The Darkly Splendid Realm

Introduction by Laird Barron. Cover art by Harry O. Morris.

If you've felt eyes studying you from the shadows, it has seen you...

If crooked branches have rapped upon your window at night, it has summoned you...

If your dreams are plagued by half-glimpsed terrors, it has claimed you...

From one of the most gruesomely original voices in contemporary horror comes this book of thirteen nightmares. Richard Gavin will plunge you into underworlds of Hellish beauty; give you flight on Dread-Moths' wings; tend for you a thicket that blooms with feral children. More than a volume of horror tales, this collection offers visions of a realm whose splendours are as illuminating as they are dark.

"Richard Gavin pens tales of grimness and melancholy, of ghosts and things much darker than ghosts, and in a fashion that does honour to the genre's founders while blazing his own unique path." – from the Introduction by Laird Barron

"Richard Gavin is a major find; someone who can shake up horror's world with a whisper." – Hellnotes

"...disorienting shifts of perspective, outre imagery and twisted internal logic...Gavin writes in a style that suits the gothic horrors he conjures. Readers of antiquarian ghost tales and classic horror fiction will find this book a fine extension of those traditions." – Publishers Weekly (on Omens)

"Richard Gavin's tales are genuinely evocative of the strange and alien." – Ramsey Campbell

"...combines the meticulously crafted prose and occult overtones of such early 20th Century horror greats as H.P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen and William Hope Hodgson, but with distinctly contemporary settings and conflicts...Gavin creates evocative tales that work on the imagination as much as they do on the nerves." – James Grainger in Rue Morgue

Contents:

• Introduction: Vistas of Evil Splendor, by Laird Barron
• Prowling Through Throated Chambers
• Where the Scarab Dwells
• Phantom Passages
• Primeval Wood
• Final Night in Nevertown
• Children of the Mound
• The Language of the Nameless Region
• The Astral Mask
• Dreaming While Adrift on the River of Despair
• Getting the Strap
• Waterburns
• The Bitter Taste of Dread-Moths
• Following the Silent Hedges
• Author’s Afterword
• About the Author