“Beautifully written and morally ambivalent, this complex tale will appeal to readers of Gene Wolfe and China Miéville.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review The city is crumbling. Clouds over Nowy Solum have not parted in a hundred years. Gods have deserted their temples. In the last days of a dying city, the decadent chatelaine chooses a forbidden lover, separating twin outcasts and setting them on independent trajectories that might finally bring down the palace. Then, screaming from the skies, a lone god reappears and a limbless prophet is carried through South Gate, into Nowy Solum, with a message for all: Beyond the city, something ancient and monumental has come awake. “A breathtaking success of a fantasy story. Find yourself a copy, brew some strong coffee, and allow your mind to be blown.” —The Arcanist “Reading it is like waking up in the wrong bed, in the wrong apartment, under the wrong sun. The strangest part is the insidious way the strangeness of Hayward’s world becomes familiar as the story progresses . . . By turns surreal, macabre and stunningly violent, The Fecund’s Melancholy Daughter is dreamlike in its strangeness and complexity. Like a dream, it is difficult to define and difficult to shake.” —The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

From the author of Filaria, The Fecund’s Melancholy Daughter, and Head Full of Mountains comes Brent Hayward’s debut short story collection, featuring ten stories spanning his career, plus two new, previously unpublished pieces, the novelette Lake of Dreams and the titular novella. In Broken Sun, Broken Moon, the storm has passed but gravity is weak again. The scribe isn’t feeling well. Houses in palmetto break apart and float away. Mechanisms behind the sun and the moon are breaking down. And now government men sail into town, from the capital, bringing with them a newborn perfect—the first in years. They’re looking for the scribe, and they’re not very happy. In Lake of Dreams, George Triplehorn was passed over by rapture when it swept the planet. Dead people either stayed that way or got fed up with conditions and moved to the moon. Like the others left behind, George tried to muddle by, making a living with his new skills as an entertainer, but things just weren’t the same. When Myron, his agent, doctor, and sometimes shrink, lands him a gig in Lake of Dreams, the largest lunar necropolis, George figures it might just be the ticket to boost a flagging career and maybe even get his life back on track. But he’s never been to the moon before, his so-called skills are acting up, and he soon discovers that the dead are not his greatest fans. This collection, like Brent Hayward’s other works, breaks the boundaries of literary science fiction.

“Pushes urban fantasy noir to its logical extreme by casting the resurrected body of Christ—now called Cross—as an angel-slaying, wise-cracking antihero.” —Publishers Weekly For thousands of years, Cross has wandered the earth, a mortal soul trapped in the undying body left behind by Christ. He’s been a thief, a con man, a soldier, and a drunkard. He’s fought as a slave in the Colosseum and as a knight at King Arthur’s side. But now he must play the part of reluctant hero, as an angel comes to him for help finding the Mona Lisa—the real Mona Lisa that inspired the painting. Cross’s quest takes him into a secret world within our own, populated by characters just as strange and wondrous as he is. Haunted by memories of Penelope—the only woman he truly loved—he wants to avenge her death at the hands of his ancient enemy, Judas, a forgotten god from an ancient time. The angel promises to deliver Judas to Cross, but nothing is ever what it seems when Judas is involved, and when a group of renegade angels looking for a new holy war show up, things truly go to hell. “A deliriously unhinged roller coaster of a novel, blending fantasy, history, horror and humour with the aplomb of an overfull blender, but all of it smarter than it, truly, has any right—or need—to be.” —National Post “Sweeps you up with its gallows humour, whether you’re revelling in the pleasures of two-fisted, angel-punching action or the cleverly rendered language.” —Quill & Quire “Takes urban fantasy to a different level with this tale of conspiracy and confession.” —Library Journal

To defeat her enemies . . . she must make them immortal. Only men are allowed into the wells of vision. But Cara’s mother defies this edict and is killed, but not before returning with a vision of terrible and wonderful things that are to come . . . and all because of five-year-old Cara. Years later, evil destroys the rest of Cara’s family. In a rage, Cara uses magic to transform herself into a male warrior. But she finds that to defeat her enemies, she must break the cycle of violence, not continue it. As Cara’s mother’s vision of destiny is fulfilled, the wonderful follows the terrible, and a quest for revenge becomes a quest for eternal life.

When Crospinal’s ailing father finally dies, he is left utterly alone in the pen, surrounded by encroaching darkness. The machines that tended to him as a child have long ago vanished, and the apparitions that kept Crospinal company are now silenced. Struggling with congenital issues, outfitted in a threadbare uniform, he has little choice but to leave what was once his home, soon discovering that nothing in the outside world is how he had been told it would be. In his quest for meaning and understanding, and the contact of another, Crospinal learns truths about himself, about his father, and about the last bastion of humanity, trapped with him at the end of time.

18 Spine Tingling Tales Best Served Chilled... Edited by the maestro of macabre, Michael Kelly, CHILLING TALES: Evil Did I Dwell; Lewd I Did Live will distress you, delight you, and disturb you with stories that slowly creep under your skin and linger in your mind long after the pages have been read. This tome includes selections by iconic Canadian dark fantasy and horror writers Nancy Kilpatrick, Claude Lalumière, Brett Alexander Savory, Robert J. Wiersema, Richard Gavin, Barbara Roden, Leah Bobet, Michael R. Colangelo, Simon Strantzas, Jason S. Ridler, Suzanne Church, David Nickle, Christopher K. Miller, Brent Hayward, Sandra Kasturi, Ian Rogers, Gemma Files and Tia V. Travis, with an introduction by Michael Kelly.

The follow-up to Zachary Jernigan’s critically-acclaimed literary debut No Return. At the moment of his greatest victory, before a crowd of thousands, the warrior Vedas Tezul renounced his faith, calling for revolt against the god Adrash, imploring mankind to unite in this struggle. Good intentions count for nothing. In the three months since his sacrilegious pronouncement, the world has not changed for the better. In fact, it is now on the verge of dying. The Needle hangs broken in orbit above Jeroun, each of its massive iron spheres poised to fall and blanket the planet's surface in dust. Long-held truces between Adrashi and Anadrashi break apart as panic spreads. With no allegiance to either side, the disgraced soldier Churls walks into the divided city of Danoor with a simple plan: murder the monster named Fesuy Amendja, and retrieve from captivity the only two individuals that still matter to her—Vedas Tezul, and the constructed man Berun. The simple plan goes awry, as simple plans do, and in the process Churls and her companions are introduced to one of the world’s deepest secrets: A madman, insisting he is the link to an ancient world, offering the most tempting lie of all... Hope. Concluding the visceral, inventive narrative begun in No Return, Shower of Stones pits men against gods and swords against civilization-destroying magic in the fascinatingly harsh world of Jeroun.

Twenty-two genre-bending short stories of the strange and surreal from the Bram Stoker, World Fantasy, and International Horror Guild Award–winning author. Steve Rasnic Tem is the celebrated author of award-winning horror novels and short story collections such as Blood Kin and City Fishing. But the stories featured in Celestial Inventories showcase his ability to defy genre with imaginative works of the fantastic. These stories cross conventional boundaries between science fiction, fantasy, horror, literary fiction, bizarro, magic realism, and the new weird. Many of these stories have been lauded, appearing in Best of the Year compilations and receiving major Fantasy or Science Fiction nominations and awards. Others are collected from rare chapbooks, anthologies, and obscure magazines. And these previously published works are joined by a new story written specifically for this volume.

From the author of the Bram Stoker Award–winning Dawn Song: “The kind of horror that gets under your skin and picks away at your brain” (Tor.com). Stories from the Plague Years is the first fiction collection from award-winning fantasy author Michael Marano. Nine tales arranged in a haunting symphony that guide readers through a tour of the darkest landscapes of human existence. Here, fury and hate grow so strong, they cannot be held within one man’s body, and manifest themselves to devastating effect. Cities contain second, unseen cities populated by the vengeful ghosts of those who died too soon. Countries fall to famine and war. But these are also the tales of love lasting beyond death, love existing beyond all hope, and friendships never forgotten. Within are the widely praised stories “Winter Requiem,” “The Siege,” and the controversial “Burden,” as well as two original novellas, including the Shirley Jackson Award–nominated “Displacement.” Marano, acclaimed for his evocative voice, paints lush portraits both terrifying and tender, injecting even the darkest of fantasies with a punk rock sensibility and a touch of the humane. With Stories from the Plague Years, he presents snapshots of a time when our world collided with evil, sickness, and self-destruction, and left behind lasting scars on those who dared to survive. “Few horror authors are better equipped to write about madness than Marano. With an expansive vocabulary, a tenacious commitment to poetic prose, and a willingness to follow whatever discursive paths his whim takes, Marano is an acquired taste—but without doubt possessed of a unique talent.” —Booklist

Stories of suspense, sorrow, and horror by the Bram Stoker Award–winning, New York Times–bestselling author of Ararat. A circus clown willing to give anything to be funny. A spectral gunslinger who must teach a young boy to defend the ones he loves. A lonely widower making a farewell tour of the places that meant the world to his late wife. A faded Hollywood actress out to deprive her ex-husband of his prize possession. These are just some of the characters to be found in Tell My Sorrows to the Stones, a remarkable collection of short fiction by one of today’s literary masters of darkness. “Some of my editor friends tell me that horror fiction is finally starting to make a comeback. If that’s true, writers like Christopher Golden are a big part of the reason.” —George R. R. Martin