Intense and profoundly unsettling, Brian Evenson’s Last Days is a down-the-rabbit-hole detective novel set in an underground religious cult. The story follows Kline, a brutally dismembered detective forcibly recruited to solve a murder inside the cult. As Kline becomes more deeply involved with the group, he begins to realize the stakes are higher than he previously thought. Attempting to find his way through a maze of lies, threats, and misinformation, Kline discovers that his survival depends on an act of sheer will. Last Days was first published in 2003 as a limited edition novella titled The Brotherhood of Mutilation. Its success led Evenson to expand the story into a full-length novel. In doing so, he has created a work that’s disturbing, deeply satisfying, and completely original.

Last Days

Literature & Fiction

EVENSON, BRIAN

United States

Underland Press

In Finch, mysterious underground inhabitants known as the gray caps have reconquered the failed fantasy state Ambergris and put it under martial law. They have disbanded House Hoegbotton and are controlling the human inhabitants with strange addictive drugs, internment in camps, and random acts of terror. The rebel resistance is scattered, and the gray caps are using human labor to build two strange towers. Against this backdrop, John Finch, who lives alone with a cat and a lizard, must solve an impossible double murder for his gray cap masters while trying to make contact with the rebels. Nothing is as it seems as Finch and his disintegrating partner Wyte negotiate their way through a landscape of spies, rebels, and deception. Trapped by his job and the city, Finch is about to come face to face with a series of mysteries that will change him and Ambergris forever.

Finch

VanderMeer, Jeff

You have two days to pass your audition. You better pass it, feller. You’re joining the circus. Ain’t that the best news you ever got?” Delivered by a trio of psychotic clowns, this ultimatum plunges Jamie into the horrific alternate universe that is the centuries-old Pilo Family Circus, a borderline world between Hell and Earth from which humankind’s greatest tragedies have been perpetrated. Yet in this placepeopled by the gruesome, grotesque, and monstrouswhere violence and savagery are the norm, Jamie finds that his worst enemy is himself. When he applies the white face paint, he is transformed into JJ, the most vicious clown of all. And JJ wants Jamie dead! Echoes of Lovecraft, Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, and early Stephen King resound through the pages of this magical, gleefully macabre work nominated as Best Novel by the International Horror Guild.

The Pilo Family Circus

Elliott, Will

Genre Fiction

Friday night at the Orbit Drive-in: a circus of noise, sex, teenage hormones, B-movie blood, and popcorn. On a cool, crisp summer night, with the Texas stars shining down like rattlesnake eyes, movie-goers for the All-Night Horror Show are trapped in the drive-in by a demonic-looking comet. Then the fun begins. If the movie-goers try to leave, their bodies dissolve into goo. Cowboys are reduced to tears. Lovers quarrel. Bikini-clad women let their stomachs’ sag, having lost the ambition to hold them in. The world outside the six monstrous screens fades to black while the movie-goers spiral into base humanity, resorting to fighting, murdering, crucifying, and cannibalizing to survive. Part dark comedy part horror show, Lansdale's cult Drive-In books are as shocking and entertaining today as they were 20 years ago.

The Complete Drive-In

LANSDALE, Joe R.

Kallix, a morose, laudanum-addicted, unschooled, slightly anorexic werewolf is still on the run. The youngest daughter of the Thane of the MacRinnalch Clan of werewolves, held responsible unfairly for the death of the Thane, and justifiably responsible for the deaths of a great many other werewolves, remains prohibited from returning to Scotland in order to maintain the uneasy peace that temporarily prevails in court, despite the endemic debauchery and degeneracy always threatening to again spiral out of control. Frankly, things aren’t much better for her in London than in Scotland. The love of her life is in hiding and her enemies increase in number by the day. Strong as she is when enraged, it’s becoming ever more dangerous to be her. Daniel and Moonglow, her two human friends, do what they can to keep her hidden in plain sight (who would look for a werewolf in a remedial program for high school dropouts?) and keep her fed. Millar is a true world-creator, populating Curse of the Wolf Girl with a universe of characters: fashion-designing werewolves, cross-dressing werewolves, and neurotic, psychotic, and erotic werewolves, as well as fairies, Fire Elementals, and good ole humans whipping them in faster and faster revolutions with his thrilling, vertiginous rollercoaster narrative.

Curse of the Wolf Girl

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Millar, Martin

Fantasy

A city in a bottle. Kings. Genies. Jane Austen and Frankenstein. Grandmothers at sea . . . The acclaimed Best American Fantasy series continues with 20 stories chosen by best-selling writer Kevin Brockmeier. With stories by established writers, such as Peter S. Beagle, Laura Kasischke, Jeffrey Ford, and Lisa Goldstein, alongside tales by brilliant newcomers like Kellie Wells, Thomas Glave, Ryan Boudinot, and Rebecca Makkai, Real Unreal delivers a richly diverse experience of contemporary fiction. Guest editor Brockmeier knows fantasy inside and out: he is the recipient of three O. Henry Awards, the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, and an Italo Calvino Short Fiction Award. His stories have been published widely, including The New Yorker, The Georgia Review, McSweeney's, and The Oxford American, and have been reprinted in Best American Short Stories, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and the first volume of The Best American Fantasy.

Real Unreal: Best American Fantasy 3

It’s 1999 and the world is falling apart at the seams. The sky is afire, the oceans are rising—and mankind is to blame. While the spoils of the 20th Century dwindle, Jack Finnegan lives on the fringes in his decaying mansion, struggling to keep his life afloat and his loved ones safe while battling that most modern of diseases—AIDS. As the New Millennium approaches, Jack’s former lover, a famous photographer reveling in the world's decay, gifts him with a mysterious elixir called Fusax, a medicine rumored to cure the incurable AIDS. But soon, the "side effects" of Fusax become more apparent, and Jack gets mixed up with a bizarre entourage of rock stars, Japanese scientists, corporate executives, AIDS victims, and religious terrorists. While these larger players compete to control mankind's fate in the 21st Century, Jack is forced to choose his own role in the World's End, and how to live with it. Originally published in 1997, Glimmering is a visionary mix of fantasy and science fiction about a world in which humanity struggles to cope with the ever-approaching "End of the End."

Glimmering

Hand, Elizabeth

In this collection of darkly funny, disquieting stories, John Shirley brings his substantial talent to bear on human morality through the absurd, violent blunderings of his characters. In Extremis features more than twenty of Shirley’s most intense stories, including two never-before-published pieces that are sure to roil even the most hardened readers.

In Extremis: The Most Extreme Short Stories of John Shirley

Shirley, John

Meet Luff Imbry, an insidiously clever confidence man . . . He likes good wine, good food, and good stolen goods, and he always maintains the upper hand. When a business rival gets the drop on him, he finds himself abandoned on Fuldaa far-off, isolated world with a history of its own. Unable to blend in and furious for revenge, Imbry has to rely on his infamous criminal wit to survive Fulda’s crusade to extinguish The Other. Hailed as the heir apparent to Jack Vance, Matthew Hughes brings us this speculative, richly imagined exploration of society on the far edges of extreme. A central character in Black Brillion, Luff Imbry is at last front and center in Hughes’s latest rollercoaster adventure through a far-future universe.

The Other

Hughes, Matthew

Unemployment has ravaged the U.S. economy. People struggle everywhere, exhausted by the collapse that destroyed their lives. Benjamin Cade is an expert in cognition, and before the flatlined economy caught up to him, he earned his living as a university instructor. Now, without income, he joins the millions defaulting on their loans in his case, the money he borrowed to finance his degrees. Using advances in cognitive science and chemical therapy, Ben’s debtors can reclaim their property his education. The government calls the process Repossession Therapy,” and this data is invaluable to those improving the indexing” technology a remarkable medical advance that has enabled the effective cure of all mental disorders. But Ben has no intention of losing his mind without a fight, so he begins teaching in the park, distributing his knowledge before it’s gone in a race against ignorance. And somewhere in Ben’s confusing takedown, Chimpanzee arrives. Its iconography appears spray-painted around town. Young people in rubber chimpanzee masks start massive protests. As Ben slowly loses himself, the Chimpanzee movement seems to grow. And all fingers point to Ben.

Chimpanzee: A Novel

Bradley, Darin

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