Thrillers 2

Featuring: Gemma Files, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Tim Waggoner, and R. Patrick GatesThis volume marks the long-overdue return of a dark fiction series that debuted in 1993. After a fourteen year hiatus, Thrillers is revived with a star-studded second volume.Within these pages, you'll find terror, suspense, and mystery that range from quietly menacing to shockingly graphic, wildly fantastic to grimly realistic. It's all here, with one universal ingredient: a well-told story.The formula for the Thrillers series is deceptively simple: we invite four of the genre's most popular authors to each contribute 20,000 words of original, never-before-been-published fiction. We add insightful Afterwords by each author, along with striking illustrations by a brilliant artist. The end result is a wonderful showcase for the finest of today's short fiction.

From Publishers Weekly

Horror aficionados will welcome Morrish's all-original dark fiction anthology, the long-awaited sequel to Thrillers (1993). Each of the four contributors—Gemma Files, Tim Waggoner, R. Patrick Gates and Caitlín R. Kiernan—succeeds in sending intelligent chills up the reader's spine. Files's creepy "Pen Umbra," with echoes of T.E.D. Klein and William Sloane in its plot and language, is a standout, and Kiernan manages to work a few wrinkles into "Houses Under the Sea" that demonstrate how a skilled writer can use some well-worn Lovecraftian motifs to good effect. Waggoner also scores with the subtle "The Faces That We Meet," a compelling portrait of horror lurking beneath a suburban surface. Authors' notes illuminate the composition of each of the nine stories and novellas. (Dec.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

After a 13-year hiatus, Thrillers starts looking like a series with a second showcase of four dark-fantasy authors. From Gemma Files' novella "Pen Umbra" (art-history grad student tries to make money participating in a scientific study and opens doors best left closed) to Caitlin Kiernan's two tales ("The Daughter of the Four of Pentacles" lives in an attic full of strange objects created and found by her alchemist father, in which time passes only when she has a visitor), the stories range from subtly to blatantly horrifying. Tim Waggoner's "The Faces That We Meet," in particular, is a well-crafted mixture of those extremes: in a safe, sedate suburb, where everyone at least makes the motions of friendliness, Gordon Markely discovers how much he doesn't know when he realizes that his daughter and her friends are playing with something that leaves bloodstains on the lawn. Because the anthology has no strict theme, the contents cover a wide swathe of territory suitable for horror, and that makes it very satisfying, if not exactly bedtime reading. Regina SchroederCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

About the Contributors:Gemma Files is the IHG award-winning author of "The Emperor's Old Bones." Her collections of short stories, Kissing Carrion and The Worm In Every Heart, are both available from Prime Books. Five of her short stories were adapted for TV by Showtime's anthology series The Hunger (1998-1999). Previously a film critic, Files currently teaches at the Toronto Film School. Her second book of poetry, Dust Radio, is being edited.Tim Waggoner's novels include Pandora Drive, Like Death, A Nightmare on Elm Street: Protégé, Necropolis, and the Harmony Society. He's published close to eighty short stories, some of them collected in All Too Surreal. His articles on writing have appeared in Writer's Digest, Writers' Journal, and Ohio Writer.R. Patrick Gates is the author of Fear, Grimm Memorials, Tunnelvision, Jumpers, and The Prison. The second novel in the Grimm Memorials series, Grimm Reapings--the continuation of the diabolical doings of the witch, Eleanor Grimm, one of horror's most popular villains--was recently published by Pinnacle.Caitlín R. Kiernan is the author of seven novels, including the award-winning Silk and Threshold and the forthcoming Daughter Of Hounds. Her short fiction has been collected in Tales Of Pain And Wonder, From Weird And Distant Shores, and To Charles Fort, With Love, and has been selected for The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, and The Year's Best Science Fiction.Robert Morrish is the editor of Cemetery Dance magazine and former editor of The Scream Factory magazine. His fiction has appeared in more than 20 anthologies, including Horrors!, The UFO Files, Subterranean Gallery, Shivers, and Cold Flesh.

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