The Man on the Ceiling

Two interwoven memoirs of love, loss, and family with a haunted, frightening edge.In 2000, American Fantasy Press published an unassuming chapbook titled The Man on the Ceiling. Inside was a dark, surreal, discomfiting story of the horrors that can befall a family. It was so powerful that it won the Bram Stoker Award, International Horror Guild Award, and World Fantasy Award--the only work ever to win all three. Now, Melanie Tem and Steve Rasnic Tem have re-imagined the story, expanding on the ideas to create a compelling work that examines how people find a family, how they hold a family together despite incomprehensible tragedy, and how, in the end, they find love.Loosely autobiographical, The Man on the Ceiling has the feel of a family portrait painted by Salvador Dali, where story and reality blend to find the one thing that neither can offer alone: truth.

From Publishers Weekly

With this nightmarish series of vignettes, the Tems take the reader on a jolting, surreal journey through partially autobiographical episodes of their family life. This narrative is a complete reworking of their novella (winner of the 2000 World Fantasy, Bram Stoker and IHG awards) of the same name, expanding on the themes of family, loss and dreadful imagination. How does the tragic death of a child affect the entire family and even the house they live in? Why do they wrestle so with the demons of imagination and guilt? The authors addresss these questions in a stylized, stream-of-consciousness give and take, painting heartrending pictures of day-to-day life as parents, children and lovers. This visceral, psychological view of the horrors that occur in an average person's life will draw in readers with delicate, exquisitely detailed and almost hypnotic language. (Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

The Tems’ extraordinary autobiographical novella “The Man on the Ceiling” garnered an unprecedented number of major horror and fantasy awards. In this set of loosely connected essays and semifictional discourses, the husband-and-wife horror-writing duo supplements the novella with sober meditations on aging, loss, and the writing process. Except as illustrative digressions from a given autobiographical topic, there are few actual stories in the volume, and, indeed, the Tems repeatedly emphasize that “everything we’re telling you here is true.” Yet certain events and predicaments dance in and out of each chapter, among them the suicidal death of the couple’s eldest adopted son and the penchant for storytelling that afflicts the members of the Tems’ extended family. The titular specter is a recurring metaphor for the dark, fleetingly glimpsed shadows that linger in the background of daily life and quicken fear. The Tems’ assemblage of brooding, often surrealistic prose experiments defies easy categorization but succeeds as compelling, perhaps compulsory, reading for true horror fans. --Carl Hays

About the Author

Award-winning author, poet, and playwright Melanie Tem is the author of fourteen published novels. Her works have won, among many accolades, the Bram Stoker Award and the British Fantasy Award. Dan Simmons called her "the literary successor to Shirley Jackson," and readers and reviewers consistently rave about her deeply involved stories of the terrors that haunt families.Steve Rasnic Tem has been called "a school of writing unto himself" (Joe R. Lansdale). His surreal stories have earned him comparisons to Franz Kafka, Dino Buzzati, Ray Bradbury, and Raymond Carver. He has also won the Bram Stoker award and been nominated for British Fantasy and World Fantasy awards for his short stories, novels, and collections.Together, Melanie and Steve won the Bram Stoker award for their multi-media collection Imagination Box, and won a Stoker, International Horror Guild, and World Fantasy award for their novella The Man on the Ceiling (the only work ever to win all three). They live in Denver, Colorado with the family they have made for themselves.

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