Autumn Prose, Winter Verse

Cover art: "Night Rolls In, Where Owls Live." by Molly Devlin.

In this first career-spanning collection, author and filmmaker Mark Steensland (Behind the Bookcase, The Special) tells tales that skate along the edge of shadows cast by writers such as Ramsey Campbell and Robert E. Howard, before cutting their own unique path through the darkness.

"In Lovecraft’s Pillow" (inspired by a Stephen King suggestion; co-authored with Rick Hautala), a writer seeking inspiration buys the titular object from a pawnshop and gets more than he anticipated... "In A Tither of Mint", the birth of a cyclops to a young couple creates a rift in their relationship, until a traveling carnival arrives in town... In "One Twenty-Eight, Give or Take", a psychiatrist recounts to fellow bar patrons the reason he’ll never attend another high school reunion... In "Ah, Sweet Moment of Death", a guardian demon remembers all the bad things his dying charge has done... In "Her", a professor of architecture begins a dangerous sexual affair with an unfinished house... From the miraculous to the mundane, from the simple to the sublime, these stories reach to the outer limits of our most terrifying emotions: love, hate, and forgiveness.

Contents:

Lovecraft’s Pillow (with Rick Hautala)
One Twenty-Eight, Give or Take
The Barn
Death Wears a Smile
The Book Smeller
Sleepless
A Tither of Mint
She
Mine Now
Elegiac
But for the Grace of God
Him 81
Ah, Sweet Moment of Death
Baby Killer
Her