After the People Lights Have Gone Off

Book excerpt: From the award-winning author, “the kind of collection that lodges in your brain like a malignant grain of an evil dream” (Laird Barron, author of The Imago Sequence). Winner of the This Is Horror Award Finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award Finalist for the Bram Stoker Award This is not your cookie-cutter horror collection. Stephen Graham Jones has taken nightmarish visions from his fevered imagination and crafted them into pieces of literary genius. If the absolute fear doesn’t sweep you away, his lyrical and haunting prose will. As Joe R. Lansdale states in the introduction, “You need this book. If you like anything close to horror, and also like your stories to have elements other than just standing in the darkness with a bloody knife, you have the right book. Enjoy.” Does holding your breath for two minutes during the scariest part of a horror movie invite the terror in? Just ask the kids who go to the local theater in “Thirteen.” In “Doc’s Story,” even the most beloved family tales have teeth—that’s what happens when you’re born into a werewolf pack. And a father doesn’t have to think twice when he’s given one chance to make the ultimate sacrifice in “Snow Monsters.” In these fifteen stories, Jones coaxes our greatest fears from the shadowy corners of our minds, and we can’t turn away. “With razor-sharp prose . . . he pummels us in a full-court press of discomfort, paranoia, and a desire to keep the lights on.” —Pantheon Magazine “Jones is a true master of the horror short story. Inventive, quirky, unexpected and masterful.” —Jonathan Maberry, New York Times–bestselling author