Adam McOmber's lush, hallucinatory stories are both familiar and wholly original. Drawn from the historical record, Biblical lore, fairy tales, science fiction, and nightmares, these offbeat and fantastical works explore gender and sexuality in their darkest and most beautiful manifestations. In the tradition of Angela Carter or Kelly Link, My House Gathers Desires is covertly funny and haunting, seeking fresh ways to consider sexual identity and its relation to history. In "Sodom and Gomorrah," readers encounter a subversive, ecstatic new version of the Old Testament story. In "The Re'em," a medieval monk's search for a mythic beast conjures forbidden desire. And in "Notes on Inversion," the German psychiatrist Kraft-Ebbing receives a surreal retort to his clinical descriptions of same-sex desire. From "Sodom and Gomorrah": The strangers then are no longer like two men at all. They have undressed themselves, giving up the pretense of skin and becoming a denser part of the air. We are hungry for them. Ours is a sacred desire that was buried too long in our chests, like some city beneath the sand. Adam McOmber is the author of The White Forest (Touchstone, 2012) and This New & Poisonous Air (BOA, 2011), from which he had stories nominated for two 2012 Pushcart Prizes. His work has appeared in Conjunctions, Kenyon Review, and Fairy Tale Review. He served as the managing and associate editor of Hotel America at Columbia College Chicago from 2007-2015. He now lives in Los Angeles, CA, where he teaches at Loyola Marymount University.

Jane Silverlake, a young woman from the wild heath regions of Victorian England, uses her paranormal ability to see the souls of handcrafted objects to infiltrate a mysterious dream-manipulation cult into which the man she loves has gone missing.

Henry Coxton, a fledgling occult detective with one too many secrets of his own, has recently taken up stewardship of a ghost finding firm in the heart of Edwardian London. Along with his friends and associates, Violet Asquith (a telekinetic with a mysterious and troubled past) and Christopher X (a difficult but amiable monster), Henry must work to solve the agency’s most terrifying case. Secrets from the pasts of all three detectives begin to surface and threaten the group’s bond of friendship, as well as—it would seem—the very fabric of reality. Strongly influenced by the weird fictions of Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany and M.R. James, The Ghost Finders explores the darkest corners of London’s occult realities.

Jesus and John is a Weird re-imagining of the New Testament as a novel of allegorical horror. John, a fisherman from the rural village of Bethsaida in Galilee, is tasked with protecting the risen body of Yeshua. The pair take a a dangerous pilgrimage to a mysterious mansion in Rome known as the Gray Palace.

Not Here is a flight plan for escape and a map for navigating home; a queer Vietnamese American body in confrontation with whiteness, trauma, family, and nostalgia; and a big beating heart of a book. Nguyen’s poems ache with loneliness and desire and the giddy terrors of allowing yourself to hope for love, and revel in moments of connection achieved.

Growing up the son of agnostics, John Koessler saw a Catholic church on one end of the street and a Baptist on the other. In the no-man’s land between the two, this curious outside wondered about the God they worshipped—and began a lifelong search to comprehend the grace and mystery of God. A Stranger in the House of God addresses fundamental questions and struggles faced by spiritual seekers and mature believers. Like a contemporary Pilgrim’s Progress, it traces the author’s journey and explores his experiences with both charismatic and evangelical Christianity. It also describes his transformation from religious outsider to ordained pastor. John Koessler provides a poignant and often humorous window into the interior of the soul as he describes his journey from doubt and struggle with the church to personal faith

Told in their separate voices, sixteen-year-old Prince Oliver, who wants to break free of his fairy-tale existence, and fifteen-year-old Delilah, a loner obsessed with Prince Oliver and the book in which he exists, work together to seek his freedom.