IN THAT ENDLESSNESS, OUR END

Collection of 15 horror shortstories.

Heard the one about the Airbnb that eats your dreams, or the iron-crowned king who preys on his own bloodline from the air, still smoldering centuries after being burnt alive? How about the cloudy antique bottle you can wish your excess rage inside, or that crooked alley down which something waits to replace your disappointing child with a far more pleasant facsimile? We all know the truth, especially in times like these - in an anxiety-ridden, sleepless world such as ours, it's only ever our very worst dreams that come true.

Here, streets empty out and people pull themselves apart like amoebas, breeding murderous doppelgangers from their own flesh; houses haunt, ideas possess and a cold and alien moon stares down, whispering that it's time to spawn. New myths rise and ancient evils descend. From the seemingly mundane terrors of a city just like yours to all the most dark and distant places of a truly terrible universe, nothing is as it seems... not even that dimly-recalled cinematic memory you've been chasing all these years, the one you think might be just something you stumbled upon while flipping through channels after midnight. The one that still disturbs you enough to raise a cold sweat all over your body, whenever you try to will its details clear.

Hot on the heels of her This Is Horror Award-winning short story collection Spectral Evidence, critically-acclaimed horror author Gemma Files compiles fifteen more of her most startling recent nightmares - a creepily seductive downward spiral of dark poetry and existential dread, entirely suitable to the slow apocalypse going on all around us. So take your mind off your troubles and send it somewhere the rules still operate, if only to punish those who violate them.

Formerly a film critic, journalist, screenwriter and teacher, Gemma Files has been an award-winning horror author since 1999. She has published six collections of short work, two chapbooks of speculative poetry, a Weird Western trilogy, a story-cycle and the stand-alone novel Experimental Film, which won a Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and a Sunburst award for Best Adult Novel.
Gemma's stories have appeared in multiple best-of-the-year anthologies, as well as these recent anthologies: the 2021 Stoker Winner When Things Get Dark: Stories Inspired by Shirley Jackson edited by Ellen Datlow (Titan Books, 2021); Dark Stars: New Tales of Dark Horror edited by John F. D. Taff (Tor Nightfire, 2022); and Screams From the Dark edited by Ellen Datlow (Tor Nightfire, 2022). Her story "The Emperor's Old Bones" won the International Horror Guild Award for Best Short Story and five of her stories were adapted for the second season of the television series The Hunger.