Thanatrauma
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
“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 vision of a highly personalized hell; and “The Way Station,” a tribute to the legendary Stefan Grabinski. Also featured is a special bonus, “August Freeze,” from the lost, undistributed Winter 1985 issue of Weird Tales.
Steve Rasnic Tem has won the Bram Stoker, World Fantasy, and British Fantasy Awards and has established himself as one of today’s finest writers of horror and weird fiction. In this new collection, by turns chilling and thought-provoking, Tem is at his very best.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
World Fantasy Award winner Tem (The Night Doctor) is at his sharpest and most crushing in this collection of 21 horror shorts. In "Saudade," a grieving widower takes a cruise at his daughters' behest and discovers that vacations can become nightmares when you bring your terror with you. "Sleepover" takes readers to a sinking town where a family struggles to stay calm in the midst of disaster. In "The Walls Are Trembling," a woman contends with a banshee who comes to her in the night to scream out warnings about tragedies that have already occurred. And the hellish, hallucinatory "Torn" offers a chilling portrait of the afterlife. The common thread throughout is an inexorable sense of loss; the empty places Tem's characters navigate become their own rich, tangible landscapes of negative space. Tem maintains a dreamy, seething style that renders the worlds he creates at once familiar and deeply alien. This is essential for fans of dark speculative fiction, surrealist travelogues, and meditations on loss.
