Stephen Graham Jones

A neighborhood won't let its residents forget the past. One taste draws two lovers into a nightmarish addiction. A harsh winter forces strange creatures down from the mountains. At sea level, where it's safe, things like this can't happen. But when you're sky high in Denver, Colorado, anything goes...including your sanity. Beware of Terror at 5280', a horror fiction anthology featuring dark tales set in and around Denver and the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, penned exclusively by local authors. Terror at 5280' is a Denver Post Bestseller and winner of the Fiction Anthology category (and finalist for Horror Fiction) in The 2020 Best Book Awards from American Book Fest. Edited by: Josh Schlossberg, Gary Robbe, Melinda Bezdek, Bobby Crew, Desi D, Lisa Mavroudis, Thomas C. Mavroudis, and Jeamus Wilkes. TABLE OF CONTENTSPreface - Denver Horror Collective Foreword - John Palisano The Depths - Matthew Lyons Laffing Sal - Lindsay King-Miller This Was Always Going to Happen - Stephen Graham Jones Electric Stalker - Rebecca S. W. Bates Gaze with Undimmed Eyes and the World Drops Dead - Carina Bissett Grave Mistake - Joshua Viola & Carter Wilson There is Something Up There - Joy Yehle Scrape - Gary Robbe The Copper Door Karma Jar - Cindra Spencer Block 12 - Thomas C. Mavroudis A Place for Cady - Melinda Bezdek Taste - Henry Snider Chronic Cold - Josh Schlossberg The Dead Spot - Angela Sylvaine The Ghosts of Cheesman Park - Grace Horton Old Golden Road - Jay Seate If I Shall Wake - Desi D The Blue Lady - Sean Murphy Mountain Lovers - Bobby Crew Left Behind - P. L. McMillan Deep Veins - Travis Heermann That Time Maggie Ghosted Me - Jeamus Wilkes Last Words: Cannibal Kings and Queens - Larry Berry

DUSK DEFENDS THE LIGHT FROM THE DARK. SOMETIMES... Life is nothing if not constant change. And these changes force us to make terrifying choices that will lead us into either the light or the dark. Dusk is this tipping point, where things go well, or where they go very, very bad. Suspended in Dusk II continues the legacy of editor Simon Dewar's anthology series. Volume II includes the disturbing work of seventeen extremely diverse voices from the horror and speculative fiction genres. -- Teenage boys navigate the Dark Web where diabolical games of life and death await...-- A woman stalked by shadows gets answers she doesn't want to hear...-- Ghost hunters commune with malevolent spirits seeking vengeance on the living...-- A family confronts a Maori legend that's less myth and far more terrifying truth...-- A young man explores a love that continues to gnaw long after it's gone...-- A group of adults encounter childhood fears that will not die...-- And so much more. Suspended in Dusk II is introduced by Angela Slatter and includes fiction from Ramsey Campbell, Stephen Graham Jones, Bracken MacLeod, Damien Angelica Walters, Alan Baxter, Paul Tremblay, Sarah Read, Christopher Golden, Nerine Dorman, Dan Rabarts, Gwendolyn Kiste, Benjamin Knox, Annie Neugebauer, J. C. Michael, Letitia Trent, Paul Michael Anderson and Karen Runge. Confront your change. But you must first survive dusk. Praise for Suspended in Dusk II: "Simon Dewar's second installment of the series really delivers. This collection has thrown together a multitude of quality writing that begs to be read. There is darkness in the margins of each page, smudges of black ink threatening to swallow the reader when they aren't expecting," - Brian Bogart, Kendall Reviews "Suspended in Dusk II grabs you by the throat from the very first story and does not let go. I honestly can't overstate how good this anthology was. There are some very heavy topics in the stories but...not a single one is played merely for shock value or cheap emotion." - Gracie Kat, Sci-Fi & Scary "I appreciated the large amount of diversity in this book; from the foreword it became clear that individuals of all shapes of life were given the chance to contribute, and I feel that's largely absent in anthologies these days." - Red Lace Reviews Proudly presented by Grey Matter Press, the multiple Bram Stoker Award-nominated independent publisher. Grey Matter Press: Where Dark Thoughts Thrive

Two books, one anthology. The grift. The scam. The double-cross. Blackmail and burglary; murder and larceny. Blood Business tracks the underbelly of human nature as it drags itself through the muck of our lesser angels in twenty-seven crime stories set in this world... and beyond.

Two books, one anthology. The grift. The scam. The double-cross. Blackmail and burglary; murder and larceny. Blood Business tracks the underbelly of human nature as it drags itself through the muck of our lesser angels in twenty-seven crime stories set in this world... and beyond.

Winner of the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction PrizeA darkly comical horror lurks beneath the surface of everyday events in Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman, a seductively poetic story collection of unusual brilliance and rare humor. In Aimee Parkison’s Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman, lovers find unexpected romance in cramped spaces, fast food addicts struggle through cheeseburger addiction, and the splendor of nature competes with the violence of television. All the while, a complicated and precarious present dawns onto a new world where wealthy women wear children’s eyes as jewelry and those in need of money hawk their faces only to forever mourn what parts of themselves they have sold to survive. Open the refrigerator door. Inside are antique jars. Open them to hear the music: Beethoven playing piano; slaves singing for freedom in plantation fields; mothers humming lullabies through the night to smallpox babies, knowing this song is the last sound their children will ever hear. As Stephen Graham Jones notes in his foreword to this prize-winning collection, “The best books . . . fold you into a darkness sparkling with life. They lock you in the refrigerator but they also pipe in some music that never repeats, and when the door starts to open, you cling tight to it, so you can have just a few minutes more. This book, it’ll be over far too fast for you, yes. But even were it five times as thick as it is now, it would still be too short. Remember, though, the best books, they’re loops. They never stop. This one still hasn’t, for me.”

A spellbinding and surreal coming-of-age story about a young boy living on the fringe with his family â?? who are secretly werewolves â?? and struggling to survive in a contemporary America that shuns them.

Nominated for both the Shirley Jackson and Bram Stoker Awards, and a Best of 2016 selection of Tor.com and Book Riot, acclaimed horror writer Stephen Graham Jones' (The Only Good Indians and My Heart is a Chainsaw) Mongrels goes beyond your typical werewolf story to show a young boy, mired in poverty and always on the run, coming-of-age in a world that fears him and hates his family...but may just be more monstrous than he could ever be. He was born an outsider, like the rest of his family. Poor yet resilient, he lives in the shadows with his aunt Libby and uncle Darren, folk who stubbornly make their way in a society that does not understand or want them. They are mongrels, mixed blood, neither this nor that. The boy at the center of Mongrels must decide if he belongs on the road with his aunt and uncle, or if he fits with the people on the other side of the tracks. For ten years, he and his family have lived a life of late-night exits and narrow escapes--always on the move across the South to stay one step ahead of the law. But the time is drawing near when Darren and Libby will finally know if their nephew is like them or not. And the close calls they've been running from for so long are catching up fast now. Everything is about to change. A compelling and fascinating journey, Mongrels alternates between past and present to create an unforgettable portrait of a boy trying to understand his family and his place in a complex and unforgiving world. A smart and innovative story-- funny, bloody, raw, and real--told in a rhythmic voice full of heart, Mongrels is a deeply moving, sometimes grisly, novel that illuminates the challenges and tender joys of a life beyond the ordinary in a bold and imaginative new way.

"My hat is off to Stephen Graham Jones, because he is the kind of author that makes the frustrated writer inside every book reviewer cringe with self-doubt."--PopMattersSo there's video footage of me not washing my hands in the bathroom at work. My dad says it's the kind of the thing that can tank his whole business. That he has to be extra careful. Don't I understand? Usually when he's spewing all this, I just stand there. Last week I was his show-and-tell for Sunday school class. We wore matching ties, and I was under strict orders not to smile or look sly. Some of those people were his customers, after all. I don't know. Anyway, bam, yeah, the camera caught me: I ran the water but didn't wash my hands. Over the course of one shift working the window of his father's drive-through urinal, our sixteen-year-old Flushboy will have to not only juggle gallons of warm pee and deal with the worst flood ever (it's not water), but he'll also have to fend off the urine mafia, solve the citywide mystery of Chickenstein, and win his girlfriend back. Stephen Graham Jones is the author of ten novels, three collections, and one novella. He is a full professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and in the low-residency program for University of California Riverside--Palm Desert. Stephen is forty-one, and married with children.

It’s a wonder humanity ever survived into the twenty-first century. Even Neanderthals knew to bury the dead beneath stones to prevent corpses from rising. Ancient civilizations feared slain warriors would return from battlefields, medieval physicians worried that bodies would rise from plague pits, many cultures buried the dead at crossroads to prevent the dead from walking. In Zombies: Shambling Through the Ages, editor Steve Berman has collected stories that reveal the threat of revenants and the living dead is far from recent. From the Bronze Age to World War II, this anthology guides us through millennia of thrills, chills, kills, carnage, horror, and havoc wreaked throughout history by the walking dead.

It was a fire that could be seen for miles, a fire that split the community, a fire that turned families on each other, a fire that it's still hard to get a straight answer about. A quarter of a century ago, someone held a match to Greenwood, Texas's cotton. Stephen Graham Jones was twelve that year. What he remembers best, what's stuck with him all this time, is that nobody ever came forward to claim that destruction. And nobody was ever caught. Greenwood just leaned forward into next year's work, and the year after that, pretending that the fire had never happened. But it had. This fire, it didn't start twenty-five years ago. It had been smouldering for years by then. And everybody knew it. Getting them to say anything about it's another thing, though. Now Stephen's going back. His first time since high school, and maybe his last. For answers, for closure, for the people who can't go back. The ones who never got to leave. Part mystery, part memoir, Growing Up Dead in Texas is packed with more secrets than your average graveyard. Stephen Graham Jones' breakout novel is a story about farming. A story about Texas. A story about finally standing up from the dead and walking away.

We stare at each other because we don't know which tribe, and then nod at the last possible instant. Standard procedure. You pick it up the first time a white friend leads you across a room just to stand you up by another Indian, arrange you like furniture, like you should have something to say to each other. As one character after another tells it in these stories, much that happens to them does so because "I'm an Indian." And, as Stephen Graham Jones tells it in one remarkable story after another, the life of an Indian in modern America is as rich in irony as it is in tradition. A noted Blackfeet writer, Jones offers a nuanced and often biting look at the lives of Native peoples from the inside. A young Indian mans journey to discover America results in an unsettling understanding of relations between whites and Natives in the twenty-first century, a relationship still fueled by mistrust, stereotypes, and almost casual violence. A character waterproofs his boots with transmission fluid; another steals into Glacier National Park to hunt. One man uses watermelon to draw flies off poached deer; another, in a modern twist on the captivity narrative, kidnaps a white girl in a pickup truck; and a son bleeds into the father carrying him home. Rife with arresting and poignant images, fleeting and daring in presentation, weighty and provocative in their messages, these stories demonstrate the power of one of the most compelling writers in Native North America today.

These thirteen stories are our own lives, inside out. A boy’s summer romance doesn’t end in that good kind of heartbreak, but in blood. A girl on a fishing trip makes a friend in the woods who’s exactly what she needs, except then that friend follows her back to the city. A father hears a voice through his baby monitor that shouldn’t be possible, but now he can’t stop listening. A woman finds out that the shipwreck wasn’t the disaster, but who she’s shipwrecked with. A big brother learns just what he will, and won’t, trade for one night of sleep. From prison guards making unholy alliances to snake-oil men in the Old West doling out justice, these stories carve down into the body of the mind, into our most base fears and certainties, and there’s no anesthetic. Turn the light on if you want, but that just makes for more shadows.