Cover designer: Gábor Csigás

Cthulhu Lies Dreaming: Twenty-three Tales of the Weird and Cosmic is now available, with stories by yours truly (Mike Davis), Pete Rawlik (author of Reanimators), Lucy Brady, Leeman Kessler (of Ask Lovecraft), and others. My story is titled The Red Brick Building; editor Salome Jones told me “it was a punch to the gut.”

I hope you enjoy the punch. Regardless, the other 22 stories in this book are top notch, and I’m honored to share a table of contents with these writers. This is a truly spectacular Lovecraftian anthology.

I asked Salome about her inspiration for Cthulhu Lies Dreaming. Her response:

I was originally inspired by the phrase, Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! (I’m apparently surrounded by cultists.) It means something like “Rejoice that Cthulhu sleeps.” You know the theory that this life is all a computer simulation? That somewhere some supergeeks are running some fancy video game trial, that none of this is real? Well, I started thinking, what if what we think of as reality is, in fact, not real. And what if the source of it was much less benign than some scaled up computer?

Salome interviewed some of the Cthulhu Lies Dreaming authors — you can listen to those interviews on a special edition of the Lovecraft eZine podcast. Listen on iTunes or download on the podcast webpage.

Purchase Cthulhu Lies Dreaming here. Available in print and for Kindle. Published by Ghostwoods Books.

Book synopsis:

The classic American horror author H. P. Lovecraft coined the term weird fiction in the 1920s. Even today, in our rational world of wonder, his legacy of cosmic horror slumbers on. Deep in the recesses of our unconscious minds, we suspect its truth – that as we puzzle out the shape of true reality, we’ll find it is not to our liking. Not one bit.

Modern science, with its experts and specialties, is a fragmentary thing. In this, it reflects the human mind. We keep our thoughts in boxes, broken into digestible shards. It is safer. Cosmic horror warns us that what we fondly imagine to be reality is just a thin skin of light and substance over endless gulfs of insanity. Gather too much knowledge, make the wrong connections, and the truth can no longer be denied.

The amazing tales lovingly collected in Cthulhu Lies Dreaming are fragments of that truth. Treat them with the caution that they deserve. Each will offer you glimpses behind the skin of the world, leading you closer and closer to the edge of the abyss. Knowledge may bring wisdom, but it also offers far darker gifts to the curious.

The truth is indeed out there, and it hungers.

Table of Contents:

Foreword – Kenneth Hite
Nikukinchaku – Matthew Hockey
Babatunde – Ayobami Leeman Kessler
The Myth of Proof – Greg Stolze
Service – Lynnea Glasser
The Star that is Not a Star – Lucy Brady
August Lokken – Yma Johnson
Wake My Lord – M. S. Swift
Puddles – Thord D. Hedengren
Sometimes, the Void Stares Back – Marc Reichardt
Beyond the Shore – Lynne Hardy
Bleak Mathematics – Brian Fatah Steele
Father of Dread – Matthew Chabin
He Sees You in His Dreams – Samuel Morningstar
Isophase Light – Daniel Marc Chant
Icebound – Morris Kenyon
Seven Nights in a Sleep Clinic – Saul Quint
Mykes Reach – William Couper
Notes on Wilcox – Peter Rawlik
Offspring – Evey Brett
Out on Route 22 – E. Dane Anderson
The Red Brick Building – Mike Davis
The Lullaby of Erich Zann – G. K. Lomax
Cymothoa Cthulhii – Gethin A. Lynes

Purchase Cthulhu Lies Dreaming here. Available in print and for Kindle. Published by Ghostwoods Books.