volume anthology demonstrates, it is a tradition with many unexpected detours and hidden chambers, and one that continues to evolve, finding new forms and new themes as it explores the bad dreams that lurk around the edges-if not in the unacknowledged heart--of the everyday. Peter Straub, one of today's masters of horror and fantasy, offers an authoritative and diverse gathering of stories calculated to unsettle and delight.

This first volume surveys a century and a half of American fantastic storytelling, revealing in its 44 stories an array of recurring themes: trance states, sleepwalking, mesmerism, obsession, possession, madness, exotic curses, evil atmospheres. In the tales of Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne, the bright prospects of the New World face an uneasy reckoning with the forces of darkness. In the ghost-haunted Victorian and Edwardian eras, writers including Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Ambrose Bierce explore ever more refined varieties of spectral invasion and disintegrating selfhood.

In the twentieth century, with the arrival of the era of the pulps, the fantastic took on more monstrous and horrific forms at the hands of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, and other classic contributors to Weird Tales. Here are works by acknowledged masters such as Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, Conrad Aiken, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, along with surprising discoveries like Ralph Adams Cram's "The Dead Valley," Emma Francis Dawson's "An Itinerant House," and Julian Hawthorne's "Absolute Evil." American Fantastic Tales offers an unforgettable ride through strange and visionary realms.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Peter Straub
• Somnambulism: A Fragment - (1784) - shortfiction by Charles Brockden Brown
• The Adventure of the German Student - (1824) - shortstory by Washington Irving
• Berenice - (1835) - shortstory by Edgar Allan Poe (variant of Berenice--A Tale)
• Young Goodman Brown - (1835) - shortstory by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• The Tartarus of Maids - (1855) - shortstory by Herman Melville
• What Was It? A Mystery - (1859) - shortstory by Fitz-James O'Brien
• The Legend of Monte del Diablo - (1863) - shortstory by Bret Harte
• The Moonstone Mass - (1868) - shortstory by Harriet Prescott Spofford
• His Unconquerable Enemy - (1889) - shortstory by W. C. Morrow
• In Dark New England Days - (1890) - shortstory by Sarah Orne Jewett
• The Yellow Wall Paper - (1892) - shortstory by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• The Black Dog - (1892) - shortstory by Stephen Crane
• Ma'ame Pélagie - (1893) - shortstory by Kate Chopin
• Thurlow's Christmas Story - (1894) - shortstory by John Kendrick Bangs
• The Repairer of Reputations - (1895) - novelette by Robert W. Chambers
• The Dead Valley - (1895) - shortstory by Ralph Adams Cram
• The Little Room - (1895) - shortstory by Madeline Yale Wynne
• The Striding Place - (1896) - shortstory by Gertrude Atherton
• An Itinerant House - (1897) - shortstory by Emma Frances Dawson
• Luella Miller - (1902) - shortstory by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
• Grettir at Thorhall-stead - (1903) - shortstory by Frank Norris
• Yuki-Onna - (1904) - shortstory by Lafcadio Hearn
• For the Blood Is the Life - (1905) - shortstory by F. Marion Crawford
• The Moonlit Road - (1907) - shortstory by Ambrose Bierce
• Lukundoo - (1907) - shortstory by Edward Lucas White
• The Shell of Sense - (1908) - shortstory by Olivia Howard Dunbar
• The Jolly Corner - (1908) - novelette by Henry James
• Golden Baby - (1910) - shortstory by Alice Brown
• Afterward - (1910) - novelette by Edith Wharton
• Consequences - (1915) - shortstory by Willa Cather
• The Shadowy Third - (1916) - novelette by Ellen Glasgow
• Absolute Evil - (1918) - novelette by Julian Hawthorne
• Unseen--Unfeared - (1919) - shortstory by Francis Stevens
• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - (1922) - novelette by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Curse of Everard Maundy - (1927) - novelette by Seabury Quinn
• The King of the Cats - (1929) - shortstory by Stephen Vincent Benét
• The Jelly-Fish - (1929) - shortstory by David H. Keller, M.D.
• Mr. Arcularis - (1931) - novelette by Conrad Aiken
• The Black Stone - (1931) - shortstory by Robert E. Howard
• Passing of a God - (1931) - shortstory by Henry S. Whitehead
• The Panelled Room - (1933) - shortstory by August Derleth
• The Thing on the Doorstep - (1937) - novelette by H. P. Lovecraft
• Genius Loci - (1933) - shortstory by Clark Ashton Smith
• The Cloak - (1939) - shortstory by Robert Bloch
• Biographical Notes - essay by uncredited
• Note on the Texts - essay by uncredited
• Notes - essay by uncredited

The second volume of Peter Straub's pathbreaking anthology American Fantastic Tales picks up the story in 1940 and provides persuasive evidence that the decades since then have seen an extraordinary flowering. While continuing to explore the classic themes of horror and fantasy, successive generations of writers- including Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, Charles Beaumont, Stephen King, Steven Millhauser, and Thomas Ligotti-have opened up the field to new subjects, new styles, and daringly fresh expansions of the genre's emotional and philosophical underpinnings. For many of these writers, the fantastic is simply the best available tool for describing the dislocations and newly hatched terrors of the modern era, from the nightmarish post- apocalyptic savagery of Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" to proliferating identities set deliriously adrift in Tim Powers' "Pat Moore."

"At its core," writes editor Peter Straub, "the fantastic is a way of seeing." In place of gothic trappings, the post-war masters of the fantastic often substitute an air of apparent normality. The surfaces of American life-department store displays in John Collier's "Evening Primrose," tar-paper roofs seen from an el train in Fritz Leiber's "Smoke Ghost," the balcony of a dilapidated movie theater in Tennessee Williams' "The Mysteries of the Joy Rio"-become invested with haunting presences. The sphere of family life is transformed, in Davis Grubb's "Where the Woodbine Twineth" or Richard Matheson's "Prey," into an arena of eerie menace. Dramas of madness, malevolent temptation, and vampiristic appropriation play themselves out against the backdrop of modern urban life in John Cheever's "Torch Song" and Shirley Jackson's unforgettable "The Daemon Lover."

Nearly half the stories collected in this volume were published in the last two decades, including work by Michael Chabon, M. Rickert, Brian Evenson, Kelly Link, and Benjamin Percy: writers for whom traditional genre boundaries have ceased to exist, and who have brought the fantastic into the mainstream of contemporary writing. The 42 stories in this second volume of American Fantastic Tales provide an irresistible journey into the phantasmagoric underside of the American imagination.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Peter Straub
• Evening Primrose - (1940) - short story by John Collier
• Smoke Ghost - (1941) - short story by Fritz Leiber
• The Mysteries of the Joy Rio - (1954) - short story by Tennessee Williams
• The Refugee - (1943) - short story by Jane Rice
• Mr. Lupescu - (1945) - short story by Anthony Boucher
• Miriam - (1945) - short story by Truman Capote
• Midnight - (1946) - short story by Jack Snow
• Torch Song - (1947) - short story by John Cheever
• The Daemon Lover - (1949) - short story by Shirley Jackson
• The Circular Valley - (1950) - short story by Paul Bowles
• I'm Scared - (1951) - short story by Jack Finney
• The Vane Sisters - (1951) - short story by Vladimir Nabokov
• The April Witch - [The Elliott Family] - (1952) - short story by Ray Bradbury
• Black Country - (1954) - short story by Charles Beaumont
• Trace - (1961) - short story by Jerome Bixby
• Where the Woodbine Twineth - (1964) - short story by Davis Grubb (variant of You Never Believe Me)
• Nightmare - (1965) - short story by Donald Wandrei
• I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream - (1967) - short story by Harlan Ellison
• Prey - (1969) - short story by Richard Matheson
• The Events at Poroth Farm - (1972) - novella by T. E. D. Klein
• Hanka - (1974) - short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer (trans. of Hanka)
• Linnaeus Forgets - (1977) - short story by Fred Chappell
• Novelty - (1983) - short story by John Crowley
• Mr. Fiddlehead - (1989) - short story by Jonathan Carroll
• Family - (1989) - short story by Joyce Carol Oates
• The Last Feast of Harlequin - [Cthulhu Mythos] - (1990) - novelette by Thomas Ligotti
• A Short Guide to the City - (1990) - short story by Peter Straub
• The General Who Is Dead - [Ambergris] - (1996) - short story by Jeff VanderMeer
• That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French - (1998) - short story by Stephen King
• Sea Oak - (1998) - novelette by George Saunders
• The Long Hall on the Top Floor - (1999) - short story by Caitlín R. Kiernan
• Nocturne - (2000) - short story by Thomas Tessier
• The God of Dark Laughter - (2001) - short story by Michael Chabon
• Pop Art - (2001) - novelette by Joe Hill
• Pansu - (2001) - short story by Poppy Z. Brite
• Dangerous Laughter - (2003) - short story by Steven Millhauser
• The Chambered Fruit - (2003) - novelette by M. Rickert
• The Wavering Knife - (2004) - short story by Brian Evenson
• Stone Animals - (2004) - novelette by Kelly Link
• Pat Moore - (2004) - novelette by Tim Powers
• The Little Stranger - (2004) - novelette by Gene Wolfe
• Dial Tone - (2007) - short story by Benjamin Percy
• Biographical Notes - essay by uncredited
• Note on the Texts - essay by uncredited
• Notes - essay by uncredited

Peter Straub's Blue Rose trilogy (Koko, Mystery, and The Throat) is one of the landmark accomplishments of modern popular fiction. Ranging from the Caribbean to Vietnam to the American Midwest and spanning decades of tumultuous history, these books are both unforgettable narratives and indelible portraits of people in extremis, struggling to survive in a world marked by grief, loss, pain, trauma, and homicidal madness. The four stories gathered here are offshoots of that larger fictional universe. Each one stands entirely on its own. Together, they shine a revelatory light on the mysteries and hidden corners of the novels that inspired them.

"Blue Rose" recounts a defining moment in the childhood of Koko's Harry Beevers, the moment when the ten-year-old Harry discovers his capacity for violence and brutality. "The Juniper Tree" describes, with almost unbearable clarity, a lonely young boy's encounter with adult betrayal, and with the darker aspects of human sexuality. "The Ghost Village" takes us to the phantasmagoric landscape of Vietnam, where the barriers between the living and the dead begin to dissolve, to mesmerizing effect. "Bunny is Good Bread" is arguably Straub's single most harrowing story. With relentless attention to detail, it anatomizes the creation of a human monster through abuse, cruelty, and neglect.

These disturbing, beautifully written stories have a moral weight and emotional resonance that only the finest fiction achieves. They are the clear product of a master storyteller at the very top of his game. No one who reads them is likely to forget them, or come away unchanged.

Table of Contents:

• Blue Rose
• The Juniper Tree
• Bunny is Good Bread
• The Ghost Village
• An Interview with Peter Straub (Conducted by Bill Sheehan)

'KOKO ' Only four men knew what it meant. Vietnam vets. One was a doctor. One was a lawyer. One was a working stiff. One was a writer. All were as different as men could be - yet all were bound eternally together by a single shattering secret. And now they are joined together again on a quest that could take them from the graveyards and fleshpots of the Far East to the human jungle of New York, hunting an inhuman ghost of the past risen from nightmare darkness to kill and kill...

Tom Pasmore, ten years old, survives a near fatal accident. During his long recovery, he becomes obsessed with an unsolved murder and finds he has clues to solving it that he shouldn't. Lamont von Heilitz has spent his life solving mysteries, until he wanted to know nothing more of the terror of life and the horror of death. When a new murder disrupts their world of wealth, power, and pleasure, the two must form an unlikely partnership to confront demons from the past and the dark secrets that still haunt the present.

Writer Tim Underhill, the haunted Vietnam-vet hero of Koko, has been summoned by childhood friend John Ransom to his home town of Millhaven, the site of old horrors now plagued by new demons. After decades of silence, it appears that the Blue Rose killer has struck again - brutally murdering Ransom's wife. Assisted in his search for the truth by the reclusive amateur detective Tom Pasmore, Underhill is swiftly drawn into a dark labyrinth of lies and deceit, each turn punctuated by jolting shocks, leading inexorably back to the terrors of his own past - to mysterious events in the jungles of Vietnam; to the day he witnessed the killing of his young sister; and to the ensuing series of murders that rocked the city.

Over the past three decades, the most adventurous practitioners of the literary arts of science fiction, fantasy, and horror have been transforming those genres into something all but unrecognizable. In Conjunctions' game-changing New Wave Fabulists issue, guest editor Peter Straub has put together an anthology of innovative literary reinventions of traditional "pulp" forms. Contributors range from Jonathan Lethem to Neil Gaiman, from John Crowley to Kelly Link, from Elizabeth Hand to China Miéville. Gary K. Wolfe and John Clute contribute essays on the ongoing evolution of genre, while the brilliant cartoonist Gahan Wilson has created the cover and original frontispieces for each story.

Table of Contents:

• Guest Editorial Note - essay by Peter Straub
• The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines - novella by John Crowley
• Lull - novelette by Kelly Link
• Entertaining Angels Unawares - shortstory by M. John Harrison
• Little Red's Tango - novelette by Peter Straub
• The Wisdom of the Skin - shortstory by James Morrow
• Shift - shortstory by Nalo Hopkinson
• The Dystopianist, Thinking of His Rival, Is Interrupted by a Knock on the Door - shortstory by Jonathan Lethem
• Guardian (excerpt) - (2002) - shortstory by Joe Haldeman
• Familiar - shortstory by China Miéville
• The Big Rock Candy Mountain - shortstory by Andy Duncan
• Knight (excerpt) - novelette by Gene Wolfe
• The Bearing of Light - shortstory by Patrick O'Leary
• Simon's House of Lipstick - shortstory by Jonathan Carroll
• The Invisible Empire - shortstory by John Kessel
• The Further Adventures of the Invisible Man - shortstory by Karen Joy Fowler
• Abduction - shortstory by Paul Park
• The Least Trumps - novella by Elizabeth Hand
• October in the Chair - shortstory by Neil Gaiman
• Malebolge, Or the Ordnance of Genre - essay by Gary K. Wolfe
• Beyond the Pale - essay by John Clute

On a brisk autumn day, a thirteen-year-old boy stands on the shores of the gray Atlantic, near a silent amusement park and a fading ocean resort called the Alhambra. The past has driven Jack Sawyer here: his father is gone, his mother is dying, and the world no longer makes sense. But for Jack everything is about to change. For he has been chosen to make a journey back across America - and into another realm.

One of the most influential and heralded works of fantasy ever written, The Talisman is an extraordinary novel of loyalty, awakening, terror, and mystery. Jack Sawyer, on a desperate quest to save his mother's life, must search for a prize across an epic landscape of innocents and monsters, of incredible dangers and even more incredible truths. The prize is essential, but the journey means even more. Let the quest begin...

Two of the greatest storytellers of our time join forces to create an epic thriller of unsurpassed power; a twisting, compelling story of a small American town held in the grip of evil beyond all reason.

French Landing, Wisconsin. A comfortable, solid middle-American town inhabited by comfortable, solid middle-Americans! and a serial killer. Three children have been lost -- taken by a monster with a taste for child's flesh nicknamed 'The Fisherman' after a legendary murderer. It's all way beyond the experience of the local police, whose only hope lies with ex-detective Jack Sawyer, the man who cracked their last case for them.

But, plagued by visions of another world, Jack has retired to this rural retreat precisely to avoid such horrors -- and, having recognized the touch of madness on this case, he's keeping well away. Soon, he'll have no choice. Young Tyler Marshall, left behind one afternoon by his bullying friends, pedals past the local old folks' home and is accosted by a crow. 'Gorg,' it caws, and 'Ty.' What ten-year-old could resist a bird that speaks his name? Not Ty, that's for sure. And as he follows the mysterious crow, he's grabbed by the neck and dragged into a hedge. The Fisherman has made another catch!