Nightingale Songs

In the dead of night, there are footsteps in the hall . . . In the dead of night, your past mistakes will haunt you . . . In the dead of night, you hear a discordant tune . . . In the dead of night, the nightingale sings . . . Simon Strantzas, master of the subtle and the bizarre, returns with a dozen strange tales and eerie mysteries. From the shores of a remote oil-stained sound to deep within the familiar heart of suburbia, these are the songs of broken people who cannot find a way to fix themselves, who must search the dark for salvation. Like a siren, the nightingale sings them onward to face their end. But it sings for you too. A requiem in your honor. Because, for you, it is already too late. Table of Contents In the Nightingale, Waiting for the Curtain to Rise, an Introduction by John Langan Out of Touch Her Father’s Daughter The Deafening Sound of Slumber Unreasonable Doubt Tend Your Own Garden The Nightingale Pale Light in the Jungle An Indelible Stain upon the Sky Something New Mr. Kneale Everything Floats When Sorrows Come Afterword "Nightingale Songs is a dark gem. Strantzas demonstrates once again why he is so highly regarded amongst connoisseurs of the macabre and the fantastic." - Laird Barron "Simon Strantzas displays a gift for evoking disturbing atmospheres and creating odd, frightening encounters with the uncanny . . . " - Lisa Tuttle "He does not show you the gate to this new Golden Age of weird fiction that is upon us, but leads you through it." - Joseph S. Pulver "Strantzas deftly establishes ordinary and seemingly innocuous situations that spin out of the characters' control and always end with an uneasy sense of menace, even when their resolution is ambiguous or cryptic." - Publishers Weekly "Like the subtly disquieting locations in which they take place—a suburban house obscured by weeds and dark butterflies, the basement of a former home grown suddenly unfamiliar, a sleep clinic where the patients never meet—Simon Strantzas’ elegant stories worry at the reader’s sense of certainty. The songs they sing won’t comfort you. But you will remember them." - Glen Hirshberg

About the Author

Simon Strantzas is the author of the critically-acclaimed Cold to the Touch (Tartarus Press, 2009), a collection of thirteen tales of the strange and supernatural. His first collection, Beneath the Surface (reprinted by Dark Regions Press, 2010), has been called one of the most important debut short story collections in the genre. Strantzas's stories have appeared in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Cemetery Dance, and Postscripts. In 2009, his work was nominated for the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction. He lives in Toronto, Canada, with his wife and an unyielding hunger for the flesh of the living.

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