joss whedon

November 10, 2014

Peer into DARKNESS with Pat Cadigan’s “The Power and the Passion”

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized Ann Monn, anthology, clive barker, dan simmons, darkness, Ellen Datlow, excerpt, George R. R. Martin, horror, humbe bundle, joe hill, joss whedon, max brooks, neil gaiman, Pat Cadigan, robert r mccammon, short story, stephen king, The Power and the Passion

With award-winning, superstar editor Ellen Datlow’s “superb sampling of some of the most significant short horror works published between 1985 and 2005” Darkness being featured as part of the Humble Horror Book Bundle, we’re sharing excerpts from nine select stories over the next seven days.

Our next glimpse comes from “The Power and the Passion” by Pat Cadigan.

The voice on the phone says, “We need to talk to you, Mr. Soames,” so I know to pick the place up. Company coming. I don’t like for company to come into no pigsty, but one of the reasons the place is such a mess all the time is, it’s so small, I got nowhere to keep shit except around, you know. But I shove both the dirty laundry and the dirty dishes in the oven — my mattress is right on the floor so I can’t shove stuff under the bed, and what won’t fit in the oven I put in the tub and just before I pull the curtain, I think, well, shit, I shoulda just put it all in the tub and filled it and got it all washed at once. Or, well, just the dishes, because I can take the clothes over to the laundromat easier than washing them in the tub.

So, hell, I just pull the shower curtain, stack the newspapers and the magazines — newspapers on top of the magazines, because most people don’t take too well to my taste in magazines, and they wouldn’t like a lot of the newspapers much either, but I got the Sunday paper to stick on top and hide it all, so it’s okay. Company’ll damned well know what’s under those Sunday funnies because they know me, but as long as they don’t have to have it staring them in the face, it’s like they can pretend it don’t exist.

I’m still puttering and fussing around when the knock on the door comes and I’m crossing the room (the only room unless you count the bathroom, which I do when I’m in it) when it comes to me I ain’t done dick about myself. I’m still in my undershirt and shorts, for chrissakes.

“Hold on,” I call out, “I ain’t decent, quite,” and I drag a pair of pants outa the closet. But all my shirts are either in the oven or the tub and company’ll get fanny-antsy standing in the hall — this is not the watchamacallit, the place where Lennon bought it, the Dakota, yeah. Anyway, I answer the door in my one hundred percent cotton undershirt, but at least I got my fly zipped.

Company’s a little different this time. The two guys as usual, but today they got a woman with them. Not a broad, not a bitch, not a bimbo. She’s standing between and a little behind them, looking at me the way women always look at me when I happen to cross their path — chin lifted up a little, one hand holding her coat together at the neck in a fist, eyes real cold, like, “Touch me and die horribly, I wish,” standing straight fuckin’ up, like they’re Superman, and the fear coming off them like heat waves from an open furnace.

They all come in and stand around and I wish I’d straightened the sheets out on the mattress so it wouldn’t look so messy, but then they’d see the sheets ain’t clean, so six of one, you know. And I got nothing for anyone to sit on, except that mattress, so they just keep standing around.

The one guy, Steener, says, “Are you feeling all right, Mr. Soames?” looking around like there’s puke and snot all over the floor. Steener don’t bother me. He’s a pretty man who probably was a pretty boy and a pretty baby before that, and thinks the world oughta be a pretty place. Or he wants to prove pretty guys are really tougher and better and more man than guys like me, because he’s afraid it’s vice versa, you know. Maybe even both, depending on how he got up this morning.

The other guy, Villanueva, I could almost respect him. He didn’t put on no face to look at me, and he didn’t have no power fantasies about who he was to me or vice versa. I think Villanueva probably knows me better than anyone in the world. But then, he was the one took my statement when they caught up with me. He was a cop then. If he’d still been a cop, I’d probably respect him.

So I look right at the woman and I say, “So, what’s this, you brought me a date?” I know this will get them because they know what I do to dates.

Check out the Humble Horror Book Bundle which includes works from Stephen King, George R. R. Martin, Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker, Joss Whedon, Joe Hill, Max Brooks, Robert R. McCammon, and Dan Simmons.

For more info about Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Ann Monn.

November 10, 2014

Peer into DARKNESS with Edward Bryant’s “Dancing Chickens”

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized Ann Monn, anthology, clive barker, dan simmons, Dancing Chickens, darkness, edward bryant, Ellen Datlow, excerpt, George R. R. Martin, horror, humble bundle, joe hill, joss whedon, max brooks, neil gaiman, Robert R. McMannon, short story, stephen king

Our next glimpse comes from “Dancing Chickens” by Edward Bryant.

What do aliens want?

Their burnished black ships, humming with the ominous power of a clenched fist, ghost across our cities. At first we turned our faces to the skies in the chill of every moving shadow. Now we seem to feel the disinterest bred of familiarity. It’s not a sense of ease, though. The collective apprehension is still there — even if diminished. For many of us, I believe, the feeling is much like awaiting a dentist’s drill.

Do aliens have expectations?

If human beings know, no one’s telling. Our leaders dissemble, the news media speculate, but facts and truths alike submerge in murky communications. Extraterrestrial secrets, if they do have answers, remain quietly and tastefully enigmatic. Most of us have read about the government’s beamed messages, all apparently ignored.

Do humans care?

I’m not really sure anymore. The ships have been up there for months — a year or more. People do become blasé, even about those mysterious craft and their unseen pilots. When the waiting became unendurable, most humans simply seemed to tune out the ships and thought about other things again: mortgages, spiraling inflation, Mideast turmoil, and getting laid. Yet the underlying tension remained.

Some of us in the civilian sector have retained our curiosity. Right here in the neighborhood, David told us he sat in the aloneness of the early morning hours and pumped out Morse to the silhouettes as they cruised out of the dark above the mountains and slid into the dim east. If there were replies, David couldn’t interpret them. “You’d think at least they’d want to go out for a drink,” David had said.

Riley used the mirror in his compact to send up heliograph signals. In great excitement he claimed to have detected a reply, messages in kind. We suggested he saw, if anything, reflections from the undersides of the dark hulls. None of that diminished his ecstasy. He believed he was noticed. I felt for him.

Hawk — both job description and name — didn’t hold much with guesses. “In good time,” he said, “they’ll tell us what they want; tell us, then buy it, take it, use it. They’ll give us the word.” Hawk had plucked me, runaway and desperate young man, literally out of the gutter along the Boulevard. Since before the time of the ships, he had cared for me. He had taken me home, cleaned, fed, and warmed me. He used me, sometimes well. Sometimes he only used me.

Whether Hawk loved me was debatable.

Watching the ships gave me no answer.

I attempted to communicate every day. It was a little like what my case worker told me about what dentists did to kids’ mouths before anyone had invented braces. When he was a boy with protruding teeth, my case worker was instructed to push fingers gently against those front teeth every time he thought of his mouth and how people were making fun. “Hey, Trigger! Where’s Roy?” Years of gentle, insistent touches did what braces do now.

I tried to do something like that with the alien ships. Every time I fantasized smooth, alien features when I shivered in the chilly wake of an alien shadow, I gathered my mental energies, concentrated, shot an inquiring thought after the diminishing leviathan.

Ship, come to me… I wanted it to carry me away, to take charge, to save me from any sense of responsibility about my own actions in my own life. I knew better, but that didn’t stop the temptation.

Once, only once, I thought I felt a reply, the slightest tickling just at the border of my mind. At the time it was neither pleasant nor unpleasant, more a textural thing: slick surfaces, cool, moist, one whole enclosing another. (A fist fills the glove. One hand, damp, warm: the wrist — twists.)

For more info about Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Ann Monn.

November 7, 2014

Peer into DARKNESS with George R. R. Martin’s “The Pear-Shaped Man”

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized Ann Monn, anthology, clive barker, dan simmons, darkness, Ellen Datlow, excerpt, George R. R. Martin, horror, humble bundle, joe hill, joss whedon, max brooks, neil gaiman, robert r mccammon, short stories, stephen king, the pear-shaped man

Our next glimpse comes from “The Pear-Shaped Man” by George R. R. Martin.

The Pear-shaped Man lives beneath the stairs. His shoulders are narrow and stooped, but his buttocks are impressively large. Or perhaps it is only the clothing he wears; no one has ever admitted to seeing him nude, and no one has ever admitted to wanting to. His trousers are brown polyester double knits, with wide cuffs and a shiny seat; they are always baggy, and they have big, deep, droopy pockets so stuffed with oddments and bric-a-brac that they bulge against his sides. He wears his pants very high, hiked up above the swell of his stomach, and cinches them in place around his chest with a narrow brown leather belt. He wears them so high that his drooping socks show clearly, and often an inch or two of pasty white skin as well.

His shirts are always short-sleeved, most often white or pale blue, and his breast pocket is always full of Bic pens, the cheap throwaway kind that write with blue ink. He has lost the caps or tossed them out, because his shirts are all stained and splotched around the breast pockets. His head is a second pear set atop the first; he has a double chin and wide, full, fleshy cheeks, and the top of his head seems to come almost to a point. His nose is broad and flat, with large, greasy pores; his eyes are small and pale, set close together. His hair is thin, dark, limp, flaky with dandruff; it never looks washed, and there are those who say that he cuts it himself with a bowl and a dull knife. He has a smell, too, the Pear-shaped Man; it is a sweet smell, a sour smell, a rich smell, compounded of old butter and rancid meat and vegetables rotting in the garbage bin. His voice, when he speaks, is high and thin and squeaky; it would be a funny little voice, coming from such a large, ugly man, but there is something unnerving about it, and something even more chilling about his tight, small smile. He never shows any teeth when he smiles, but his lips are broad and wet.

Of course you know him. Everyone knows a Pear-shaped Man.

Jessie met hers on her first day in the neighborhood, while she and Angela were moving into the vacant apartment on the first floor. Angela and her boyfriend, Donald the student shrink, had lugged the couch inside and accidentally knocked away the brick that had been holding open the door to the building. Meanwhile Jessie had gotten the recliner out of the U-Haul all by herself and thumped it up the steps, only to find the door locked when she backed into it, the recliner in her arms. She was hot and sore and irritable and ready to scream with frustration.

And then the Pear-shaped Man emerged from his basement apartment under the steps, climbed onto the sidewalk at the foot of the stoop, and looked up at her with those small, pale, watery eyes of his. He made no move to help her with her chair. He did not say hello or offer to let her into the building. He only blinked and smiled a tight, wet smile that showed none of his teeth and said in a voice as squeaky and grating as nails on a blackboard, “Ahhhh. There she is.” Then he turned and walked away. When he walked he swayed slightly from side to side.

Check out the Humble Horror Book Bundle which includes works from Stephen King, George R.R. Martin, Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker, Joss Whedon, Joe Hill, Max Brooks, Robert R. McCammon, and Dan Simmons.

For more info about Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Ann Monn.

November 6, 2014

Peer into DARKNESS with Poppy Z. Brite’s “Calcutta, Lord of Nerves”

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized Ann Monn, anthology, Calcutta Lord of Nerves, clive barker, dan simmons, darkness, Ellen Datlow, excerpt, George R. R. Martin, horror, humble bundle, joe hill, joss whedon, max brooks, neil gaiman, poppy z brite, robert r mccammon, short story, stephen king

Our next glimpse comes from “Calcutta, Lord of Nerves” by Poppy Z. Brite.

I was born in a North Calcutta hospital in the heart of an Indian midnight just before the beginning of the monsoon season. The air hung heavy as wet velvet over the Hooghly River, offshoot of the holy Ganga, and the stumps of banyan trees on the Upper Chitpur Road were flecked with dots of phosphorus like the ghosts of flames. I was as dark as the new moon in the sky, and I cried very little. I feel as if I remember this, because this is the way it must have been.

My mother died in labor, and later that night the hospital burned to the ground. (I have no reason to connect the two incidents; then again, I have no reason not to. Perhaps a desire to live burned on in my mother’s heart. Perhaps the flames were fanned by her hatred for me, the insignificant mewling infant that had killed her.) A nurse carried me out of the roaring husk of the building and laid me in my father’s arms. He cradled me, numb with grief.

My father was American. He had come to Calcutta five years earlier, on business. There he had fallen in love with my mother and, like a man who will not pluck a flower from its garden, he could not bear to see her removed from the hot, lush, squalid city that had spawned her. It was part of her exotica. So my father stayed in Calcutta. Now his flower was gone. He pressed his thin chapped lips to the satin of my hair. I remember opening my eyes — they felt tight and shiny, parched by the flames — and looking up at the column of smoke that roiled into the sky, a night sky blasted cloudy pink like a sky full of blood and milk.

There would be no milk for me, only chemical-tasting drops of formula from a plastic nipple. The morgue was in the basement of the hospital and did not burn. My mother lay on a metal table, a hospital gown stiff with her dying sweat pulled up over her red-smeared crotch and thighs. Her eyes stared up through the blackened skeleton of the hospital, up to the milky bloody sky, and ash filtered down to mask her pupils.

My father and I left for America before the monsoon came. Without my mother, Calcutta was a pestilential hellhole, a vast cremation grounds, or so my father thought. In America he could send me to school and movies, ball games and Boy Scouts, secure in the knowledge that someone else would take care of me or I would take care of myself. There were no thuggees to rob me and cut my throat, no goondas who would snatch me and sell my bones for fertilizer. There were no cows to infect the streets with their steaming sacred piss. My father could give me over to the comparative wholesomeness of American life, leaving himself free to sit in his darkened bedroom and drink whiskey until his long sensitive nose floated hazily in front of his face and the sabre edge of his grief began to dull. He was the sort of man who has only one love in his lifetime, and knows with the sick fervor of a fatalist that this love will be taken from him someday, and is hardly surprised when it happens.

When he was drunk he would talk about Calcutta. My little American mind rejected the place — I was in love with air conditioning, hamburgers and pizza, the free and undiscriminating love that was lavished upon me every time I twisted the TV dial — but somewhere in my Indian heart I longed for it. When I turned eighteen and my father finally failed to wake up from one of his drunken stupors, I returned to the city of my bloody birth as soon as I had the plane fare in my hand.

Calcutta, you will say. What a place to have been when the dead began to walk.

Check out the Humble Horror Book Bundle which includes works from Stephen King, George R.R. Martin, Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker, Joss Whedon, Joe Hill, Max Brooks, Robert R. McCammon, and Dan Simmons.

For more info about Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Ann Monn.

November 6, 2014

WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY FINE joins the Humble Horror Book Bundle

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized Ann Monn, anthology, clive barker, dan simmons, darkness, daryl gregory, elizabeth story, Ellen Datlow, George R. R. Martin, horror, humble bundle, joe hill, joss whedon, max brooks, neil gaiman, novella, robert r mccammon, stephen king, we are all completely fine

Daryl Gregory’s “scathingly funny, horrific yet oddly inspiring” We Are All Completely Fine joins Ellen Datlow’s Darkness in the Humble Horror Book Bundle.

Check out the Humble Horror Book Bundle which includes works from Stephen King, George R.R. Martin, Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker, Joss Whedon, Joe Hill, Max Brooks, Robert R. McCammon, and Dan Simmons.

Pay what you want. Support charity.

For information on We Are All Completely Fine, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover design by Elizabeth Story.

For more info about Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Ann Monn.

November 5, 2014

Peer into DARKNESS with Kathe Koja’s “Teratisms”

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized Ann Monn, anthology, clive barker, dan simmons, darkness, Ellen Datlow, excerpts, George R. R. Martin, horror, humble bundle, joe hill, joss whedon, kathe koja, max brooks, neil gaiman, robert r mccammon, short story, stephen king, teratisms

Our next glimpse comes from “Teratisms” by Kathe Koja.

“Beaumont.” Dreamy, Alex’s voice. Sitting in the circle of the heat, curtains drawn in the living room: laddered magenta scenes of birds and dripping trees. “Delcambre. Thibodaux.” Slow-drying dribble like rusty water on the bathroom floor. “Abbeville,” car door slam, “Chinchuba,” screen door slam. Triumphant through its echo, “Baton Rouge!”

Tense hoarse holler almost childish with rage: “Will you shut the fuck up?”

From the kitchen, woman’s voice, Randle’s voice, drawl like cooling blood: “Mitch’s home.”

“You’re damn right Mitch is home.” Flat slap of his unread newspaper against the cracked laminate of the kitchen table, the whole set from the Goodwill for thirty dollars. None of the chairs matched. Randle sat in the cane-bottomed one, leg swinging back and forth, shapely metronome, making sure the ragged gape of her tank top gave Mitch a good look. Fanning herself with four slow fingers.

“Bad day, big brother?”

Too tired to sit, propping himself jackknife against the counter. “They’re all bad, Francey.”

“Mmmm, forgetful. My name’s Randle now.”

“Doesn’t matter what your name is, you’re still a bitch.”

Soft as dust, from the living room: “De Quincy. Longville.” Tenderly, “Bewelcome.”

Mitch’s sigh. “Numbnuts in there still at it?”

“All day.”

Another sigh, he bent to prowl the squat refrigerator, let the door fall shut. Half-angry again, “There’s nothing in here to eat, Fran — Randle.”

“So what?”

“So what’d you eat?”

More than a laugh, bubbling under. “I don’t think you really want to know.” Deliberately exposing half a breast, palm lolling beneath like a sideshow, like a street-corner card trick. Presto. “Big brother.”

His third sigh, lips closed in decision. “I don’t need this,” passing close to the wall, warding the barest brush against her, her legs in the chair as deliberate, a sluttish spraddle but all of it understood: an old, unfunny family joke; like calling names; nicknames.

The door slamming, out as in, and in the settling silence of departure: “Is he gone?”

Stiff back, Randle rubbing too hard the itchy tickle of sweat. Pushing at the table to move the chair away. “You heard the car yourself, Alex. You know he’s gone.”

Pause, then plaintive, “Come sit with me.” Sweet; but there are nicknames and nicknames, jokes and jokes; a million ways to say I love you. Through the raddled arch into the living room, Randle’s back tighter still, into the smell, and Alex’s voice, bright.

“Let’s talk,” he said.

Mitch, so much later, pausing at the screenless front door, and on the porch Randle’s cigarette, drawing lines in the dark like a child with a sparkler.

“Took your time,” she said.

Defensively, “It’s not that late.”

“I know what time it is.”

He sat down, not beside her but close enough to speak softly and be heard. “You got another cigarette?”

She took the pack from somewhere, flipped it listless to his lap. “Keep ’em. They’re yours anyway.”

He lit the cigarette with gold foil matches, JUDY’S DROP-IN. An impulse, shaming, to do as he used to, light a match and hold it to her fingertips to see how long it took to blister. No wonder she hated him. “Do you hate me?”

“Not as much as I hate him.” He could feel her motion, half a head-shake. “Do you know what he did?”

“The cities.”

“Besides the cities.” He did not see her fingers, startled twitch as he felt the pack of cigarettes leave the balance of his thigh. “He was down by the grocery store, the dumpster. Playing. It took me almost an hour just to talk him home.” A black sigh. “He’s getting worse.”

“You keep saying that.”

“It keeps being true, Mitch, whether you want to think so or not. Something really bad’s going to happen if we don’t get him —”

“Get him what?” Sour. No bitter. “A doctor? A shrink? How about a one-way ticket back to Shitsburg so he —”

“Fine, that’s fine. But when the cops come knocking I’ll let you answer the door,” and her quick feet bare on the step, into the house. Tense unconscious rise of his shoulders: Don’t slam the door. Don’t wake him up.

Check out the Humble Horror Book Bundle which includes works from Stephen King, George R.R. Martin, Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker, Joss Whedon, Joe Hill, Max Brooks, Robert R. McCammon, and Dan Simmons.

For more info about Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Ann Monn.

November 5, 2014

Peer into DARKNESS with Joe Hill’s “My Father’s Mask”

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized Ann Monn, anthology, clive barker, dan simmons, darkness, Ellen Datlow, excerpt, George R. R. Martin, horror, humble bundle, joe hill, joss whedon, max brooks, my father's mask, neil gaiman, robert r mccammon, short story, stephen king

Our first glimpse comes from “My Father’s Mask” by Joe Hill.

On the drive to Big Cat Lake, we played a game. It was my mother’s idea. It was dusk by the time we reached the state highway, and when there was no light left in the sky, except for a splash of cold, pale brilliance in the west, she told me they were looking for me.

“They’re playing card people,” she said. “Queens and kings. They’re so flat they can slip themselves under doors. They’ll be coming from the other direction, from the lake. Searching for us. Trying to head us off. Get out of sight whenever someone comes the other way. We can’t protect you from them — not on the road. Quick, get down. Here comes one of them now.”

I stretched out across the backseat and watched the headlights of an approaching car race across the ceiling. Whether I was playing along, or just stretching out to get comfortable, I wasn’t sure. I was in a funk. I had been hoping for a sleepover at my friend Luke Redhill’s, ping-pong and late night TV with Luke (and Luke’s leggy older sister Jane, and her lush-haired friend Melinda), but had come home from school to find suitcases in the driveway and my father loading the car. That was the first I heard we were spending the night at my grandfather’s cabin on Big Cat Lake. I couldn’t be angry at my parents for not letting me in on their plans in advance, because they probably hadn’t made plans in advance. It was very likely they had decided to go up to Big Cat Lake over lunch. My parents didn’t have plans. They had impulses and a thirteen-year-old son and they saw no reason to ever let the latter upset the former.

“Why can’t you protect me?” I asked.

My mother said, “Because there are some things a mother’s love and a father’s courage can’t keep you safe from. Besides, who could fight them? You know about playing card people. How they all go around with little golden hatchets and little silver swords. Have you ever noticed how well-armed most good hands of poker are?”

“No accident the first card game everyone learns is War,” my father said, driving with one wrist slung across the wheel. “They’re all variations on the same plot. Metaphorical kings fighting over the world’s limited supplies of wenches and money.”

My mother regarded me seriously over the back of her seat, her eyes luminous in the dark.

“We’re in trouble, Jack,” she said. “We’re in terrible trouble.”

“Okay,” I said.

“It’s been building for a while. We kept it from you at first, because we didn’t want to scare you. But you have to know. It’s right for you to know. We’re — well, you see — we don’t have any money anymore. It’s the playing card people. They’ve been working against us, poisoning investments, tying assets up in red tape. They’ve been spreading the most awful rumors about your father at work. I don’t want to upset you with the crude details. They make menacing phone calls. They call me up in the middle of the day and talk about the awful things they’re going to do to me. To you. To all of us.”

“They put something in the clam sauce the other night, and gave me wicked runs,” my father said. “I thought I was going to die. And our dry cleaning came back with funny white stains on it. That was them too.”

My mother laughed. I’ve heard that dogs have six kinds of barks, each with a specific meaning: intruder, let’s play, I need to pee. My mother had a certain number of laughs, each with an unmistakable meaning and identity, all of them wonderful. This laugh, convulsive and unpolished, was the way she responded to dirty jokes; also to accusations, to being caught making mischief.

I laughed with her, sitting up, my stomach unknotting. She had been so wide-eyed and solemn, for a moment I had started to forget she was making it all up.

My mother leaned toward my father and ran her finger over his lips, miming the closing of a zipper.

“You let me tell it,” she said. “I forbid you to talk anymore.”

Check out the Humble Horror Book Bundle which includes works from Stephen King, George R.R. Martin, Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker, Joss Whedon, Joe Hill, Max Brooks, Robert R. McCammon, and Dan Simmons.

For more info about Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Ann Monn.

October 29, 2014

DARKNESS invades the Humble Horror Book Bundle

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized afterlife with archie, Ann Monn, anthology, buffy the vampire slayer, charity, clive barker, comic book legal defense fund, dan simmons, darkness, darkness: two decades of modern horror, Ellen Datlow, George R. R. Martin, horror, humble bundle, joe hill, joss whedon, locke & key, max brooks, neil gaiman, rape abuse and incest national network, shadowman, son of kali, stephen king, zombies

We are proud to announce the inclusion of award-winning, superstar editor Ellen Datlow’s “superb sampling of some of the most significant short horror works published between 1985 and 2005” Darkness in the the Humble Horror Book Bundle.

The chilling collection of horror books and comics includes works from Stephen King, George R.R. Martin, Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker, Joss Whedon, Joe Hill, Max Brooks, and Dan Simmons

Pay what you want. Support charity.

San Francisco, Calif. – October 29, 2014 – ‘Tis the season for terror in this chilling collection of horror books and comics. Humble Bundle has teamed with several of the leading publishers to kick off the Halloween season right with a variety of the most sought after horror books on the market. Customers can pay what they want while supporting charity and satisfying their craving for carnage all at once with the Humble Horror Book Bundle which includes works by such luminaries as Stephen King, George R.R. Martin, Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker, Joss Whedon, Joe Hill, Max Brooks and many more.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books

Customers can name their price for Shadowman Vol. 4: Fear, Blood, and Shadows, Song of Kali, The Mocking Dead Vol. 1, Houses of the Holy, The Last Zombie, Zombies: The Recent Dead, plus two FREE songs by band on the rise, A Sound of Thunder. Those who pay more than the average price will also receive Buffy Omnibus Vol. 1, Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: The Dark Watch, Pinocchio, Vampire Slayer, Swan Song and Knights of Sidonia, Humble Bundle’s first ever manga title. Customers who pay $15 or more will receive all of the above, plus Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror, the Eisner award-winning Locke & Key, Vol 1: Welcome To Lovecraft and the first two issues of the acclaimed series Afterlife with Archie.

“Humble Bundle is proud to include so many quality horror titles in one place,” said Humble Bundle’s Director of Books Kelley Allen. “From vampires to witches plus a horde of zombies, this bundle has everything a horror reader could want by some of the genre’s biggest names.”

As with all Humble Bundles, customers can choose how their purchase dollars are allocated, between the comic creators and charity. The Humble Horror Book Bundle supports the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, the nation’s largest anti-sexual assault organization as well as the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund which defends first amendment rights of comic book professionals nationwide.

The Humble Horror Book Bundle runs for two weeks and ends Wednesday, November 12, 2014 at 11 a.m. Pacific time.

About Humble Bundle

Humble Bundle organizes pay-what-you-want plus charity promotions for awesome digital content and puts the power directly in the hands of the consumers, offering them fully-featured titles at prices they set themselves. Consumers pay what they want and decide how to allocate their money between content creators, charity and a humble tip. Humble Bundle also offers the Humble Store, a digital storefront that features great games at great prices with a portion of sales going to select charities. Since the company’s launch in 2010, Humble Bundle has helped empower its community to allocate more than $47 million toward charity to date. For more information, please visit https://www.humblebundle.com

For more info about Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Ann Monn.

Tachyon Publications

joss whedon

tachyonpub