"I want to be like John Langan when I grow up, okay? He blends
meticulously crafted traditional narratives with joyous genre-bending
and narrative rule-breaking. His stories are fiercely smart, timely,
timeless, heartbreaking, and of course, flat-out scary. Langan
fearlessly commits to his monsters, his characters, his readers, to his
vision of the horror story and the messed-up, broken, frightening world
we inhabit. Wide, Carnivorous Sky, indeed." - Paul Tremblay, author of The Little Sleep and Swallowing a Donkey's Eye.
John Langan has, in the last few years, established himself as one of
the leading voices in contemporary horror literature. Gifted with a
supple and mellifluous prose style, an imagination that can conjure up
clutching terrors with seeming effortlessness, and a thorough knowledge
of the rich heritage of weird fiction, Langan has already garnered his
share of accolades. This new collection of nine substantial stories
includes such masterworks as "Technicolor," an ingenious riff on Poe's
"Masque of the Red Death"; "How the Day Runs Down," a gripping tale of
the undead; and "The Shallows," a powerful tale of the Cthulhu Mythos.
The capstone to the collection is a previously unpublished novella of
supernatural terror, "Mother of Stone." With an introduction by Jeffrey
Ford and an afterword by Laird Barron.
Contents:
- Introduction: Reading Langan, by
Jeffrey Ford
- Kids
- How the Day Runs Down
- Technicolor
- The Wide, Carnivorous Sky
- City of the Dog
- The Shallows
- The Revel
- June, 1987. Hitchhiking, Mr. Norris
- Mother of Stone
- Afterword: Note Found in a Glenfiddich Bottle, by Laird Barron