The Dark Ride: The Best Short Fiction of John Kessel

“Completely strange and idiosyncratic. His stories are singular experiences... They burst out of their texts with news that is strange, mysterious, beyond reason or parsing—beyond Kessel himself, it seems, who must have been as startled as anyone to see such sentences appear on his page. They are uncanny. “

—Kim Stanley Robinson, from his Introduction


The Dark Ride collects John Kessel’s best short fiction, beginning with 1981’s “Not Responsible! Park and Lock It!” and ending with 2021’s “The Dark Ride.” The stories range from flash pieces to novellas, from comedy to existential horror, from far future SF to Kafkaesque fantasy, including 40,000 words of never-before-collected fiction and extensive author’s notes.


All his best are here, among them Nebula Award winners “Another Orphan” and “Pride and Prometheus,” by the writer Sci-Fi Weekly called  “quite possibly the best short story writer working in science fiction today.”


"...capable of the most artful and rigorous literary composition, but with a mischievious genius that inclines him toward speculative fiction...[Kessel] writes with subtlety and great wit...and his craftsmanship is frequently absolutely brilliant.  Plus, his sense of comedy is remarkable."

—Publishers Weekly


“Articulate, polished, dazzlingly ingenious, thoroughly varied but essentially of a piece...a systematic demonstration of just what, in serious and ambitious hands, contemporary literary SF can do.”

—Nick Gevers, Infinity Plus


“These are stories that liberate the mind, which of course is what escapism is all about.”

—New York Times Book Review