Our annual Halloween sale has risen from the dead! Crawl into the horror of Halloween with a truly spooky new read. All of our Dark House Press titles will be 50% off now until the very stroke of midnight on Halloween! Titles covering everything from murder and disease to the post-apocalyptic world, these books are sure to keep you on the edge of your seat. Check out this deal before it disappears!

Dark House Press aims to publish neo-noir, speculative novels, short story collections and anthologies with a literary bent. It is an imprint of Curbside Splendor Publishing.

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The New Black: A Neo-Noir Anthology

from $2.00

edited by Richard Thomas

The New Black is a collection of twenty neo-noir stories exemplifying the best authors currently writing in this dark sub-genre. A mixture of horror, crime, fantasy, science fiction, magical realism, the transgressive, and the grotesque all with a literary bent, The New Black represents the future of genre-bending fiction from some of our brightest and most original voices.

The New Black features a foreword by Laird Barron and twenty original illustrations by Luke Spooner.

PRAISE FOR THE NEW BLACK:
"The New Black ought to be the New High Standard for dark fiction anthologies. It's loaded with intelligence and talent. Every one of the pieces in this extraordinary compilation is worthy of your full attention."
—Jack Ketchum

"The New Black is a great collection of incredibly unique fiction. I honestly liked every story in here, and I usually don’t say that about an anthology. It was also nice to encounter so many authors with whom I was unfamiliar. A strong compilation of talent. Very strong."
—John Boden, Shock Totem Productions

“There's depth to darkness, a richness waiting for those who have the patience to let their vision adjust to it. Rembrandt knew that; it's there in the voluminous shadows that wrap around the figures in his paintings. So did Poe: it's the note sounding underneath the stories his narrators tell us. And so do the writers Richard Thomas has assembled for The New Black. At this point in our shared history, it's no secret that those things closest to us, our family, our memory, may be full of night. What is remarkable is what the writers in this book succeed in telling us about that darkness, what shapes they discern within it. A showcase of some of the most exciting writers at work today, The New Black is not to be missed.”
—John Langan, The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies

CONTRIBUTORS:
Stephen Graham Jones, Paul Tremblay, Lindsay Hunter, Roxane Gay, Kyle Minor, Craig Clevenger, Micaela Morrissette, Richard Lange, Benjamin Percy, Roy Kesey, Craig Davidson, Rebecca Jones-Howe, Joe Meno, Vanessa Veselka, Nik Korpon, Brian Evenson, Craig Wallwork, Tara Laskowski, Matt Bell, and Antonia Crane.

PRESS:
Pantheon Magazine
Windy City Reviews
Entropy Magazine
Reddit AMA with the contributing authors
The Horror Bookshelf
Largehearted Boy
Jeff Pfaller

PUBLICATION DETAILS:
Pages: 340
ISBN: 978-1940430041
Publication Date: May 2014

Format:

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Scratch

from $5.00

by Steve Himmer

After an aimless life, Martin Blaskett is ready to settle down, unaware of the rising tension between the wild and the domestic in his new town. When he draws the attention of a shape-shifter from local legend, his world is shaken, and he is led across the slippery border of the feral wilderness which has a history all its own.

PRAISE FOR SCRATCH:
"The writing is magnificently inventive throughout […] A terrific voice and premise."
—Kirkus Reviews

"Scratch finds Steve Himmer doing what he does best—putting a magnifier to the fine line between human and beast, between what is tame and what is red in tooth and claw. Then he sets fire to any old platitudes about nature and man, creating a new mythology out of the ashes and shadows."
—Amber Sparks, author of The Unfinished World and May We Shed These Human Bodies

“Scratch is not only a ripping tale—of dreams and darkness, humans and houses, and the creatures those houses are meant to keep out—but a contemplation of the beautiful dark mysteries of nature. Like a strange old story you overheard when you thought you were alone in the woods, Scratch is beguiling, haunting, and wild.”
—Kate Racculia, author of Bellweather Rhapsody

"Steve Himmer's particular genius involves giving the minds of his characters room to roam. His take on literary horror might usefully be compared to that of Benjamin Percy or William Gay, but its roots reach back much further, through Shirley Jackson to Hawthorne and Poe. This book, this gift to us, is an absolutely essential reminder that every story starts at the edge of the forest."
—Roy Kesey, author of Any Deadly Thing

PRAISE FOR STEVE HIMMER:
“When a covert mission sends Oscar, a low-ranking employee in the Bureau of Ice Prognostication, to the arctic, he must confront the perils and pains of a life lived under the veil of secrecy. Fram is an extraordinary meditation on the critical flaws in the systems we hold dear, and the human costs of those flaws. Steve Himmer writes with such uncommon intelligence and sorrow and grace, I would follow him anywhere—into the arctic and beyond.”
—Laura van den Berg, author of Find Me, The Isle of Youth, and What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

“Himmer’s debut novel [The Bee-Loud Glade] evokes Chekhov, Thoreau, Fowles, and others.”
—Publishers Weekly

ABOUT STEVE HIMMER:
Steve Himmer is author of the novels The Bee-Loud Glade and Fram. His stories have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Hobart, Hawk & Handsaw, The Collagist, and Los Angeles Review, and in anthologies such as On The Clock: Contemporary Short Stories of Work and Re:Telling. He edits the web journal Necessary Fiction and teaches at Emerson College in Boston.

PUBLICATION DETAILS:
Pages: 200
ISBN: 978-1940430843
Publication Date: October 2016

Format:

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Echo Lake

from $5.00

by Letitia Trent

When 30-something Emily Collins inherits her recently murdered Aunt's house she moves to Heartshorne, Oklahoma, to claim it and confront her family's dark past. After her dead mother begins speaking to her in dreams, Emily stumbles upon a horrible community secret that leads to terrifying revelations about the supernatural pull of Echo Lake.

PRAISE FOR ECHO LAKE:
"Trent’s years as a poet serve her well in this heavily atmospheric novel, which deftly conjures up both evil and the small town’s complicit reluctance to face its past."
—Kirkus Reviews

"Echo Lake is more than just a good debut novel. It is the coming-out party for Letitia Trent, the new poet-queen of neo-noir."
—Kyle Minor, author of Praying Drunk

“In Echo Lake, Letitia Trent, with deceptively simple, beautiful language, creates a small American town slowly self destructing under the weight of its secrets. Trent illuminates the mystery of family and community, the pain of loss, all the while spinning a tale of murder and suspense. It's at turns a lovely and bone chilling read.”
—Paula Bomer, author of Inside Madeleine

“In Echo Lake, Trent’s small town characters guard their secrets, and warn their children away from the mist-covered lake. Dark, ominous, and lyrical, Echo Lake is a beautiful exploration of loss, and the menace of deceptive surfaces.”
—Karen Brown, author of The Longings of Wayward Girls

“Trent’s debut novel combines a ripping good scare with prose as rich as dark verse. Her characters wear the imprint of the past like livid bruises, the bravest among them untangling their distorted histories to discover truths about the nature of community, family and self."
—Sophie Littlefield, author of House of Glass

"Echo Lake itself is perhaps the most memorable aspect of Echo Lake; Trent builds it up to be a truly eerie setting, a body of sickly water that is as haunting as it is haunted, where one cannot go swimming without risk of injury, thanks to the debris that lies just under the surface, and the fumes that pour out of it at night."
—Monkeybicycle

ABOUT LETITIA TRENT:
Letitia Trent grew up in Vermont and Oklahoma and spent her teenage years traveling with her flea-marketing parents. She received her MFA in poetry from Ohio State University. Her work has appeared in journals such as The Denver Quarterly, Fence, Folio, The Journal, Blazevox, and The Black Warrior Review. Her poetry collections include One Perfect Bird (2012) and You aren't in this movie (2012). She was the 2010 winner of the Alumni Flash Writing Award from the Ohio State University's The Journal and has been awarded fellowships from The Vermont Studio Center and the MacDowell Colony.

PRESS:
Los Angeles Review
Kirkus Reviews
Pantheon Magazine
My Bookish Ways
Entropy Magazine
The Reading Cafe
Otherppl Podcast with Brad Listi
Heavy Feather Reviews
Monkeybicycle
The Qwillery

PUBLICATION DETAILS:
Pages: 347
ISBN: 978-1940430034
Publication Date: July 2014

Format:

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Vile Men

from $5.00

by Rebecca Jones-Howe

Vile Men is a collection of dark, seductive, powerful, and touching short stories told with a lyrical voice that lulls readers into submission with its elegant, enlightened prose. Including several original stories, Jones-Howe's words dance trancelike on the page before clenching readers tightly by the windpipe and whispering that everything will be all right.

PRAISE:
"Rebecca Jones-Howe’s Vile Men is an exciting, dark, sexy collection that is convulsively beautiful and bright. Each story digs a great hole and is filled with the most savage, brutal, human emotions: love, desire, addiction and the impossibility of satisfaction."
—Antonia Crane, author of Spent

“Rebecca Jones-Howe fearlessly tackles the ugliness most of us manage to hide. Each broken character blurs the lines between villain and victim as they bathe in sex, horror, dignity, want, resignation, and darkness. Vile Men is the handbook to uncovering your damage.”
—Mercedes M. Yardley, author of Pretty Little Dead Girls

"Rebecca Jones-Howe takes you on a tour of the human psyche that is dark, disturbing, and exquisitely written. The sentences in this book are the best kind of dangerous. Just when you think you're safe another one comes along and draws blood."
—Rob Hart, author of New Yorked

“Rebecca Jones-Howe's Vile Men shows us characters driven by desperation to do violence to themselves or others, but behind these sharp stories about the horror of gender and sex is an empathetic insight into human weakness. Jones-Howe might bring us to the darkest parts of the human heart, but her stories remind us that we are all a little bit vile, too.”
—Letitia Trent, author of Echo Lake

"Vile Men is dark, provocative stuff. The men found within these pages are indeed bad news, but the most dangerous paths aren't always led by them, as Rebecca Jones-Howe's narrators take us right past the expected awfulness of dead-end, drug-addled relationships, bad sex on ant hills, or navigating the treacherous rubble of the bar scene, where her women can find satisfaction and even surprise flashes of triumph amongst all the emotional jetsam. "There's a certain kind of man who goes for damaged girls," she writes. They may be broken, but as vile as these men may be (and always such needy little beasts) they don't get to have everything."
—David James Keaton, author of The Last Projector

ABOUT REBECCA JONES-HOWE:
Rebecca Jones-Howe has had work published, or is forthcoming, in PANK, Punchnel's, Pantheon Magazine, Out of the Gutter, Pulp Modern, and Pulp Metal. She was also the winner of the 2012 WAR writing competition at LitReactor.com.

PUBLICATION DETAILS:
Pages: 170
ISBN: 978-1940430515
Publication Date: September 2015

Format:

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The Doors You Mark Are Your Own

from $1.00

by Okla Elliott, Raul Clement

Joshua City is one of seven city-states in a post-apocalyptic world where water is scarce and technology is at mid-twentieth-century Soviet levels. As the novel opens, the Baikal Sea has been poisoned, causing a major outbreak of a flesh-eating disease called nekrosis. Against this backdrop of political corruption, violence and oppression, a struggle for control of Joshua City ensues, and a revolutionary group called The Underground emerges.

The Doors You Mark Are Your Own is a sweeping literary epic—the result of years of painstaking writing and world-building by two brilliantly imaginative minds—that readers will get lost in and never want to end.

PRAISE FOR THE DOORS YOU MARK ARE YOUR OWN:
"An epic novel of good and evil."
—Kirkus Reviews

"The Doors You Mark Are Your Own is a dystopian masterpiece."
—Kyle Minor, author of Praying Drunk and In the Devil's Territory

"The Doors You Mark Are Your Own is an expansive tale of good and evil, of friendship and loyalty, of fear and courage. A literary dystopia that is both an elegant and engrossing read."
—Damien Angelica Walters, author of Sing Me Your Scars

"The Doors You Mark Are Your Own is one of those intriguing, compelling books that defy description, or, the impact is a reflection of keen imagination, surprises, a new vision, but yet one that is rock-ribbed intriguing. All I can say is that you should read this and enjoy it, since it is a rare thing, a very rare thing indeed, when something new comes into the world."
—Craig Nova, author of Wetware and The Good Son

"If Vladimir Nabokov and Phillip K. Dick had mated and produced a genius baby, that baby might well have grown up to write The Doors You Mark Are Your Own. Inspired, thrilling literary madness of the best possible sort."
—Pinckney Benedict, author Dogs of God and Miracle Boy and Other Stories

ABOUT OKLA ELLIOTT:
Okla Elliott is currently an Illinois Distinguished Fellow at the University of Illinois, where he works in the fields of comparative literature and trauma studies. He also holds an MFA in creative writing from Ohio State University. His work has appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, The Literary Review, New Letters, A Public Space, The Southeast Review, and Subtropics, among others. He is the author of a collection of short fiction, From the Crooked Timber, and a collection of poetry, The Cartographer’s Ink.

ABOUT RAUL CLEMENT:
Raul Clement lives in Urbana, IL. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have been published in Blue Mesa Review, Coe Review, As It Ought to Be, and the Surreal South '09 anthology. He is an editor at New American Press and Mayday Magazine.

PUBLICATION DETAILS:
Pages: 724
ISBN: 978-1940430201
Publication Date: March 2015

Format:

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Paper Tigers

from $5.00

by Damien Angelica Walters

In this haunting and hypnotizing novel, a young woman loses everything—half of her body, her fiancé, and possibly her unborn child—to a terrible apartment fire. While recovering from the trauma, she discovers a photo album inhabited by a predatory ghost who promises to make her whole again, while slowly consuming her from the inside out.

PRAISE:

"[Paper Tigers is] deeply emotional and beautifully poetic."
—Cemetery Dance Online

"This isn't just a great novel—it's one of the best horror novels in recent memory."
—Hellnotes

"[Paper Tigers is] a smartly dark, deftly crafted journey into the depths of damaged humanity."
—Dread Central

"Paper Tigers is a gorgeous tapestry of pain from an author who specializes in just such intricate needlework. It's about suffering, and wholeness, fear, longing, insecurity, self-loathing, and the prices we'd pay to get back what we lost."
—The Horror Fiction Review

"Paper Tigers is full of hauntings of every sort, a modern ghost story of the very best kind, combining the delicate mania of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the subtlety of Shirley Jackson, and the raw dynamism of Joyce Carol Oates. But what Walters delivers here is thoroughly her own creation: a starkly beautiful tale of what it means to survive."
—Helen Marshall, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Gifts for the One Who Comes After

“Paper Tigers gathers the best from every childhood scary story—creepy antiques, haunted houses, seemingly friendly ghosts—and repackages them with the worst and most isolating of adult fears. Walters’ prose is vivid and gripping, luring you in, feeding you images that will leave you comforted by the light of your bedside nightstand; horror nostalgia at its finest.”
—Rebecca Jones-Howe, author of Vile Men

“With Paper Tigers, Damien Angelica Walters has created a hauntingly elegant portrait of loneliness and longing for healing. But where she confronts real terror is in answering the question of what it costs the wounded to be whole again. This book is at once as beautiful and frightening as a scar on smooth skin or a scream with perfect pitch.”
—Bracken MacLeod, author of Mountain Home and Stranded

“Damien Angelica Walters pulls you into the heart of her characters and traps you there until you’re not sure if the story is haunting you, or you’re haunting it. Wonderfully creepy and heartwarming, fear and sadness alternate and blend throughout in a story that’s packed with atmosphere. Keep the lights on and the tissues close.”
—Sarah Read, editor of Pantheon Magazine

PUBLICATION DETAILS
Pages: 300
ISBN: 978-1940430577
Publication Date: February 2016

Format:

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Exigencies

from $5.00

edited by Richard Thomas

Exigencies is an anthology of 23 original neo-noir stories by emerging authors that blend literary fiction, fantasy, horror, and crime in order to explore an exigency, a tipping point. The writing is a hybrid of page-turning genre-writing and transgressive fiction and show-cases some of the best new writers of Neo-Noir.

CONTRIBUTORS

Letitia Trent, Joshua Blair, Rebecca Jones-Howe, Kevin Catalano, Heather Foster, Usman T. Malik, Jason Metz, Nathan Beauchamp, Adam Peterson, Damien Angelica Walters, Brendan Detzner, Faith Gardner, Alex Kane, Sarah Read, W. P. Johnson, Barbara Duffey, David James Keaton, Marytza Rubio, Kenneth Cain, Amanda Gowin, Mark Jaskowski, and Axel Taiari

Format:

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