Nineteen tales of dark, psychological horror from the pen of one of the modern masters of dark Fiction, award-winning author Melanie Tem. Contents include:The Ice Downstream / Sitting with the Driver / The Rock / The Co-op / Secrets / Daddy's Side / Loving Delia / Aspen Graffiti / Chameleon / The Better Half / Memento Mori / Trail of Crumbs / Pandorette's Mother / Pele / Cousin Claudine / Fry Day

EYES OF THE WOLF, EYES OF THE WOMANOn a moonlit night in Denver a young girl runs – half transformed, half starving, half innocent. Behind her stretches a legacy of strong women, each possessed by the girl and the terror of the changing.Save her, or consume her.Four sisters lived in four houses. Now their female descendants, steeped in blood and sacrifice and rage, cling to their essence and their ancient rituals while Deborah, runaway, uninitiated, threatens their ...

Over a career of 30+ years, Melanie Tem received the Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy Awards for her writing, which included almost a hundred short stories, twelve solo novels, as well as scripts, poems, and storytelling performances. At the time of her death in 2015, she left behind numerous plays, several of which had been produced, but none had appeared in print. These plays arguably contain some of the finest writing of her final ten years. FR...

Singularity gathers award-winning writer Melanie Tem's most important short fiction, highlighting her diversity and mastery of her art.The sixty stories collected here range from "Sitting with the Driver," a western with a dark woman at its center, to "Little Shit," a contemporary tale of a woman who uses her deceptive appearance and psychic power to trap those who prey on the helpless. The child in "Corn teeth" longs not only to become a part of an alien family, but also to become...

Regret and denial haunt the ghost town of Revenant. It is the last chance for the living to give the dead and gone the gift of freedom. The pedophile, the mother who talks to her dead children, the father with an image of his son before the accident, the little boy yearning for his birth mother and a girl morning her phantom aborted baby, all congregate in Revenant for the final judgment. Either let them go or spend eternity in a vast wasteland, endlessly floating.There is a presen...

Twenty-year-old Valerie Kittridge is horrified to learn that her father has had a stroke. As an only child and with her mother dead, her father is all she has in the world, and she leaves her life as a film student in California to nurse her father back to health. On her wild, late-night car ride to Duerme, the small town in New Mexico where her father lives with his girlfriend, she is besieged with a host of strange and terrifying dark omens and flashbacks to her childhood. For there is s...

Alexander waits in his yellow-gray house in a yellow wood for his namesake daughter, the one who "of all my children ... has always stirred me most, with love, with rage and fear, with envy and disappointment." He has summoned her. She is his prodigal child, and she is his scion, and it's time.Alexandra left as soon as she turned eighteen, the only way she could keep from being swallowed up by her father, her only chance of having a life of her own. Alexandra grew up with her fathe...

A voice whispers in her ear at night, promising her a new life, urging her to let go of the reality she knows. The voice could only belong to one person, her brother Ethan, but his body, broken by drugs, lies cold in the morgue. An invisible hand has opened the door for Lucy and her sisters and though Lucy questions her parents they have receded into their private existence where nothing can touch them.Lucy is quickly losing touch with her reality of white fences and pristine lawns...

CARESS IN AN EMPTY ROOMOnce Charlotte Tobias was a prim and severe schoolteacher, wielding her red pencil, writing to imaginary lovers and hiding the letters in a closet. Then, on the night of her fortieth birthday, Charlotte dreamed of love, and her life would never be the same again.He came to her, her own creation, bold and dark, naked and rippling with muscles. She named him Phanes. She game him poetry, and curiosity, and let him make love to her in ways and places she ...

A voice whispers in her ear at night, promising her a new life, urging her to let go of the reality she knows. The voice could only belong to one person, her brother Ethan, but his body, broken by drugs, lies cold in the morgue. An invisible hand has opened the door for Lucy and her sisters and though Lucy questions her parents they have receded into their private existence where nothing can touch them.Lucy is quickly losing touch with her reality of white fences and pristine lawns...

Steve Rasnic & Melanie Tem : In Concert collects the collaborative short fiction of Melanie Tem and Steve Rasnic Tem, who have worked at the cutting edge of imaginative fiction for over a quarter century. In the twenty-one tales herein, the reader will find fear, joy, and mystery. In Concert showcases the wide range of their collaborative work. The title story tells of a lonely elderly woman who achieves rapport with a lost astronaut through the power of music. In "The Icy Region My Heart ...

Leila Blackwell suffers from keratitis, a condition that, coupled with prior eye problems, is slowly robbing her of her sight. Nevertheless, she stubbornly tries to maintain a "normal" lifestyle, often forsaking the companionship of her lover Cathy to act independently, as any fully sighted person might do. It's thus that she finds herself alone in a public rest room when a familiar male voice penetrates the silence, saying, "Don't be afraid, I won't hurt you."Leila finds herself k...