Tommy B. Smith

For the first time collected together in one volume, the best weird fiction from Morpheus Tales, the UK's most controversial weird fiction magazine Only the very best weird fiction has been hand-picked from the Morpheus Tales archives to create this first collected volume of the magazine Christopher Fowler calls "edgy and dark". Featuring fiction by Lyn Cannaday, Robert T. Canipe, Steven Lee Climer, Nickolas Cook, Garon Cockrell, Nick Day, Vic Fortezza, Ken Goldman, Gary Hewitt, Todd Austin Hunt, Michael Laimo, Kevin Lucia, Adrian Ludens, Christian McPhate, Mari Mitchell, Theresa C. Newbill, Aaron A. Polson, Jonathan J. Schlosser, Tommy B. Smith, Alan Spencer, Wayne Summers, Randy Young, Mark Zirbel, Lee Clark Zumpe. Established horror best-sellers rub shoulders with rising stars and newcomers in this diverse collection of short weird fiction.

The tale of a widow's harrowing journey through grief and peril into the cold remnants of a dead world. Damon Sharpe had in part found victory, he believed, in his battle to unearth a truth obscured by time. By autumn, he was dead, leaving to his wife Anne a house of unfulfilled wishes, remnants, and the key to the enigma of his obsession, the Mourner's Cradle. A journey through grief and peril delivers Anne Sharpe from her home in St. Charles to the faraway skeletons of a long-dead civilization where she will find the desperate answers she seeks...or die trying. This horror novel is perfect for fans of... The Silent Corner by Dean Koontz The Fisherman by John Langan The Grieving Stones by Gary McMahon Daphne du Maurier Thomas Ligotti Shirley Jackson Dan Simmons Proudly represented by Crystal Lake Publishing--Tales from the Darkest Depths. Interview with the author: So what makes this horror novella so special? It's a story of inner darkness and shattered remnants. Not everyone is comfortable confronting tragedy and loss, yet it's something most of us must eventually face. If the things we love are stripped away, what will remain? The Mourner's Cradle is the story of a widow, Anne Sharpe, and her battle to make sense of her husband's death, which places her on a dark and perilous path. Tell us more about your lead character. The invisible woman reveals herself. Her name is Anne Sharpe. People hardly noticed her before her husband's death. Not everyone understands her. Her grief has brought out a dark fury in her, though perhaps it has been there for some time and her husband's death was the catalyst for its liberation. Why should readers give this book a try? For a glimpse into the human abyss and a cold journey to long-forsaken pinnacles. So be careful, dear readers. You dance with skeletons. Do you have other books featuring these characters? The Mourner's Cradle shares its setting of St. Charles with my debut horror novella, Poisonous. Some readers will find some familiarity in this, though The Mourner's Cradle is its own story and a different tale of a different time.

This book is a collision of ink and paper and an awakening of possibilities. Captured within are fragments of glass, metal, bone, ice, dreams, visions, and lives. Inside its pages, you will read of a lost village and the burning affliction of its people. You will share in an engineer's unveiling of a hidden conspiracy. You will visit with a child confined to a tiny rectangular world on the brink of dissolution, and you will follow a girl on her trek from a home of crime and poverty across barren fields of ice to where an unspeakable force dwells. These are but a few of the works you will find among this collection of fourteen tales which blends the cosmic, the psychological, the human, and the inhuman in bringing together the essential dark fiction from author Tommy B. Smith's pen of chaos.

Following the Quake of '79, a terrible force came to the city of St. Charles. This was the Living Poison. In Lilac Chambers, it may have found the perfect host. As she finds herself changing, becoming increasingly dangerous to everyone around her, it becomes apparent that her state of being is no accident of nature. She is becoming a prime vehicle for the Living Poison's destructive swath through the streets of St. Charles. Detective Brandt McCullough has seen the Living Poison's brutality. John Sutterfield, ringmaster of Sutterfield's Circus of the Fantastic, is discovering its malignancy festering within the very circus he founded. These two are the only ones who might stand in the way of a force greater than anything they have ever known, one which threatens to wash the streets in red and swallow the city into chaos, but the stakes may be higher than either of them can imagine. St. Charles-indeed, the world-may tremble.