"In this disturbing, often grotesque and ultimately mesmerizing collection, Piccirilli (The Cold Spot) reprints 16 stories and 45 poems. Although the star-studded introductions are a nice bonus, Piccirilli's stories are the selling point, and all are standouts. "An Average Insanity, a Common Agony" is an emotionally devastating tale of a man trying to do the right thing for the sake of an innocent creature. "Alchemy" tells the story of five emotionally stunted people whose discovery of a dead body lets them visit their own dark places ("They weren't frightened [by the sight of the corpse]. None of us were. It broke up the monotony"). "With an Ear for My Father's Weeping" manages to be both touching and hysterical. Piccirilli's unique mix of gore, violence and a literate style bordering on the lyrical help make this collection one that horror fans will relish."--Publishers Weekly, starred review. With story introductions by Jack Ketchum, Brian Keene, Edward Lee, Simon Clark, TM Wright, Gary Braunbeck, Thomas Monteleone, Tamara Thorne, Ed Gorman, Ray Garton, and Christopher Golden.

BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Tom Piccirilli's The Last Kind Words. This lyrical tale of evil, loss, and redemption is a stunning addition to the Southern gothic tradition of Flannery O’Connor and Harry Crews. A Choir of Ill Children is the startling story of Kingdom Come, a decaying, swamp backwater that draws the lost, ill-fated, and damned. Since his mother’s disappearance and his father’s suicide, Thomas has cared for his three brothers—conjoined triplets with separate bodies but one shared brain—and the town’s only industry, the Mill. Because of his family’s prominence, Thomas is feared and respected by the superstitious swamp folk. Granny witches cast hexes while Thomas’s childhood sweetheart drifts through his life like a vengeful ghost and his best friend, a reverend suffering from the power of tongues, is overcome with this curse as he tries to warn of impending menace. All Thomas learns is that “the carnival is coming.” Torn by responsibility and rage, Thomas must face his tormented past as well as the mysterious forces surging toward the town he loves and despises.

“Tom Piccirilli is the master of the Southern gothic, quietly building horror where the chills grow with increasing strangeness.”—Denver Post A haunted man must settle his accounts with the living—and the dead. . . . The night Johnny Danetello drove a dying girl through the streets of Brooklyn in his cab, he was trying to save her life. Instead he ran down a cop and lost her and his freedom. Every day in prison, Johnny knew that Angie Monticelli’s family blamed him for her death, and that going home would be suicide. But Johnny has unfinished business with his former friend turned mob boss, Vinny Monticelli. Now Johnny has returned to converse with the doomed and the dead—and wait for Vinny to make his move. Survivors of a long-ago freak accident, the two men share access to alternate realities no one else can know—and to a past and present that will all become the same in a city only one of them can leave alive. . . . “In a genre where twisted souls and violence are the norm, Piccirilli’s work stands out for how it blends these elements with a literate sensibility.”—Publishers Weekly BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Tom Piccirilli's The Last Kind Words.

BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Tom Piccirilli's The Last Kind Words. Five years ago, Eddie Whitt’s daughter Sarah became the victim of a serial killer known as Killjoy, and Whitt vowed to hunt him down—no matter what the cost. But the police have given up. And Killjoy has stopped killing…and in some bizarre act of repentance has begun kidnapping abused infants and leaving them with the parents of his original victims. The only clues to Killjoy’s identity lie in a trail of taunting letters. And even as they lead Whitt to a deadly cult—and closer to his prey—he begins to suspect that, like his wife, he’s losing his grip on reality: Sarah’ s dollhouse is filled with eerie activity, as if her murder never occurred. As dark forces rise around him, Whitt must choose—between believing that evil can repent…and stepping into a trap set by a killer who may know the only way to save Whitt’s soul.

Hertzan Chimera died on the 14th of August 2004 after fourteen years typing like a madman. He will be remembered (one hopes) for his extreme short stories and subversive books that tried to break away from rational thought and tedious 3-act structure, works that tore down the barriers of taste and exploded the fixed genres writers find themselves having to cater to. Includes exclusive H.C.interviews with Jack Ketchum, Tom Piccirilli, Edward Lee, Charlee Jacob and others.

BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Tom Piccirilli's The Last Kind Words. Two years ago Shad Jenkins went to prison for assaulting his sister’s attacker. Now he has returned to the southern mountain town of Moon Run Hollow, only to find that Megan is dead. No one knows how she died–or why she was found on Gospel Trail Road, a dirt path leading up to the gorge high above the Chatalaha River, where victims of yellow fever were once brought to die. Navigating a world filled with abnormal children and clandestine snake handlers, one that is slowly being poisoned by illegal moonshine, Shad must pierce the townsfolk’s superstitions and terrible secrets to find out the truth about his sister’s death. But the Blood Dreams he’s suffered from since childhood have taken on an eerie urgency, revealing to Shad the nightmarish form of an unseen adversary. Plagued by the wraiths that haunt the hollow, Shad finds himself increasingly unsure of his own sanity as he begins to piece together what may have happened to his sister–and who exactly his enemy is....