My new short story collection WORSHIP THE NIGHT is just around the corner (that is to say, at the printers) and up for preorder at the web site of publisher Dark Renaissance. Dark Renaissance is a new publishing house, but at its helm is Joe Morey, a man with many years of experience in producing beautiful books; a man with an inexhaustible passion for horror literature. The preorder page for WORSHIP THE NIGHT is here:

http://darkrenaissance.com/product/worship-the-night-preorder

There is already a fine review of the book at the review site of author Don D’Ammassa, Critical Mass:

http://www.dondammassa.com/R3D2013.htm

Mr. D’Ammassa says: “Jeffrey Thomas has been turning out excellent short stories for several years now, almost all in unusual venues where most readers are unlikely to discover them. There are eight of his better stories in this new collection…there are moments of humor as well as suspense, horror, and outright strangeness. The novella ‘Sea of Flesh’ is my favorite in a very fine selection.”

And I have made a little trailer to promote the book at YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IR_YleSlk74

But to best describe what this book is about, I’ve decided to share my introduction from the book, below.

Before I do that, however, I just want to stress that the book’s lovely cover art and the brilliant illustrations that grace every one of the stories therein are by the amazing Erin Wells. I had specifically requested that Joe Morey hire her for this job, as I have long admired the work she has done for several of my brother Scott Thomas’s collections. The funny thing is, I had requested that Erin render an Asian dragon for the book’s cover, because dragons feature in several of the stories. She didn’t receive this request, but Erin’s instincts were dead on and she created a dragon image on her own. Like her illustrations, her cover evokes the sense of dark poetry I wanted these stories to convey.

So without any further ado, here is my introduction to WORSHIP THE NIGHT, from Dark Renaissance Books:

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When I see short story collections

from writer friends of mine that feature incisive introductions by scholarly

folk like Matt Cardin or John Langan, I sometimes feel jealous. But then, who

better to introduce my work than me? Especially since I’d like to say a few

words about each of the stories in this collection — giving each its own sub-introduction,

as it were.

So let’s begin with…

The Lost Family focuses on the

protagonist of my novel The Fall of Hades,

which is set in Hell two thousand years after an apocalyptic war between

Angels, Demons and the Damned. The events of The Lost Family don’t take place prior to, or after, the events of The Fall

of Hades, but somewhere in the middle of the protagonist’s travels in the

novel. For that reason, I might just as well have titled this story The Lost

Chapter. But it is also meant to work as a stand-alone story, if you haven’t

read that novel.

Counterclockwise is set in my

futuristic milieu of Punktown. I thought it best to allow my favorite stamping

ground at least one manifestation here…lest it grow vengeful. The setting has

been good to me and I don’t take that lightly, since Punktown is not often

kind.

The Holy Bowl was written for

an anthology about that mightiest of deities, the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Since I suspected most of my fellow contributors to that book would go for

broad humor and the extreme bizarre, I decided to play my story a bit more

straight.

In Limbo was written

especially for this collection. The premise for it came to me one late October

night in 2012 as Hurricane Sandy, Halloween, and Life itself bore down upon me.

About the Author makes the

observation that sometimes a writer is more fascinating, and stranger, than

anything they may have written. It’s also about my general preference for innovative

horror as opposed to tropes that have been done to death…or undeath.

The Strange Case of Crazy Joe

Gallo is a Lovecraftian piece that features actual alleged gangland

personalities and events. (Notice I said “alleged,” so no one need track me

down and whack me.) My brother Scott and I have long been intrigued with the

fascinating and charismatic Joe Gallo.

Children of the Dragon is

another Lovecraftian piece, this one set in modern day Viet Nam. I have quite a

love affair with Viet Nam…largely because I have had a number of love affairs

with Vietnamese women. Subsequently, my beautiful daughter Jade is half

Vietnamese. Since my first trip in October of 2004, and to the time of this

writing, I have traveled to Viet Nam eight times. Children of the Dragon incorporates actual places I have visited in

that country, which is not nearly as ominous (these days, at least) as I

portray it here — but it often serves a dramatic purpose to set a character

down in an unfamiliar environment in which, a fish out of water, he can become

thoroughly disoriented. Ah, the deliciously disorienting Orient!

Viet Nam also has its influence in The

Sea of Flesh, in that a number of its characters are Vietnamese, but this story

takes place in another of my favorite locales: Salem, Massachusetts. This long

novella (or short novel?) was written for a book called The Sea of Flesh and Ash, which was long delayed with its original

publisher and therefore withdrawn from them, finally released by another publisher

to a very limited readership. The premise of The Sea of Flesh and Ash was that my brother Scott Thomas and I

would both write a novella based on the same beautiful piece of artwork by

Travis Anthony Soumis, which would serve as our cover. Thus, I wrote my dark

fantasy The Sea of Flesh, and Scott

wrote The Sea of Ash…a brilliant

work that I hope he will feature in some future collection of his own. It

deserves much greater exposure.

The title of this book, Worship

the Night, was inspired by a kind of loose theme at work in these stories:

the notion of deities, hereafters, or otherwheres beyond the mortal plane. As I

say, The Lost Family involves angels

and demons, if not quite in the traditional sense, while Counterclockwise offers a glimpse into an alien belief system. The Holy Bowl invokes the aforementioned

Flying Spaghetti Monster — as convincing a deity as this world has to offer, and

much tastier than most. The title of In

Limbo evokes the dismal way station said to lie between the two more definitive

afterlives, and hence — literally or metaphorically — between damnation and salvation.

Similarly, the protagonist of  About the Author believes she has torn

through a barrier between this world and the netherworld. If your spiritual

calling leans less toward Judeo-Christian conceptions and more toward the eldritch,

you might want to become an acolyte of the Cthulhu Mythos, as addressed in The Strange Case of Crazy Joe Gallo and Children of the Dragon. Finally, the

main characters of The Sea of Flesh interact

with a mystical alternate realm.

With a theme of this nature, one might well wonder what the author’s

position on religion could be.

Don’t ask.

Okay, that probably isn’t fair. Better to say, then, that I despise

religion. That is, religion as practiced by those who wish for eternal torture to

be inflicted on others for not sharing their particular brand of superstition.

Which isn’t to say that I don’t necessarily believe in mysterious forces at

work in the universe. My personal jury is still out on that one. I am in awe of

the unknown, with a capital “Un,” and I hope that sense of wonder translates

into some of these tales. But in regard to my disgust, I’m not talking about spiritual

matters…I’m talking about physical matter, matter shaped into the things we

call people, human effing beings, who can be credited with other such hateful inventions

as guns and money. Perhaps money will be the theme of my next collection. God

– such as He, She or It might be — forbid.

Anyway.

With our introduction and sub-introductions behind us, let us now allow these

stories to speak for themselves…

– Jeffrey Thomas