You'll find none of that in Seeing Red, David J. Schow’s very first collection of short stories, back in print from Cimarron Street Books after twenty years.
Seeing Red features the World Fantasy Award-winning story, “Red Light,” the Twilight Zone Magazine prize-winner “Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You,” plus eleven more tales as startling, as disturbing, as provocative and unnerving.
Between these covers you’ll also find an introduction by best-selling fantasist T.E.D. Klein, a bevy of original illustrations (including previously unpublished cover concepts by Thomas Canty for the 1990 paperback edition), relevant magazine covers, an all-new interview — “Between Light & Shadow” — in which DJS recalls the era during which most of these tales appeared, and an updated and expanded Afterword. Not to mention, and an all-new cover by Tim Bradstreet!
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.
Full contents include:
Introduction: Look Out, He’s Got a Knife! by Robert Bloch
Action
Pick Me Up
Dusting the Flowers
Seeing Things
(Melodrama)
Scoop Bites the Dust
Final Performance (Stage Adaptation of Robert Bloch’s “The Final Performance”)
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.”
The full contents include:
Introduction by Richard Christian Matheson
Pamela’s Get
Brass
Calendar Girl
The Falling Man
Rock Breaks Scissors Cut
Afterword: Missing, Presumed Lost
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
