Cimarron Street Books is pleased to bring you an all-new edition of CRYPT ORCHIDS — the fourth collection of short stories by award-winning author David J. Schow, a gathering of foreboding fiction that grabs the cutting edge barehanded, damns the spray of blood, and stays right in your face “until you want to go down on your knees and mumble for mercy,” according to best-selling author John Farris.
Crime. Psychos. Trashed relationships. Tainted love. Murder. Sinister plots. Evil connivance. Men in Suits with a Plan.
Bizarre cover copy.
Not to mention hustlers, losers, cutthroats, gun fetishists, homicidal hitchhikers, demented road-hogs, serial killer impersonators, government torturers, and a Ripper named Jack. And most unnerving of all . . . vaudevillians (shudder).
Welcome to CRYPT ORCHIDS, where you’ll also meet a most murderous collector, a horror movie host who deals in the real thing, an innocent victim of a TV test screening, persnickety aliens with testicle-heads, a werewolf with a hook in place of a paw, a Mikey who does, in fact, hate everything, a hit man named Mister Bart, and a temperamental geezer with a lot to say about the environment and skinning people alive.
As Robert Bloch once said . . . it takes balls to make CRYPT ORCHIDS.
Enter and be enthralled. The Management assumes no responsibility for parts of you left scattered about.
Here's what folks are saying about CRYPT ORCHIDS:
Schow is so fine a writer, so imaginative a storyteller, that he deserves a place in all contemporary fiction collections.
― Library Journal
A polished, clever, witty, unflinching writer who combines horror and dark humor as well as anyone since the late, great Robert Bloch. Schow is one of the few writers of his generation who can actually makes psychos interesting.
― Weird Tales
CRYPT ORCHIDS definitely meets the high standards established by Schow’s previous story collections, such as BLACK LEATHER REQUIRED. Versatile, charming, and fiercely independent, Schow is a master of the contemporary horror story.
― Fiona Webster - Amazon
(CRYPT ORCHIDS) shows an eager propensity to ricochet between the virtuosic and the crass, often within the same paragraph, sometimes the same sentence. It’s a fine line to tread, but Schow has rarely shown even a wobble’s worth of misstep in developing a style that’s as inimitable as it is distinctive, and pulling it off because each artistic “either/or” is the clear choice of an intellect as sharp as a leather awl.
― Brian Hodge - Hellnotes
On a purely linguistic level, Schow’s style is as carefully crafted as Lovecraft’s, Robert Aickman’s, or Thomas Ligotti’s, (wielding) a surprising variety of tone and mood . . . his tales themselves range from the brooding to the comical to the poignant.
― S.T. Joshi - Studies in Weird Fiction
Bleak and savage stuff, as good as it gets.
― Scott Winnett - Locus
Inside this MONSTER-SIZED fourth issue of bare•bones, you will find:
Matthew R. Bradley, Peter Enfantino and William Schoell explore Gorgo, Konga and Reptilicus in film, fiction and comics (including a 12-page Gorgo photo gallery)
Derek Hill on the horror films of Val Lewton
S. Craig Zahler reviews three novels by Harry Stephen Keeler
Richard Krauss examines Verdict magazine
Don D’Ammassa’s Overlooked Library
The latest installment of David J. Schow’s R&D column
Cimarron Street Books is pleased to bring you the definitive expended edition of David J. Schow's collection of novellas — LOST ANGELS — back in print after 20 years!
DEFINE LOVE
Obsessive, all-consuming, fiery, arctic?
A passion that grips others, but not you?
An infatuation that refuses to release you from its grasp? A weapon that renders you idolized, or used, or lost forever?
LUST/ANGER
The lyrics that make love a battlefield, a drug, or a fount of redemption.
LOVE’S ANGLES
The mysterious, the tragic, the enigmatic. The geometry of you plus a stranger.
LOS ANGELES
Where love is found. Earned. Stolen. Sought. Regained . . . and ultimately lost again.
LOST ANGELS
Victims of the rigors of love in the City of Night.
LOST ANGELS 2020
This all-new edition of the classic collection by World Fantasy Award winner David J. Schow features an introduction by Richard Christian Matheson, an updated afterword by the author, and for the first time in paperback, the novella “Rock Breaks Scissors Cut.”
Here's what reviwers are saying about LOST ANGELS:
“Pamela’s Get” is the most powerful work I have read by David J. Schow.
This compelling horror story about a woman dealing with the sudden
death of her best friend reaches up and wraps its fingers around your
throat and won’t let go. — Amy Thomsen / Locus
“Brass” is quite reminiscent of classic Weird Tales horror fiction and is quite well done; possibly the best single story that Night Cry has published. — Robert Coulson / The Comic Buyer’s Guide
A
quintet of stories more concerned with that old ficitve verity,
character, than glittering special effects. The collection is hung on a
truly respectable thematic pivot, and the whole is truly greater than
the sum of the parts. — Edward Bryant
Top-notch from cover to cover. — Mike Baker / Afraid
This
collection has plenty of the red stuff. It’s just that the blood comes
from broken hearts, not those that’ve been squeezed through a meat
grinder. These stories carry the same qualities of Rod Serling at his
most poignant. — David Kuehls / Fangoria
Simply
put, David J. Schow is one of the best practitioners of short fiction
working in the field today. Schow is a powerful writer, and an honest
one — the kind who isn’t afraid to be either sentimental or graphic,
sometimes in the same story. What binds his work together is his utter
belief in his craft and his ability to set it out in a style that is
both invisible and astonishingly evocative. — Charles de Lint / Mystery Scene
“Pamela’s Get” could well have been one of the best episodes of The Twilight Zone,
had it been written at the right time. It’s a sad, touching piece about
the lives we lead as a direct result of the love of our friends.
There’s also the strangely bitter “The Falling Man,” along with “Brass,”
which has meant something different to me every time I’ve read it.
That’s the mark of a living story. — babbagepress.com
Cimarron Street Books is pleased to exhume David J. Schow's collection ZOMBIE JAM in an all-new expanded edition, with even more illustrations by the best damned zombie artist around, the justly famous Bernie Wrightson!
Zombie fiction is . . . well, dead.
Want to know what it was like when it still had a heartbeat?
Voila ― ZOMBIE JAM
has finally crawled from its mouldering grave and landed right in your
eager hands. Collected here are David J. Schow’s groundbreaking (heh),
genre-bending short stories of the Zombie Apocalypse, before, during,
and after. Included is “Jerry’s Kids Meet Wormboy,” probably the single greatest zombie story of all time ― and we dug up its original, longer, unexpurgated form.
Here's what the critics have said about ZOMBIE JAM:
DarkEcho calls ZOMBIE JAM “a retrospective of Schow’s vivid zombie phase. No one else has ever done zombies exactly his way.”
Booklist called the collection “ghoulish fun!”
Publisher’s Weekly
added: “Thanks to bouncy prose and an incisive wit, Schow makes even
the outrageous and grisly morsels of Grand Guignol seem palatable.”
Sarah Meador of Rambles called it “the perfect testament to the horror of these voiceless eating machines . . . Even if you’ve read all the stories of ZOMBIE JAM in original release ― and you’re probably lying if you say you have ― you need this book.”
What happens when the movie is over, the TV is clicked off, and the “normal” world resumes?
What happens when monster movies transcend the 20th Century limitations of celluloid and sprocket holes, or when a night at the movies becomes more real than you ever suspected?
Screens can be two-way streets.
Cimarron Street Books is proud to bring you World Fantasy Award winner David J. Schow’s Monster Movies — a celebration of staying up past bedtime for Shock Theatre marathons, the gospel of horror hosts and the curriculum vitae of monster magazines, the sculpting of raw light through film stock, and the afterlife of Gothic shamblers, shrinking men, and Creatures from certain Lagoons. But what you find at the crossroads of reel and reality isn’t always rosy nostalgia . . . sometimes, it can eat you alive.
Includes the Dimension Award-winning story “Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You.”
Introduction by Greg Nicotero, Executive Producer of Creepshow and The Walking Dead, and co-owner of KNB EFX Group.
Featuring a cover painting by renowned movie poster illustrator Reynold Brown (Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Creature from the Black Lagoon).
