“Unquiet Dreams is the long, deep plunge in the coldest quarry in the woods; the lingering look under the rotting wood at all the writhing life there; the stare into the abyss until one realizes something is staring back.”

~ S. R. Bissette, creator of Tyrant, Taboo, Teen Angels & New Mutants and illustrator of Swamp Thing

Out now from Tirgearr Publishing, it’s my dark fiction collection Unquiet Dreams. Wow, what a nice pull quote from Steve, too! One of the stories in here is dedicated to him, the darkly comic ‘Another Metamorphosis’ which of course features dinosaurs. Most of the stories in this collection have dedications — either the person who inspired them or someone I immediately thought of upon writing them. Many of the stories have appeared in print, but not always in easy-to-obtain anthologies and some in magazines or websites alas, no longer with us.

I experimented with various ways of arranging the stories: by length, by theme, even by genre. The truth is most of the stories veer off into more than one category. Some are short and a couple are rather lengthy. I thought of breaking them up as ‘REM sleep, naps and fever dreams’, but the categories never pleased me. In the end I went with ‘higgelty piggelty’ and that seems to have suited the collection (and me, just because I like to say ‘higgelty piggelty’).

You’ll find my paean to Ray Bradbury that appeared in a literary magazine, my ultra-modern-meets-ancient office horror story, a couple of crime stories that veer into a hint of the supernatural, a zombie western and at least two dragons — much to my surprise. October always makes me think of Bradbury’s The October Country, itself a strange collection of tales that take unexpected turns into off corners and dark passages. It’s a grand tradition to follow, even in my own small way.

Are you feeling in need of something unsettling? Give them a try.