A superb collection of weird fantasy tales by Arthur Porges (1915-2006). Includes four previously unpublished stories.

"Fantasy once again, deftly and convincingly -- as only Robert Nathan can do it -- handled, with a satiric twist now and again, and a pull at the heartstrings. He has told the story of a failure whose one escape into a dream world comes through the imposed background of the ship he has built for himself in his own drab front yard. When the wife who demands results, sells it as a hot dog stand, he takes one last stand -- and Fate plays into his hands and launches the ship on the high road of adventure, southward bound. He picks up a "crew" as rudderless as himself, and they make their way against insuperable obstacles until "the law" catches up with them. But -- he has won something as a bulwark for the future. There is pathos and humor and that indefinable tug at the love of makebelieve that gave One more spring its impetus. It lacks the immediate application to current problems -- but it has the same adult fairy tale quality."--Kirkus.

With The Strange Dark One, W. H. Pugmire collects all of his best weird fiction concerning H. P. Lovecraft's dark god, Nyarlathotep. This avatar of the Great Old Ones is Lovecraft's most enigmatic creation, a being of many masks and multitudinous personae. Often called The Crawling Chaos, Nyarlathotep heralds the end of mortal time, and serves as avatar of Azathoth, the Idiot Chaos who will blew earth's dust away. Many writers have been enchanted by this dark being, in particular Robert Bloch, the man who, through correspondence, inspired Wilum Pugmire to try his hand at Lovecraftian fiction. This new book is a testimonial of Nyarlathotep's hold on Pugmire's withered brain, and these tales serve as aspects of a haunted mind. Along with stories that have not been reprinted since their initial magazine appearances, The Strange Dark One includes "To See Beyond," a sequel-of-sorts to Robert Bloch's groovy tale, "The Cheaters;" and the book's title story is a 14,000 word novelette set in Pugmire's Sesqua Valley. The Strange Dark One is a collection of Lovecraftian fiction by W. H. Pugmire. Each tale is beautifully illustrated by the remarkable Jeffrey Thomas, who is himself one of today's finest horror authors.

Olaf, a name handed down for centuries since the time of King Olof Skotkonung of Sweden, is given to several characters with Swedish ancestry. The discovery of a mysterious substance with properties previously untapped is passed on from one generation to another. Over time, the Olafs find out more and more about the potential for this special rock. Their research is slowed down by finding a more useful substance, gold. The gold and its value tend to overshadow everything else as the Olafs use their riches for a variety of purposes. The study of the special rock, however, continues to yield some rather surprising results. Some come with unexpected perils involving everything from government intelligence agencies to small time hoodlums. Curl up and follow the adventures of Olaf's stone!

Bluebirds by Catulle Mendès (1841-1909), here delightfully translated for the first time into English by Brian Stableford, is fascinating, not only because it illustrates a particular evolution within the pattern of the author's own works, but because that pattern reflects a more general one associated with the evolution from the French Romanticism of the first half of the nineteenth century to the Decadent and Symbolist Movements of the fin-de-siècle. Mendès was one of the key figures in the latter phases of that process of development, launching his literary career in the 1860s under the patronage of Théophile Gautier, whose daughter Judith he married--much against her father's wishes--in 1866, and then becoming a leading figure among the "Parnassians" who attempted a renewal and revivification of Romantic ideals, before he entered wholeheartedly into the Decadent Movement launched in the 1880s. The stories in the present collection extend over a linear spectrum, moving by degrees from the affected sentimentality of Romanticism to a darker and somewhat jaundiced world-view that illustrates the Decadent sensibility very well, although all the stories were written in advance of the enormous fashionability that the sensibility in question achieved in the late 1880s.

The characters in Annie Reiner's first collection of short stories inhabit a world somewhere between reality and fantasy. Both poetic and amusing, with their own unique style, these stories flow down a quirky stream of consciousness to reveal what's really on people's minds below the surface of ordinary logic.

"Granny Yaga follows the switchback adventures of a boy called Danny, growing up in North London where the local she-dragons are notorious fighters, and any alert passer-by can spot Granny herself flying low over the British Museum. Danny becomes Granny's aide-de-camp in a life-or-death duel with the demon Koschei, fought out in the London underground, in disused stations, boarded-up houses and the enchanted skies over Crouch End, with back-up from the relatively orthodox magic of Yesterdayland (huts on chicken legs, talking cats, self-catering tablecloths) and the realpolitik of its neighbouring Soviet satellite, a land of cruel edicts and capricious tsars where the workers and permanently drunk, and the loo seats belonging to each family in a communal flat hang side by side on the wall 'like luckless horseshoes'. A gripping read for all ages, from Danny's to Granny's." Hilary Spurling"Delightfully inventive. Wickedly funny." Marina Lewycka, author of A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian

Simon Gregory Williams, known as "the beast" in Sesqua Valley, has been so corrupted by his reading and memorizing every existing edition of the Necronomicon that his tainted psyche cannot enter into Randolph Carter's Dreamland. However, there is another dreamland, "the dreamland of witches," into which Simon can slink because of his brilliance as an alchemist; and it is into that dreamland that Simon accompanies an innocent young woman in her quest for rare magick. Yet even Simon, who is so experienced in eldritch lore, has never been so confronted by such outlandish Lovecraftian lunacy as he finds in this dreamland of witchery. In this fascinating excursion into the Lovecraftian fantasy/horror realm of Dreamland, two veteran authors of weird fiction have written a novel that is by turns horrific and poignant, with vibrant characters and a compelling narrative that carries the reader on from scene to scene to the novel's cataclysmic conclusion. David Barker is a widely published author and poet whose work has appeared in Fungi, Cyäegha, and Shoggoth.net. W. H. Pugmire is a longtime Lovecraftian author whose work has been gathered in many volumes, notably The Tangled Muse and An Ecstasy of Fear. The two authors have collaborated on The Revenant of Rebecca Pascal and In the Gulfs of Dream and Other Lovecraftian Tales.