Description: Welcome to Richard Gavin's "grotesquerie," where fear and the numinous converge in eerie and nightmarish tales of transcendent horror from a truly visionary writer. The highly anticipated new collection of macabre delights.
Brief description: Richard Gavin explores the realm where fear and the numinous converge. His eerie, nightmarish stories have garnered high critical praise, appear in several volumes of Best New Horror and Year's Best Horror, and have been collected in five previous books, including Sylvan Dread: Tales of Pastoral Darkness and At Fear's Altar. Along with fiction, Richard produces works of esotericism and meditations on the macabre, such as The Benighted Path: Primeval Gnosis and the Monstrous Soul and The Moribund Portal: Spectral Resonance and the Numen of the Gallows. He dwells in the North. Online presence: www. richardgavin.net
Review Quotes:
Praise for Richard Gavin's previous work:
"With the debut of Richard Gavin's first collection, it seems clear that a renaissance of the horror story has secretly been taking place in the small presses. These are stories that bear witness to a Golden Age of the past and evidence a new resolve in the present. Gavin's writing serves as a testament that great masters once crafted great stories...and as evidence that they shall do so again."
--- Thomas Ligotti
"Literate horror fans who have yet to encounter Canadian author Richard Gavin are in for a treat. The lyrical prose is often at a higher level than usual presentations of otherworldly demons and malevolent forces. Gavin has a knack for original plotlines. The author easily creates a feeling of cosmic dread."
--- Publishers Weekly
"Like Blackwood and Machen before him, Richard Gavin knows the inhuman yet seductive rapture of the deep woods; he has heard the ancient music on the hills. In his stories of 'sylvan dread, ' his protagonists explore uncanny ravines and hillside clefts, take part in sacrilegious rites, encounter maenads and goatbrides and Lovecraftian horrors. Gavin's prose is always quietly controlled, carefully crafted, but it inexorably leads his men and women into realms of terrifying otherness, where they are changed, changed utterly."
--- Michael Dirda, Pulitzer Prize-winning literary critic
"Richard Gavin's tales are genuinely evocative of the strange and alien."
--- Ramsey Campbell