For almost thirty years, Shirley Jackson Award-winning horror author Gemma Files has consistently served up tale after tale celebrating monstrosity in all its forms: the imperfect, the broken, the beautifully alien and the sadly familiar. Her characters make their own choices and take their own chances, slipping from darkness into deeper darkness yet never losing their humanity—not even when they're anything but. An embittered blood-servant plots revenge against the vampires who own him; a little girl's best friend seeks to draw her into an ancient, forbidden realm; two monster-hunting sisters cross paths with an amoral holler-witch again and again, battling both mortal authorities and immortal predators. From the forgotten angels who built the cosmos to the reckless geniuses whose party drug unleashes a plague, madness, monsters and murder await at every turn. And in "The Speed of Pain," sequel to the International Horror Guild award-winning story "The Emperor's Old...

IF YOU GO DOWN DEEP ENOUGH, YOU FIND ALL SORTS OF THINGS . . . . In her second collection from Trepidatio Publishing, award-winning author Gemma Files takes her readers on journeys out beyond safe borders—from the trackless depths of the sea, to the empty desert frontiers of the Weird West, even to the edges of cracks between worlds. Here, in these narrow spaces between the known and the unknown, behind the paper-thin curtains of reality, lurk monsters both human and ancient: selkies and avenging revenants, voodoo priestesses and pirate sorcerers, ghosts and vampires, and the most famous murderer of all time. But however strange the things found in these deep places, what draws them up, and calls them back, are forces the human heart knows all too well: grief and vengeance, rage and loss . . . and, most terrible of all, love. Published over the past fifteen years—some only available online until now—these fantasies of the darkest kind showcase the breadth and...

From the haunted hills of Roman Britain to the sewers of occupied Warsaw . . . in the bloodied streets of Revolutionary Paris, and the anarchy World War II Shanghai . . . out of the wilds of America, India, Africa and Europe . . . down the long savage darkness of the centuries, monsters have fed upon us. They are shapeshifters, vampires, sorcerers and spirits—things named only in myth, and things for which we have no name. They are our demons, our reflections, our desires and our nightmares. And all too often, they are . . . only human.In this second collection from Gemma Files—featuring the award-winning "The Emperor's Old Bones" (winner of the 1999 International Horror Guild Award for Best Short Fiction), and five never-before-published stories—we tour the overlooked intersections between wilderness and civilization where secret dances of fear and pain are performed and hunters and hunted change roles.

In this first published collection of short stories from one of Canada's most talented rising stars of horror, Gemma Files takes us into a world of black magic and bleak desire. A world where obsession is stronger than death. Where body, soul, time and space itself, are all fluid and treacherous. Where living houses dream longingly of oblivion, and vampires ache for more than simply blood. A world where the only escape from the darkness within is to embrace it. . . . A world not so very different from our own.

Two years after the Civil War, Pinkerton agent Ed Morrow has gone undercover with one of the weird West's most dangerous outlaw gangs-the troop led by "Reverend" Asher Rook, ex-Confederate chaplain turned "hexslinger," and his notorious lieutenant (and lover) Chess Pargeter. Morrow's task: get close enough to map the extent of Rook's power, then bring that knowledge back to help Professor Joachim Asbury unlock the secrets of magic itself. Magicians, cursed by their gift to a solitary and painful existence, have never been more than a footnote in history. But Rook, driven by desperation, has a plan to shatter the natural law that prevents hexes from cooperation, and change the face of the world-a plan sealed by an unholy marriage-oath with the goddess Ixchel, mother of all hanged men. To accomplish this, he must raise her bloodthirsty pantheon from its collective grave through sacrifice, destruction, and apotheosis. Caught between a passel of dead gods and monsters, hexes galore, Rook's witchery, and the ruthless calculations of his own masters, Morrow's only real hope of survival lies with the man without whom Rook cannot succeed: Chess Pargeter himself. But Morrow and Chess will have to literally ride through Hell before the truth of Chess's fate comes clear-the doom written for him, and the entire world.

Fired at almost the same time as her son Clark's Autism Spectrum Disorder diagnosis, former film critic turned teacher Lois Cairns is caught in a depressive downward spiral, convinced she's a failure who's spent half her adult life writing about other people's dreams without ever seeing any of her own come true. One night Lois attends a program of experimental film and emerges convinced she's seen something no one else has—a sampled piece of silver nitrate silent film footage whose existence might prove that an eccentric early 20th-century socialite who disappeared under mysterious circumstances was also one of Canada's first female movie-makers. Though it raises her spirits and revitalizes her creatively, Lois's headlong quest to discover the truth about Mrs. A. Macalla Whitcomb almost immediately begins to send her much further than she ever wanted to go, revealing increasingly troubling links between her subject's life and her own. Slowly but surely, the malign...

Issue #159 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies online magazine, featuring stories by Gemma Files and Hannah Strom-Martin.

You must let blood to get blood. New Mexico, 1867. As consort to resurrected Mayan goddess Ixchel, hexslinger "Reverend" Asher Rook has founded "Hex City," the first place in all of human history where magicians can live and work together safely. But this tenuous peace is is threatened by the approach of Rook's former lover, Chess Pargeter, bent on revenge over Rook's betrayal, as he kills his way toward the very same spot, dragging Pinkerton agent-turned-outlaw Ed Morrow along with him. Because Chess, sacrificed in Ixchel's name, has become far more than just a hex: his very presence has torn a crack in the world, remaking everything around him. And as the cycle of Chess's power approaches its climax, Chess, Morrow, and a young spiritualist named Yancey Colder—caught up in Chess's vendetta—will all have to shed yet more blood as they face down his mysterious patron demon, known only as the Enemy . . . along with every other enemy Chess has already made along the way.

Months have passed since hexslinger Chess Pargeter sacrificed himself to restore the town of Bewelcome, once cursed to salt by his former lover, “Reverend” Asher Rook. Now a coalition led by Allan Pinkerton’s Detective Agency lays siege to the Mayan goddess Ixchel’s notorious Hex City, and the desert just outside Bewelcome has become the front line in a new Civil War where wild magic and black science clash. Pinkerton-turned-outlaw Ed Morrow finds himself caught between factions: the spiritualist Yancey Kloves and her allies struggle to stop an ever-widening crack from breaching the wall between worlds while Ixchel attempts to resurrect the rest of her dead pantheon, kicking off an Apocalypse fed by shed human blood. But in Hex City, the “Reverend” Rook plots a final, redemptive treachery of his own. These world-wrenching schemes all hinge on Pargeter’s participation, even though the man himself is trapped in a nightmarish underworld. But Chess has fought his way out of hell before.... This is the third and final installment in the Hexslinger Trilogy.

Issue #125 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies online magazine, featuring stories by Gemma Files and Sylvia Linsteadt.