Haunted Worlds

A Collection of Short Stories. Foreword by Ian Rogers. Cover artwork by Kim Bo Yung.

Jeffrey Thomas has become renowned for his novels and tales dealing with Punktown, a terrifying, crime-riddled city of the future in which humans and aliens from around the universe mingle in every sense of the word. But Thomas has written a wealth of stories long and short that have been gathered in several previous collections.

This volume features stories that have appeared only in Thomas’s Patreon website, Jeffrey Thomas Is Creating Weird Fiction. They are among his most intimate and intense weird tales. “Saigon Dep Lam” is an affecting Christmas story set in Vietnam (which Thomas has visited several times). Art takes a central role in “Mr. Faun” and “Drawing No. 8,” both of which suggest that paintings may be quite a bit more than what you see on the canvas.

This book also includes several unpublished stories. “The Temple of Ugghiutu” is a Lovecraftian tale that bears relations to Thomas’s Punktown novel Monstrocity. The distinctively titled “riaH gnoL” hints at the disturbing psychosis of a young woman employed by an arcade. “Good Will toward Men” makes us wonder what real difference there is between heaven and hell.

“Jeffrey Thomas haunts me. He will do the same to you.” — From Ian Rogers’s introduction