Darkscapes

The darkness has many landscapes.

Across five decades, Steven E. Wedel has explored the places where the ordinary world gives way to something darker.

Darkscapes gathers his short fiction into one expansive collection, with stories written from the late 1980s to the present. Supernatural horror, psychological terror, human monsters, ancient evils, strange encounters, and ordinary people confronting things they cannot understand all inhabit these pages.

First published in 2002 and expanded in 2006, Darkscapes returns in its most complete edition. This third edition restores stories lost from earlier versions, brings together fiction previously scattered across other collections and publications, and includes three works written especially for this volume.

Opening with "What the Craft Requires," a dark examination of obsession and the price a writer pays for his work, the collection moves through decades of horror before closing with two new stories: "Autumn Leaves," in which an aging veteran's past begins to consume his present, and "Requiem of Wind," a tale of isolation, regret, and terror on the Oklahoma prairie before statehood.

Between them are tales of obsession and grief, violence and loss, supernatural evil and very human darkness—the work of a writer returning again and again to the question of what waits when the familiar world stops being safe.

Some of these stories are old friends.

Some have been waiting in the dark.

And some have never been seen before.

Welcome to the Darkscapes.