After an asteroid crashes near their home, a set of twins discover they have strange new powers.
In a world run by aliens, father and son slaves lead a rebellion that just may save them all.
In a dark basement, a clown removes his make-up, revealing something even more horrifying.
A man wins a strange prize in a poker game and learns his life hangs on a life-or-death coin flip.
These tales, and ten more, from the twisted mind of Richard Thomas, dare you to peer into the darkest corners of human existence.
Why we’re excited about this book:
Readers of transgressive and hard-hitting horror, neo-noir, and crime fiction should be well acquainted with the work of Richard Thomas. The author of the short story collections Staring Into the Abyss, and Tribulations, his short fiction has appeared in such anthologies as Warmed and Bound: A Velvet Anthology, The Booked Anthology, Behold! Oddities, Curiosities, and Undefinable Wonders, Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories, Liminal Spaces, Lost Highways: Dark Fictions from the Road, and The Best Horror of the Year, Volume 11, among others. Thomas has served as editor as well, editing such anthologies as Burnt Tongues Anthology, The New Black: A Neo-Noir Anthology, and Exigencies: A Neo-Noir Anthology. With his latest collection, Thomas pushes back the boundaries of transgressive speculative fiction with fourteen tales that will scar your soul.
Laird Barron (Swift to Chase, Blood Standard) says: “Thomas masterfully combines noir and horror. He paints the beauty and the meanness of human life with an ease that belies how damned hard a trick it is to accomplish. Spontaneous Human Combustion is a bottle of the top shelf stuff—smooth, but it burns. Burns all the way to the bottom.”, and Livia Llewellyn (Furnace) says: “Nothing will prepare you for Richard Thomas’ stories, for the brutality, for the intense white-hot horror, for the blood-soaked gorgeous beauty of his writing. Reading his fiction is like sinking into a fever dream, filled with an alien-yet-familiar wondrousness to it all that makes you long to be back inside those seductive terrors long after they’ve ended. I was not prepared: I can’t wait to return.”
Forthcoming from Turner 22 February 2022, Spontaneous Human Combustion by Richard Thomas is available for pre-order now.
BOB PASTORELLA