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 Jeffrey Ford

The Finest Ass in the Universe collects 26 fantastic and unique visions, 5 stories original to the collection, and an introduction by Jeffrey Ford.

Interzone said of her first collection, “Monterra’s Deliciosa is a delicious collection of often startling and outrageous tales.”

Elation, compulsion, exploration, love and exquisitely timed bullying, a lascivious oyster, a man called Eggplant, the dangers of smelling like honey pudding, the enticement of innocent toadlets, the unending day of deadness. The daughter of a part-time magician and a Las Vegas showgirl turns to science. Destiny points a young man to brassiere design. Suddenly orphaned siblings try to protect their most vulnerable. Fortunes craze in neighbourhoods living cheek-by-jowl. Unintendeds abound, as life cavorts in all its unclassifiable contrariness.

Introduction by Kaaron Warren

Angel Dust is the first story collection by Australian rising star Ian McHugh. McHugh is a Writers of the Future winner, and has a number of significant overseas short fiction sales.

Angel Dust collects 15 incredible fantastic visions. A number of these were first published in Asimov’s and Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

Four stories are original to this collection.

Asimov’s editor Sheila Williams says of this writer, “Ian McHugh has a remarkable ability to render the alien utterly convincing. His nonhuman lives are so powerfully depicted that we can easily, and sometimes uneasily, immerse ourselves completely into their worlds.”

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)

A thrilling steampunk adventure.

The Emerald Key is set in London in 1864 and blends alternate history with elements of horror, mystery and urban fantasy. The game is afoot and Ember Quatermain, the brilliant and courageous daughter of legendary explorer Allan Quatermain, must draw upon all of her abilities in order to save the day. Along the way she encounters dirigibles, the lost tomb of Alexander the Great, and the charming and irresponsible Peter Styles.

Stewart Sternberg’s first novel, The Ravening, was released in 2011 through Elder Signs Press. His work has also found publication in a variety of anthologies (Chaosium Press, Mythos Books) and other venues including White Cat Magazine, and Susurrus.

Christine Daigle (formerly Purcell) is a writer, editor, steampunk enthusiast, and Scrabble demon. Her works have appeared in White Cat Magazine, the Fem-Fangs Anthology (Pill Hill Press), House of Horror, Orbis Quarterly International Literary Journal, Metro Baby, ESC! Magazine, The Copperfield Review, The Loch Raven Review, Third Reader, and other venues.

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 Sean Williams

Cover illustration by Cat Sparks

WINNER OF THE DITMAR AWARD

Cat Sparks first rose to prominence as the founder of the acclaimed Agog! Press, publishing ten titles from 2002 to 2008. As a writer, Sparks is a graduate of the inaugural Clarion South workshop, a Writers of the Future winner, a multiple Ditmar and Aurealis Award winner, and the author of close to 60 published stories.

The 13 stories include the award-winning titles “All the Love in the World”, “Seventeen”, “Hollywood Roadkill”, and the acclaimed “Arctica”.