Black Gate

T.E. Grau’s short horror fiction has appeared in The Children of Old Leech, The Dark Rites of Cthulhu, Dark Fusions – Where Monsters Lurk!, World War Cthulhu, and other fine anthologies and magazines. His other books include Triptych: Three Cosmic Tales, The Lost Aklo Stories, and The Nameless Dark, which was nominated for a 2015 Shirley Jackson Award for Single-Author Collection. His novella I Am The River will be published later this year by Lethe Press.

I’ve been wanting to sample his fiction for a while, and his brand new novella They Don’t Come Home Anymore seems like the way to do it. On his blog, Grau describes it this way.

They Don’t Come Home Anymore [is] a story that might, at first blush, seem like a slight departure from my previous work, as it centers on a teenage girl, and is very much a tale of obsession, loneliness, and a search for meaning, acceptance, and love in a world (and sub world) that waits, cruel and threatening, just behind the facade. It’s also about vampires, but not the garden variety sort you’d expect in a mass market/network television teenage vamp story, but something that cleaves closer to the natural world, and how our planet once was, and might still be in certain darkened corners. I can’t really say more, other than to invite you to pick up the book when it’s available, and tell me what you think it’s about, underneath, beyond that first impression.

They Don’t Come Home Anymore was published by This Is Horror on November 28, 2016. It is 104 pages, priced at $10.99 in paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Candice Tripp.

Michael Shea was one of the most distinguished and loved figures in the field of speculative fiction. He twice won The World Fantasy Award, and his work also received nominations for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, August Derleth and International Horror Guild awards. Ranging from wildly baroque dark fantasy to cosmic horror and grimly humorous parodies of contemporary “reality” culture, his writing conveys the sense of wonder and awe that imaginative readers crave and appreciate, and one can develop an insatiable appetite for his work.

But since Shea’s unexpected passing in 2014, many of us have been unable to slake that. That is, until the recent release of And Death Shall Have No Dominion: A Tribute to Michael Shea, which among many other things, contains three previously unpublished works of his fiction.

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Here’s a fun little science fiction mystery thriller about a scientist who returns after a very public alien abduction… or does he? What does it mean when the man at the center of an unexplained celestial event denies it ever happened?

The Return is a the first novel from Joseph Helmreich, a script reader for the Weinstein Company and an alternative folk singer. It arrives in hardcover from Thomas Dunne next week.

During a live television broadcast on the night of a lunar eclipse, renowned astrophysicist Andrew Leland is suddenly lifted into the sky by a giant spacecraft and taken away for all to see. Six years later, he turns up, wandering in a South American desert, denying ever having been abducted and disappearing from the public eye.

Meanwhile, he inspires legions of cultish devotees, including a young physics graduate student named Shawn Ferris who is obsessed with finding out what really happened to him. When Shawn finally tracks Leland down, he discovers that he’s been on the run for years, continuously hunted by a secret organization that has pursued him across multiple continents, determined to force him into revealing what he knows.

Shawn soon joins Leland on the run. Though Leland is at first reluctant to reveal anything, Shawn will soon learn the truth about his abduction, the real reason for his return, and will find himself caught up in a global conspiracy that puts more than just one planet in danger.

Equal parts science-fiction and globe-hopping thriller, Joseph Helmreich’s The Return will appeal to fans of both, and to anyone who has ever wondered… what’s out there?

The Return will be published by Thomas Dunne Books on March 14, 2017. It is 248 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital edition. The cover was designed by David Curtis.