Lesser Demons

A collection of cross-genre horror stories includes a new novella with story notes.

From Publishers Weekly

Partridge (Slippin' into Darkness) mixes hard-boiled detective fiction and pulp action horror with a touch of spaghetti westerns in this collection of 10 unsubtle and occasionally unskilled stories (all but one reprinted). His images can slip into the absurd at the wrong moment, and his prose is often clumsy, but his tales of zombie sheriffs (Lesser Demons), murderous vultures (Carrion), a criminal who encounters his idealized doppelgänger (Second Chance), and gigantic radioactive mutants (The Big Man) have plenty of entertainment value. Considerable inventiveness, an uninhibited sense of the gruesome, and vigorous pacing make this a collection of B-movies for the printed page, and though Partridge never quite equals the wit and strangeness of Joe R. Lansdale, his work will easily appeal to Lansdale's audience. (May) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From the Inside Flap

While the sun blisters a dying world, a mutant spider battles a squad of toy soldiers and a plastic cowboy on his last ride A gangster, a sheriff, and a mysterious traveler face an army of mechanical vampires burrowing up from hell itself during a wild Montana storm In a desert poisoned by atomic radiation, an abused boy stands between a rampaging giant and the hunter who would make him a grisly trophy Beneath a full Arizona moon, a drifter faces a pack of merciless human animals and the werewolf who butchered his sister In the American West, a legendary gunslinger delivers a cursed bounty to the one-horse town where his partner's ghost awaits.Tales of hardboiled horror and Twilight Zone noir. Cross-genre blowtorches with bad guys and worse guys. Love stories both dark and bittersweet. A brand new novella and extensive story notes. You'll find this and more in the fifth collection from three-time Bram Stoker award-winner Norman Partridge, an author Locus calls one of the most dependable, exciting, and entertaining practitioners of dark suspense and dark fantasy... emphasis on the dark. In Lesser Demons, Partridge explores the kind of fiction that made him both a horror fan and a writer. Using the shotgun prose of a crime novel, the title story draws a deadly bead on H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. The Iron Dead introduces Chaney, a monster-hunting pulp hero with a mechanical hand built in hell. Carrion cuts a mean swath through Robert E. Howard territory, while The Big Man explores dark shadows of American life never imagined in the atom-age horror movies of the fifties.Part celebration, part reinvention, Lesser Demons only serves to underscore RevolutionSF's verdict: Norman Partridge is the finest writer of short horror fiction going.

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