“Bleak, melancholy, and intelligent like the best by Thomas Ligotti and Jon Padgett, these tales unmistakably come from a deep, personal place and will best resonate with searchers after metaphysical horrors.” —Dejan Ognjanović, RUE MORGUE The Puppet King and Other Atonements conjures a horrific universe of puppets, labyrinths, and liminal spaces. Over the span of fourteen Borgesian terrors, Justin A. Burnett inhabits the strange borderlands between intimacy and isolation, fiction and philosophy, reality and nightmare. Sprouting from the blackened landscape of weird writers such as Thomas Ligotti, Jon Padgett, and Brian Evenson, this collection is a bleak, unflinching gaze into the vertiginous depths of the nonhuman. “A collection brimming with sublime torments. Burnett masterfully grasps the transcendent grotesque, weaving tales charged with cosmic danger. A refreshing and powerful new voice in contemporary dread.” —Rebecca Gransden, author of SEA OF GLASS “Burnett takes you through a journey of contrasts. At once delicate and painfully intimate, yet vast, reverberant and strange, The Puppet King and Other Atonements draws the reader deep into the primordial to the very edge of the stars. Highly recommended.” —Emma J. Gibbon, author of DARK BLOOD COMES FROM THE FEET

Hymns of Abomination: Secret Songs of Leeds is a long-awaited tribute anthology to the work of Matthew M. Bartlett.Bartlett is a beloved voice in contemporary weird fiction known for his richly nightmarish tales of Leeds, a fictionalized version of a village that's part of Northampton, MA. What began as Livejournal posts circulated among friends in the early 2000's, Bartlett's short, macabre, and imaginative yarns found their way into Gateways of Abomination, a collection that swept the small world of weird fiction into giddy delirium. Nathan Ballingrud aptly describes the experience of discovering Gateways in his introduction to Creeping Waves, Bartlett's second anthology: "What I encountered was a writer in full flourish, in complete command of his art. I encountered a savage dream which moved with the lethal confidence of a great white shark. Bartlett was no dilettante; here was someone channeling a vision. The book seemed to vibrate." There aren't many readers in the know who would argue otherwise.Over the years, Bartlett's work has wound its way ever more tightly into the heart of the community, influencing a wide berth of current authors (many of whom have agreed to appear in this anthology) and surely more to come. His achievements include an entry (for his short story "Rangel") in Year's Best Weird Fiction vol. 3 edited by Simon Strantzas alongside weird fiction superstars like Robert Aickman, Ramsey Campbell, and Kristi Demeester. He's even contributed to Cadabra Records' eerie blend of spoken word and haunting soundscapes with releases like Mr. White Noise, Call Me Corey, and Ginny Greenteeth (the latter read by Laurence Harvey). The point is that Bartlett isn't going anywhere, and that's good news for weird fiction and horror readers. As Scott Nicolay has said, "Matthew Bartlett is one of those authors whose emergence redefines the genre. Barker, Ligotti, Barron, Llewellyn... Bartlett." That's quite some praise. It also happens to be the widely-held consensus regarding Bartlett's work.

In "Dark Awakenings," author and scholar Cardin explores the ancient intersection between religion and horror in seven stories and three academic papers.

ANTISOCIETIES is a collection of ten stories about isolation - what it does to people, and what isolated people do to each other and themselves. An ominously quiet town. A haunting young adult novel from the turn of the century. Two starving captives frozen in agony. A young boy from a doting family. A man in a cheap Halloween mask. A succession of portraits of people trapped in their own identities, some of whom insist on their own ideas because they would have nothing at all without them. People for whom being seen by another is terrifying. And, like any collection of portraits, ANTISOCIETIES is also a collection of speculative mirrors ...

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Pagan Spain" by Richard Wright. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

With themes reminiscent of Shirley Jackson, Thomas Ligotti, and Bruno Shulz, but with a strikingly unique vision, Jon Padgett's The Secret of Ventriloquism heralds the arrival of a significant new literary talent. Padgett's work explores the mystery of human suffering, the agony of personal existence, and the ghastly means by which someone might achieve salvation from both. A bullied child who seeks vengeance within a bed's hollow box spring; a lucid dreamer haunted by an impossible house; a dummy that reveals its own anatomy in 20 simple steps; a stuttering librarian who holds the key to a mill town's unspeakable secrets; a commuter whose worldview is shattered by two words printed on a cardboard sign; an aspiring ventriloquist who spends a little too much time looking at himself in a mirror. And the presence that speaks through them all.

"Shipley's Terminal Park pounds fiction into entirely new shapes. Disintegrating and blissful. Highly Recommend." -Tony Burgess, author of Pontypool Changes Everything "Gary J. Shipley's writing has a way of making every form he works within advance, in an overarching sense, such that the next exciting thing you read, no matter how advanced, is rendered a jalopy." -Dennis Cooper, author of The Marbled Swarm "The world is a void and there are no more prophets left to serve. There is still vision, however, and Shipley's is one we might all surrender to." -Travis Jeppesen, author of The Suiciders "Shipley's writing is important because it's a fearless attempt to advance the art of literature, to force us to breathe something, to drown in something, to bloody our hands. It's an unforgettable experience." -3: AM Magazine

From A.C. Wise, the acclaimed author of Wendy, Darling, comes a brand new collection of horror stories, The Ghost Sequences. "A haunting is a moment of trauma, infinitely repeated. It extends forward and backward in time. It is the hole grief makes. It is a house built by memory in-between your skin and bones." A lush and elegant collection of tales, - many having appeared in various "Best Of" anthologies - teeming with frightful and tragic events, yet profoundly and intimately human. These chilling tales will engross and keep readers up late, their exacting and precise detailing giving each selection some verisimilitude. But remember, it's fiction. For readers of Kelly Link, Carmen Maria Machado, and Angela Carter, this is a must have collection of ghostly tales set to deliver a frisson of terror and glee.

Annotation This collection challenges the tendency among scholars of ancient Greece to see magical and religious ritual as mutually exclusive and to ignore "magical" practices in Greek religion. The contributors survey specific bodies of archaeological, epigraphical, and papyrological evidence formagical practices in the Greek world, and, in each case, determine whether the traditional dichotomy between magic and religion helps in any way to conceptualize the objective features of the evidence examined. Contributors include Christopher A. Faraone, J.H.M. Strubbe, H.S. Versnel, Roy Kotansky, John Scarborough, Samuel Eitrem, Fritz Graf, John J. Winkler, Hans Dieter Betz, and C.R. Phillips.