"All my life I've dreamed of the dead." Thanatrauma: the dread of it erodes you, the shadows waiting at the end, the impending conclusion, the troubling dream from which you will not wake. These 21 stories - four published here for the first time - explore some of our fundamental fears: death, loss, grief, and aging. In "Reflections in Black," a man takes a phantasmagoric Halloween journey in search of a former love. In "The Parts Man," a man enters a desperate contract with a sinister entity in a long, vintage automobile. The darkly beautiful "The Dead Outside My Door" is a haunting post-apocalyptic tale unlike any you've ever read. Other offerings include "Whatever You Want," in which a Christmas wish has terrible consequences; "Torn," a bizarre version of a highly personalized Hell; and "The Way Station," a tribute to the legendary Stefan Grabinski. Also included is "August Freeze," from the lost, undistributed Winter 1985 issue of Weird Tales. Winner of the Bram Stoker, World Fantasy, and British Fantasy Awards, Steve Rasnic Tem has established himself as one of today's finest writers of horror and weird fiction. In this new collection, which is by turns chilling and thought-provoking, Tem is at his very best.

This is the hotel where our nightmares go... It’s where horrors come to be themselves, and the dead pause to rest between worlds. Recently widowed and unemployed, Richard Carter finds a new job, and a new life for him and his daughter Serena, as manager of the mysterious Deadfall Hotel. Jacob Ascher, the caretaker, is there to show Richard the ropes, and to tell him the many rules and traditions, but from the beginning, their new world haunts and transforms them. It’s a terrible place. As the seasons pass, the supernatural and the sublime become a part of life, as routine as a morning cup of coffee, but it’s not safe, by any means. Deadfall Hotel is where Richard and Serena will rebuild the life that was taken from them... if it doesn’t kill them first.

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, NPR, The Atlantic, Electric Lit, Thrillist, LitHub, Kirkus Reviews • A witty, intelligent novel of an American woman on the edge, by a brilliant new voice in fiction—“the glorious love child of Ottessa Moshfegh and Sally Rooney” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) “[A] jewel of a debut . . . abundantly satisfying.”—Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker As an adjunct professor of English in New York City with little hope of finding a permanent position, Dorothy feels “like a janitor in the temple who continued to sweep because she had nowhere else to be but who had lost her belief in the essential sanctity of the enterprise.” No one but her boyfriend knows that she’s just had a miscarriage—not her mother, her best friend, or her therapists (Dorothy has two of them). She wasn’t even sure she wanted to be a mother. So why does Dorothy feel like a failure? The Life of the Mind is a book about endings—of youth, of ambition, of possibility, but also of the meaning that an inquiring mind can find in the mess of daily experience. Mordant and remorselessly wise, this jewel of a debut cuts incisively into life as we live it, and how we think of it.

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.

Ugly Behavior collects 19 of Steve Rasnic Tem's best noir tales, ugly stories about people behaving quite badly indeed. These are the stories in that box under your bed, pushed all the way back against the wall, the one that takes some effort to get to, the one you thought your momma didn't know about.

This new collection of 25 stories, including two appearing here for the first time, collects the best of Steve Rasnic Tem's dark fiction published since his landmark Centipede tome Out of the Dark: A Storybook of Horrors. A number have appeared in various Year’s Best volumes. All represent the high quality of Tem’s prose and the wide range of his approaches to the horror genre. In The Night Doctor And Other Tales, you will encounter the most haunting figures ever to cross Tem’s imagination: a man obsessed with his own breath and the breathing he hears that is not his own; a husband waiting for his wife as new bodies appear at the bottom of his yard; a weekend fisherman and the unseen man sharing his fishing hut; a loyal husband dealing with the latest changes in his wife’s physical appearance; a strange widower in his house by the sea; a devoted mother trying to protect her son from the nightmares of the past; a son returning to a dreaded summer vacation spot; a grandfather protecting his grandchildren from a legacy of dark transformations; and, in the title story, an elderly man awaits the visit of a mysterious family physician. Stories included in this collection: Breathing Apartment B Red Rabbit The Hanged Man The Fishing Hut A Sudden Event Paula Breaks Lost in the Garden of Earthly Delights Blattidae Wine Half-Light Mister Ainsley The Long Fade into Evening Domestic Magic The Secret Laws of the Universe The Man in the Rose Bushes The Night Doctor The Enemy Within Stick Men Too Many Ghosts When You're Not Looking Between the Pilings The Erased The Wake The Weight Lost The Monster Makers

A children's book for the child we lost in trauma, abuse and rape. A love story of healing, empowerment and transformation.