Publisher's Synopsis
Horror has a price...are you ready to feed the dark?
Writers and readers enact an insidious ritual, giving birth to terrible new realities. Shadow House Publishing reveals the secret geography of nightmare in WE FEED THE DARK: TALES OF TERROR, LOSS & THE SUPERNATURAL, the first collection in 15 years by critically acclaimed author William P. Simmons. In 2006, after earning a reputation as a unique new voice in horror, Simmons disappeared. He returns with a stunning and heart wrenching collection of interconnected fiction, autobiography, and revelation. These atmospheric and visionary stories chart the terror, loss, and supernatural dread that both he and his characters have experienced. Simmons tells us a terrible truth: we feed the dark, nourishing it with our fears and desires. In turn, we are fed by it. This collection subverts reality and perception, asking where fiction ends, and reality begins. Originally published in such venues as Cemetery Dance & Dark Discoveries, these critically acclaimed supernatural and psychological tales include three Honorable Mentions from The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror. Featured in Rue Morgue, All Hallows, and Publisher's Weekly, Simmons' atmospheric weird fiction has been praised by bestselling authors T.M. Wright, Nancy Kilpatrick, Hugh B. Cave, Peter Bell, Graham Masterton, and many others. This metafictional assault tells the story of a haunted life...and the secret life of stories. In Harper's Mill, a rural New York village just outside the Catskills, shadows walk, nightmares live, and reality is as restless as the dead. A child flees from spectral punishers in an endless cemetery; a widow attacks her husband's spirit; a teacher is tormented by abandoned children; salesmen replace people's personalities, and a woman is reshaped by her lover's desire. In shadowlands between our sunlit world and the unknown, a husband watches his wife's nightly suicide, a corpse leads a recluse to salvation inside a wall, and death claims people unlucky enough to fit into a peculiar jacket. In a key story of both this collection and Simmons' life, a father tells his children stories to protect them from the "Night Man", a terrifying figure who only fiction can repel. "Feed the Dark", Simmons' first new tale in over a decade, is a metafictional confession that suggests the reasons behind his disappearance, his writing, and the sentient darkness that shapes our lives. In a funeral feast of supernatural horror, magic realism, and numinous suspense, Simmons invites you to savor dread. You may never look at fiction-or life-the same. Together, you will feed the dark. Table of Contents:
