This fourth collection of stories by Jonathan Thomas definitively establishes him as one of the leading authors of weird fiction in the twenty-first century. Thomas’s creative adaptations of themes and motifs in the work of H. P. Lovecraft are vibrantly displayed in such tales as “Houdini Fish” and the cosmic “We Are Made of Stars,” while the “King in Yellow” mythos of Robert W. Chambers plays a role in “Three Dreams of Ys.” A sequence of previously unpublished tales, grouped under the heading “Dead City Suite,” resurrects stories from Thomas’s 1980s master’s thesis at Brown University, capturing both the wonder and terror of his native Providence, R.I. In all the stories Thomas’s pungent wit and distinctive prose meld with a powerfully weird imagination to fashion black jewels of weird fiction that no reader will ever forget.
