Brian Evenson received an O. Henry Award for his story "Two Brothers" and has twice received O. Henry honorable mentions. In 1995 he received an NEA Fellowship; that same year he was told by Brigham Young University that if he continued to write fiction in the same vein as his first book, he would be fired. Instead, Evenson chose to leave of his own free will to teach at Oklahoma State University. He now teaches in the creative writing program at Brown University.
Sacrificial Animals (2024) Kailee Pedersen "A delicately braided and unflinching tale of inherited family damage and revenge that walks a careful line between the realistic and the supernatural, crossing from one into the other before you--or the hapless characters--are fully aware. Sacrificial Animals reads like what might happen if Cormac McCarthy and Lafcadio Hearn were stuck waiting out a snowstorm in Nebraska and decided to collaborate."
Roxy and Coco (2024) Terese Svoboda "Existing at the sweet spot between Rachel Ingalls's Mrs. Caliban, Donald Barthelme's Snow White, and James Purdy's I Am Elijah Thrush, Roxy and Coco plucks a creature out of myth to bring it into our present - and does so in a way that keeps a steady eye on the flaws of our own weird moment. Rarely has fantastic fiction managed to say so much so deftly about the real while still offering a terrific, strange, and highly original read."
Midnight Self (2023) Adrian Van Young "An outstanding collection that skitters from a strange and gigantic skin thing to an oddly transforming doll, from a house that its owner can't stop building to a house that consumes whoever it wants, from the uprising of the past Civil War dead to the rejuvenation of future semi-artificial animals, without ever giving the reader safe ground to stand on. MIDNIGHT SELF is filled with well-written, provocative terrors, and it is well worth the read."
Knock Knock, Open Wide (2023) Neil Sharpson "Irish mythology melds with family damage and a decidedly contemporary love story in this deftly told novel. Circling around one of the most terrifying versions of a child's TV program in fiction, Knock, Knock, Open Wide has a remarkable ability to reveal the cracks in reality which, if we're not careful, we can be pushed through, landing in a darker-hued reality that huddles snarling beneath."
Oh God, the Sun Goes (2023) David Connor "Oh God, the Sun Goes is what might happen if Raymond Carver and Martin Heidegger were spliced together, given a double PhD in neurology and heartbreak, and decided to write a book that was at once highly symbolic and resonantly human. A highly original and engagingly odd book."
Cleaner (2023) Brandi Wells "There are people who pass unnoticed, but who nevertheless quietly shape the worlds that others occupy. Cleaner is about one such person, about someone who, secretly, without being detected, subtly tugs on the strings that remain unseen to so many others, changing lives that even after the fact often don't know who or what has changed them. Cleaner is a clever portrait that scrapes away the slick veneer of the everyday to reveal the rough grain of the wood beneath."
Everything the Darkness Eats (2023) Eric LaRocca "LaRocca looks at the passive violence and prejudice underlying small town life with an unblinking eye, revealing how it can erupt into something truly monstrous - and then he somehow grafts that together with something profoundly dark and supernatural to create a unique and deadly beast of a novel with a double row of very sharp teeth."
The Salt Grows Heavy (2023) Cassandra Khaw "A brutal and deadly romp whose language is as sharp and glittery as a scalpel made of ice. Strange and compelling, The Salt Grows Heavy is unlike anything else out there, a dark spell with needle-like teeth."
Salvage This World (2023) Michael Farris Smith "Audaciously prophetic. Here's a near-future and all too plausible southern noir in which the lawlessness already creeping into American democracy has become the norm and in which preachers have abandoned Christ and instead are searching for the new climate Messiah, and the line between good and evil is not only very thin but completely effaced. A rollicking good (dark) read."
Gothic (2023) Philip Fracassi "A dark and delirious journey into the unraveling of a mind, Gothic is the accursed 21st century bastard child of the 70s horror boom and John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness. Deadly, compelling, and pulls no punches."
A Different Darkness and Other Abominations (2022) Luigi Musolino "The pleasure of these stories lies in the writing itself, in Musolino's deft ability to find horror where we least expect. He embraces strangeness, and does so through an agile narrative style that keeps us on our toes ... Musolino has a strong and original voice, and uses it to get to some uniquely dark places. Rather than blood or gore, he's ultimately interested in what's truly terrifying: the vertiginous darkness that threatens to open up and swallow us."
Desert Creatures (2022) Kay Chronister "Existing at the sweet spot where A Canticle for Leibowitz and Blood Meridian meet, Chronister's Desert Creatures is a vivid investigation of faith, perseverance, and human violence as they exist at the end of the world. A scintillating first novel."
The Black Maybe (2022) Attila Veres "Every decade or so, a writer comes along who reconfigures the way we think about the Weird. First Thomas Ligotti, then Laird Barron, and now Attila Veres. An astonishing collection, really unlike anything out there, which suggests a new way forward."
The Devil Takes You Home (2022) Gabino Iglesias "The line between noir and horror not only gets blurred in Iglesias's The Devil Takes You Home; it gets obliterated. His barrio noir is a new kind of fiction, profoundly moving, despairing and scary all at once."
The Splendid City (2022) Karen Heuler "A sly and wild and funny book which uses witches, talking robotic heads, water shortages, the internet, a revolution, and a cat who used to be human (and who is now pretending to be a human with a skin condition) to cheerfully dissect the travails of what it is like to live in contemporary America. Satirical, and yet somehow more than just a satire, the joy of The Splendid City lies in the quirky and all-embracing exuberance of Heuler's imagination."
Shadowselves (2022) Jason Ockert "There are writers who are experts at perfecting the well-known story, and writers who strike out on their own, who innovate the form. What's remarkable about Ockert is that he is one of the few writers who manages simultaneously to do both: these are beautifully crafted and necessary stories that nevertheless take real narrative risks. They are surprising and alarming, but also deeply familiar and satisfying."
This Thing Between Us (2021) Gus Moreno "This Thing Between Us brings the very real horrors of living in the world into blazing contact with a supernatural strangeness that refuses to be subsumed into any pattern we can categorize, dissect, and exorcize. In Gus Moreno’s strong, original first novel, reality floats over a void, always threatening to seep out and engulf us."
The Sightless City (2021) (Slickdust Trilogy, book 1) Noah Lemelson "With one foot in the seemingly magical and the other in SF, The Sightless City hits that same sweet spot that Tamsyn Muir mines so successfully in Gideon the Ninth. Lemelson revives and updates the gestures of science fantasy to make it a truly 21st century form. Funny, dark, irreverent, and endlessly entertaining, The Sightless City is a rustpunk wonder and a first-rate debut."
Night of the Mannequins (2020) Stephen Graham Jones "Stephen Graham Jones's range and his understanding of horror in fiction and film is staggering. In this novella he juggles--sometimes in very sly ways--slasher stories, coming of age horror, traditions of madness and unreliability, and Kaiju to create an amazingly speedy, voice-driven read that's tons of fun. Each new book of his gives his own take on a different facet of horror, and together they all add up to something really expansive and original."
Jesus and John (2020) Adam McOmber "Beautifully written, heretical, and profoundly humane, this is a book about destabilizing one's entire sense of reality and revealing the unreal lurking within."
In the Night Wood (2018) Dale Bailey "Elegantly written, In the Night Wood paints a moody portrait of a marriage threatened by betrayal and loss over the backdrop of a strange wood, mysteriously vanishing children, the legend of a horned king, and a children’s story that might be more than just a story. Bailey builds his world with great care, slowly and carefully drawing both you and the characters in, revealing some pieces of the puzzle only gradually. By the time you realize where the story is going, he’s already hooked you: you couldn’t escape even if you wanted to."
Where the Dead Sit Talking (2018) Brandon Hobson "Where the Dead Sit Talking is a tender and unflinching look at shell-shocked young lives as they try in the eddies of foster care to keep their heads above water. Hobson writes with a humane authority but without giving his characters any alibis. What we have instead is a careful look at what it means to be physically and psychically scarred, abandoned by parents, Native American in a white world, haunted by death, and on the verge of becoming an adult. A wonderful, harrowing novel."
The Prague Sonata (2017) Bradford Morrow "The Prague Sonata is a mighty, epic novel that only Bradford Morrow could have written. Moving from New York to Prague to London and beyond, it is a major and compelling work about the persistence of a smart, determined woman with a real commitment both to music and to truth."
Sip (2017) Brian Allen Carr "Sip reads like what might happen if Cormac McCarthy dropped acid and then hallucinated a science fiction novel. Half post-apocalyptic disaster, half weird Western, Sip's a blood-slick trip that's nonetheless humane at its core."
In the River (2017) Jeremy Robert Johnson "Johnson writes with an energy that propels you through some very dark spaces indeed and into something profoundly unsettling but nonetheless human."
Mormama (2017) Kit Reed "Through a chorus of living and dead voices, all of which know something but none of which know everything Mormama offers the story of a family trauma that has come to infect a place. A terrific story that keeps youon your toes to the very end."
Annihilation (2014) (Southern Reach, book 1) Jeff VanderMeer "The great thing about 'Annihilation' is the strange, elusive, and paranoid world that it creates . . . I can't wait for the next one."
Man's Companion (2010) Joanna Ruocco "This is a marvelous sequence of linked stories deftly portraying those animals inside of us which long ago tracked down and ate our inner child. A wry book that combines the obsessive music of Lydia Davis and the stripped precision of Muriel Spark, Man's Companions is not to be missed."
