A Season of Loathsome Miracles

“A Season of Loathsome Miracles, the debut short story collection by Max D. Stanton, is a marvel from every literary angle: Stanton’s prose is confident, powerful and precise. He also has a rare gift for comedy, which can often be cruel but always feels organic and earned. These stories — every one of them — feel effortless (a sure sign of excellence). The author is a natural storyteller. His dialogue is crisp and believable. You’ll be hard pressed to find lulls or unneeded prose in this exceptional collection. Best of all, Stanton’s imagination is top-tier and his plotting is often ingenious — two authorial elements that can neither be taught nor learned. A Season of Loathsome Miracles is a stunning, important debut. Don’t miss it.” — Jon Padgett, author of The Secret of Ventriloquism and Editor-in-Chief of Vastarien: A Literary Journal

A vengeful witch twists time and space on her march to the pyre, and hundreds of years later, a woman loses everything to the addictive lure of omniscience. A Season of Loathsome Miracles has begun, a season untethered to the sun and spanning across centuries. A World War I flying ace is conscripted into war on a cosmic scale, and a musician of the distant future travels beyond known space to play the ultimate concert. A vice cop scours the streets of Manson-era Los Angeles in search of a sentient snuff film while in our own time, a yoga student learns a new practice that transforms her, body and soul. Max D. Stanton’s debut collection assembles thirteen short stories of gruesome horror, bleak ascensions, and gallows humor.

“With a diverse mix of strange tales and cosmic horror, A Season of Loathsome Miracles pays homage to the roots of weird fiction while also perverting it in interesting and clever ways. Packed with infernal devices, diabolical wax museums, occult films, the transformative properties of yoga, Lovecraftian whodunits, and burning witches, with his debut collection Stanton establishes himself as a haunting new voice calling to you from the shadows.” — Sam Richard, author of Sabbath of the Fox-Devils and To Wallow in Ash & Other Sorrows