Short Story Anthologies, Horror

Four Dark Nights

Name: Four Dark Nights
Author: Douglas Clegg
ISBN: 9780843950984

by Douglas Clegg, Tom Piccirilli, Christopher Golden, Bentley Little

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Overview

Bentley Little is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of such bestselling novels as The Collection, The Association, The Ignored, The Store, and The Town. Born in Arizona shortly after his mother attended the world premiere of Psycho, he has worked as a technical writer, reporter/photographer, library assistant, sales clerk, phonebook deliveryman, video arcade attendant, newspaper deliveryman, furniture mover, window washer and rodeo gatekeeper. The son of a Russian artist and an American educator, he and his Chinese wife were married by the Justice of the Peace in Tombstone, Arizona. They have one son.

Synopsis

Terrible things happen at night.

The most horrifying things take place at night, when the moon rises and darkness descends, when fear takes control and terror grips the heart. The four original novellas in this collection each take place during one chilling night, a night of shadows, a night of mystery-a night of horror. Each is a blood-curdling vision of what waits in the darkness, told by one of horror's modern masters. But as the sun sets and night falls, prepare yourself. Dawn will be a long time coming, and you may not live to see it!

What will happen tonight?

A group of friends will experiment with powers far beyond their reach, and will summon forth an unimaginable, unstoppable evil.

One by one, residents in a small suburban town will have their most hidden wishes fulfilled-only to realize there's no escape from them.

A young woman will journey to a mysterious island under the cover of darkness to perform a hideous, ancient ritual . . . with terrifying results.

A desperate man will dare to enter the Works, a sprawling Manhattan building that houses the most extreme excesses and shocking secrets . . . of both this world and the next.

Four chilling, all-new novellas. Four of horror's greatest voices.

Fangoria

Little is so wonderful he can make the act of ordering a Coke at McDonald's take on a sinister dimension.

About the Author, Douglas Clegg

Douglas Clegg is the International Horror Guild and Bram Stoker Award-winning author of more than a dozen novels, including The Infinite, Naomi, You Come When I Call You, Mischief, and The Halloween Man. He was born in Virginia but now lives close to New York City, where he is writing his next book. His novel Bad Karma became the movie of the same name.

Christopher Golden is the award-winning, L.A Times bestselling author of such novels as The Ferryman, Strangewood, Of Saints and Shadows, Prowlers, and the Body of Evidence series of teen thrillers, which was honored with an award from the American Library Association as one of its Best Books for Young Readers. Golden has also written or co-written a great many books and comic books related to the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. He is the editor of the Bram Stoker Award-winning book of criticism, CUT!: Horror Writers on Film, and co-author of The Stephen King Universe.

Tom Piccirilli is the author of nine novels, including The Night Class, A Lower Deep, Hexes, The Deceased, and Grave Men. Tom's poetry collection, A Student of Hell, won the Bram Stoker Award in 2001. His omnibus collection of forty stories, entitled Deep Into That Darkness Peering, became a finalist for both the Bram Stoker and World Fantasy Awards for best collection. Tom lives in Estes Park, Colorado, where he's currently working on several new novels in the horror, western, and mystery fields.

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Editorials

Cinescape

Douglas Clegg is clearly and without any doubt one of the best horror writers in the business.

Daily News

Clegg gets high marks on the terror scale.

Fangoria

Little is so wonderful he can make the act of ordering a Coke at McDonald's take on a sinister dimension.

Science Fiction Chronicle

One of the best horror novels of the year.

Publishers Weekly

A generously unrestricted theme events that take place in a single terrifying night and talented contributors build high expectations for this quartet of brand new horror novellas, most of which, alas, disappoint in their failure to develop a plot suitable for their length. Bentley Little's "The Circle," the only tale that faithfully limits its events to a single evening, presents three interrelated vignettes of weird incidents in a suburban neighborhood, all of which prove to have an explanation that is surprisingly humdrum by genre standards. Christopher Golden's "Pyre," in which a young woman comes to terms with her estranged father by means of supernatural experience, depends on a labored back story about a Maine island haunted by Viking ghosts. In "Jonah Rose," Tom Piccirilli spends more time elaborating his narrator's convoluted history as a former faith healer who took up with sideshow freaks than establishing that history's bearing on his mission to rescue his kidnapped son from a strange urban underworld. Only Douglas Clegg's "The Words," about two teenage outsiders whose alienation leads them into the creepy "world of Nowhere," uses its expansive length to build the atmosphere and tension crucial for orchestrating its unsettling events. Each of these stories has its moments, which suggests their authors might have produced better offerings outside the anthology's write-to-format limitations. (Oct.) FYI: This anonymously compiled volume is Leisure's third hardcover offering after last year's The Museum of Horrors, an anthology edited by Dennis Etchison. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.