Here’s a small selection of the horror and genre news that caught our eye during the last week …
OSS operative Robert Danforth parachutes behind Axis lines to investigate a lead obtained through the horrors he experienced in the Arabian desert. What he finds is the Ordinul Negru—an unholy alliance between SS occultists and the surviving fanatics of an exiled Romanian order.
In a remote Carpathian valley, children begin disappearing from the villages. Every clue leads to Castelul Umbrelor, an ancient fortress that appears abandoned by day. But at midnight, screams rise from beneath its walls.
At the center of it all is Elena, a young artist imprisoned within her ancestral manor. She has no memory of painting the nightmares filling her canvases. Yet, each morning, another part is completed. Each month, the SS carries a finished painting to the castle.
As Beltane approaches, SS kill teams close in, the resistance begins to fracture, and the terror Danforth carried out of the desert starts whispering to him from the shadows. The last painting is almost complete. The gate is already beginning to open. An interrupted blood rite from World War I is reaching its climax—and what crosses through will recognize neither nations nor armies as its master. The Nazis came seeking a weapon. What answers them is hungry. Available today in eBook, with other editions to follow, you can pick up your copy here.
When invitations are sent out for the grand opening of the world’s first and only fully-automated AI restaurant, Trusk’s, it quickly becomes the hottest meal in town. Albert Trusk, the grandfather of modern AI and robotics, has been working towards this for almost a decade, much to his wife’s chagrin and his environmentally-conscious son’s disdain.
CHEF (Cognitive Heuristic Execution Framework, because everything sounds better as an acronym) is the supercomputer at the helm, and when a cyber attack on opening night threatens to derail everything, it’s up to the locked-in diners to fight back against the hordes of inexplicably bloodthirsty robots.
Take one sweary TV Chef, add one snooty vintner, a pinch of a pretentious food critic, a single greedy Mukbanger, thinly chopped, one exotic spice girl, and a dash of petty thief who appears to have stolen the wrong identity this time, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for disaster!
These robots were programmed to serve. They were reprogrammed to slaughter. And tonight, the customer is always dead. Available for pre-order now in eBook, with other editions to come, you can guarantee yours here.
Crowned a “dark princess of Generation X” by The New York Times, Poppy Z. Brite has been penning horror, satire, and literary cross-genre work for over forty years. Publishers Weekly writes of Brite as having “a knack for depicting convincing, if monstrous, characters” and Locus calls his work “fearlessly offbeat.” A gay transgender man, Brite displays cutting discernment of the human condition and translates that into opulent tales of gore, passion, queerness, and social criticism, leaving an indelible impression across the marginalized and mainstream alike.
Dark Moon Books and editor Eric J. Guignard bring you this introduction to his work, the eighth in a series of primers exploring modern masters of literary dark short fiction. Herein is a chance to discover-or learn more of-the decadent voice of Poppy Z. Brite, as beautifully illustrated by artist Michelle Prebich.
Included within these pages are: Six short stories, one written exclusively for this book, Author interiew, Biography and bibliography, Academic commentary by Michael Arnzen, PhD (former humanities chair and professor of the year, Seton Hill University) and more! Available for pre-order now in eBook, paperback and hardcover editions, you can guarantee your copy here.
For more articles like this, please follow @thisishorror on Twitter and Bluesky.
KEV HARRISON