With a twang in its heart and a song for luck on its tongue, Songs for Dark Seasons takes readers back to the lonesome dream counties introduced in the World Fantasy Award-nominated collection, Bluegrass Symphony.

Trailer parks and graves are only temporary homes for souls in these tales, where gods dwell in churches and parking lot groves. Friday night football stars mingle with sirens; hunters’ wives help their kids not to shoot, but to fly; Chanticleers spar their way into local government; and rash-afflicted men take dryads for lovers. In backwater towns, some witches have the know-how to pin pageant queens pretty, while others relieve girls of highfalutin aspirations. Local crow-boys and bloodthirsty Ursines are the best miners around.

In these thirteen stories, forests are imbued with the deepest, saddest strains of country music, cornfield horizons stretch as long as a lone fiddle’s wail, and distant hills make mandolin promises: sweet and catchy and short-lived.

With an introduction by World Fantasy Award-winning writer Helen Marshall.

Cover by Vince Haig.

16 journeys on the dark streets of urban fantasy.

Bloodlines, the new non-traditional dark urban fantasy anthology edited by the award-winning Amanda Pillar. These 16 incredible original stories are:

• Joanne Anderton “Unnamed Children”
• Alan Baxter “Old Promise New Blood”
• Nathan Burrage “The Ties of Blood, Hair and Bone”
• Dirk Flinthart “In The Blood”
• Rebecca Fung “In the Heart of the City”
• Stephanie Gunn “The Flowers That Bloom Where Blood Touches Earth”
• Kelly Hoolihan “The Stone and the Sheath”
• Kathleen Jennings “The Tangled Streets”
• Pete Kempshall “Azimuth”
• Martin Livings “A Red Mist”
• Seanan McGuire “Into the Green”
• Anthony Panegyres “Lady Killer”
• Jane Percival “The Mysterious Mr Montague”
• Paul Starkey “The Tenderness of Monsters”
• Lyn Thorne-Adder “Lifeblood of the City”
• S. Zanne “Seeing Red”

Introduction by Seanan McGuire

The anthology is loaded with stories of dark urban fantasy imbued with mythology; seventeen fantastic tales of monsters, gods, magic and so much more.

• Joanne Anderton, “Sanaa’s Army”
• Alan Baxter, “Cephalopoda Obsessia”
• Jenny Blackford, “A Moveable Feast”
• Vivian Caethe, “Skin”
• MD Curelas, “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”
• Thoraiya Dyer, “Surviving Film”
• Dirk Flinthart, “The Bull in Winter”
• Stephanie Gunn, “The Skin of the World”
• Richard Harland, “A Mother’s Love”
• Pete Kempshall, “Dead Inside”
• Penny Love, “A Small Bad Thing”
• Karen Maric, “Embracing the Invisible”
• Christine Morgan, “Ferreau’s Curse”
• Nicole Murphy, “Euryale”
• Kat Otis, “And the Dead Shall be Raised Incorruptible”
• Dan Rabarts, “The Bone Plate”
• Erin Underwood, “The Foam Born”

Introduction by John Harwood

WINNER OF THE AUREALIS AWARD

Over 132,000 words of the best fiction by best-selling writer Sean Williams.

• A Map of the Mines of Barnath
• Ghosts of the Fall
• The Soap Bubble
• The Magic Dirt Experiment
• Night of the Dolls (with Shane Dix)
• Atrax (with Simon Brown)
• End of the World
• The Seventh Letter
• Evermore
• The Butterfly Merchant
• Reluctant Misty & the House on Burden Street
• The Girl-Thing
• Entre les Beaux Morts en Vie (Among the Beautiful Living Dead)
• Passing the Bone
• A View Before Dying
• Team Sharon
• White Christmas
• Masque of Agamemnon (with Simon Brown)

Introduction by Pamela Sargent

Cover illustration by Nick Stathopoulos

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2014 WORLD FANTASY AWARD

Death at the Blue Elephant is the first story collection by the respected and multiple award winning Australian writer and editor Janeen Webb. She is a recipient of the World Fantasy Award, the Peter MacNamara SF Achievement Award, the Australian Aurealis Award, and is a three-time winner of the Ditmar Award.

In her introduction to this book, Pamela Sargent describes these stories as evoking a “combination of suspenseful anticipation, nervous apprehension, and total absorption in something far removed from my own experience”. Death at the Blue Elephant collects 18 incredible globe-spanning visions by the self-confessed “inveterate traveller”. Five stories are original to this collection.

There’s magic here, and illusion, and strange wonders that’ll surprise and delight. — Robert Shearman

Exotic, cunning—often funny—and now and then edges to cut yourself on. — Tanith Lee

Gloriously adult, these stories will transport you—but they’ll never drop you home. — Anna Tambour

Janeen Webb’s assemblage of angels, aliens, devils and assorted revenants bring with them compassion and settings rich and exotic where even the mundanity of our everyday world is imbued with a sparkle rarely glimpsed in the hands of lesser writers. — Peter Crowther

Introduction by Robert Hood

Cover illustration by Jason Paulos

The debut collection of Jason Fischer’s award-winning short fiction. This collection features his post-apocalyptic and zombie related work.

Within these covers, you will find murderous dropbears, zombie kangaroos and undead camels. Poignant endings to the world mash-up with muscle car battles, featuring feral killers that make Mad Max look like the Disney channel. Everything is a Graveyard delves into the fantastic, the horrifying, the sad and the just plain weird.

Introduction by Kate Forsyth

Internal illustrations by James Blake

Five novellas (two original to the collection) by the multiple award-winning writer. All of the works are in some way based on or inspired by medieval literature and history.

Includes

• “The Death of Pamela”
• “Crown of Rowan”
• “Wild Dreams of Blood” (first print publication)
• “The Year of Ancient Ghosts” (original)
• “The Lark and the River” (original)

Introduction by Trent Jamieson

The debut collection by award-winning Australian dark fantasist Felicity Dowker.

“She is one of those rare and talented writers of horror who can creep you out while still making you admire the graceful construction of her prose.” – World Fantasy Award winner Angela Slatter

“Felicity Dowker is one of the all-too-rare writers who really understands both horror and its appeal. She can show the terrifying aspect of things as outre as enchanted dragons or the zombie apocalypse, or as commonplace as dysfunctional families and the Santa Claus army. To borrow her own words, ‘It hurts, and it’s horrible, and it’s beautiful . . . and we might as well enjoy it’.” – Award-winning Stephen Dedman

The collection includes the stories:

• Bread And Circuses
• Jesse’s Gift
• From Little Things . . .
• Us, After The House Came Back
• The Bearded Ones
• Berries And Incense
• To Wish On A Clockwork Heart
• Phantasy Moste Grotesk
• The Blind Man
• Red Delicious
• After The Jump
• Rota Fortunae
• Nepenthe
• The Female Of The Species Is More Deadly Than The Male
• The Emancipated Dance

Introduction by Ann Vandereer

Winner of the Aurealis Award

Publishers Weekly review:

“Australian author Hannett’s first collection shows off her fondness for lush imagery, unsettling concepts, indirect prose, and multilayered plots. “Carousel” features a girl trapped in a shed by her oppressive father; her attempts to escape elicit the sympathy of unusual rescuers. “Depot to Depot” spins the tale of a trucker who takes unexpected passengers on a strange detour. “Down the Hollow” looks at the sacrifices people must make to appease the Earth and the ways such a negotiation can go wrong. The 12 stories, all but one original to this volume, push boundaries and experiment with style, form, and meaning, rarely straightforward and often hovering between fantasy and horror. By no means an easy read, this is a collection for fans of weirdness, wonder, and oft-disturbing twists.”

Collects 33 stories of horror and dark fantasy that acknowledge the undead as ineradicable members of Australian society. The best selections twine the vampire incursion with Australian history, as in Shona Husk’s “Mutiny on the Scarborough,” whose vampire narrator reveals himself to have been one of the earliest convicts transported Down Under. Angela Slatter’s “Sun Falls,” about a luckless vamp dependent upon his smart-aleck human slave, and “The Tide,” a multi-authored story that charts vampires’ rise from second-class citizen to the nation’s ruling elite, mix horror with humor.

The stories

• “The Tide”, Martin Livings and friends*
• “Mutiny on the Scarborough”, Shona Husk
• “Sun Falls”, Angela Slatter
• “Such is Life”, Jeremy Sadler
• “Apologetoi”, Chris Lawson
• “Punishment of the Sun”, Alan Baxter
• “Red Delicious”, Felicity Dowker
• “Just a Matter of Economics”, Yvonne Eve Walus
• “Quarantine”, Patty Jansen
• “Out of the Grave”, Amanda Pillar
• “Desert Blood”, Marty Young
• “Thin Air”, Simon Brown
• “Kissed by the Sun”, Jodi Cleghorn
• “Bats”, Jane Routley
• “Black Heart”, Joanna Fay
• “Renfield’s Wife”, Damon Cavalchini
• “Listening to Tracy”, Jen White
• “Breaking the Drought”, Jay Caselberg
• “Children of the Cane”, Jason Nahrung
• “The Sea at Night”, Joanne Anderton
• “Sky in the Morning”, Sonia Marcon
• “Taking it for the Team”, Tracie McBride
• “All that Glisters”, Pete Kempshall
• “The Rider”, Martin Livings
• “Vitality”, George Ivanoff
• “Coming Home”, Kathryn Hore
• “The Little Red Man”, Ray Gates
• “Deathborn Light”, Helen Stubbs
• “The Life Stealer”, Donna Maree Hanson
• “Behind the Black Mask”, Jacob Edwards
• “Interview with the Jiangshi”, Anne Mok
• “White and Red in the Black”, Lisa L Hannett
• “Lady Yang’s Lament”, Penelope Love

*Carol Ryles, Lezli Robyn, Kaaron Warren, Patty Jansen, Alan Baxter, Devin Jeythurai, Felicity Dowker, Andrew J McKiernan, Gillian Pollack, Chuck McKenzie