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All The Stars Die: Cosmic Horror Novellas
Modern horror's King of Pain, the World Fantasy Award-and Bram Stoker Award-nominated John F.D. Taff, joins Bad Hand Books with a collection of cosmic-horror novellas: All the Stars Die.
Here's just a taste of what to expect.
- “After the Cut, the Blood”: Talent doesn't always go hand-in-hand with desire, but two musical brothers take a dark path toward forcing the issue.
- “Her Mouth is filled with Secret Soup”: A boy's initial contact with a turn-of-the-century travelling medicine show reveals it's not just selling, it's conscripting labor.
- “Fin de Siècle”: An early 20th-Century occultist millionaire acquires the world's biggest telescope, not to see stars and planets but to open a doorway between worlds.
- “In the Dim Meadows, Desolate”: The old gods aren't dead and neither is their need for the love of man, but is the love he offers now enough?
- “All the Stars Die One by One”: NASA finally uncovers the true relationship between the earth and the moon, one that brings all mankind together at last.
- “Tell Me What it Means to Me”: Guilt and shame unites the people of a fractured small town together in one place... Midnight Land.
Here's just a taste of what to expect.
- “After the Cut, the Blood”: Talent doesn't always go hand-in-hand with desire, but two musical brothers take a dark path toward forcing the issue.
- “Her Mouth is filled with Secret Soup”: A boy's initial contact with a turn-of-the-century travelling medicine show reveals it's not just selling, it's conscripting labor.
- “Fin de Siècle”: An early 20th-Century occultist millionaire acquires the world's biggest telescope, not to see stars and planets but to open a doorway between worlds.
- “In the Dim Meadows, Desolate”: The old gods aren't dead and neither is their need for the love of man, but is the love he offers now enough?
- “All the Stars Die One by One”: NASA finally uncovers the true relationship between the earth and the moon, one that brings all mankind together at last.
- “Tell Me What it Means to Me”: Guilt and shame unites the people of a fractured small town together in one place... Midnight Land.
Paperback
First published September 23, 2025
About the author
John F.D. Taff
86 books260 followersJohn F.D. Taff is a multi-Bram Stoker Award short-listed dark fiction author with more than 30 years experience, and more than 100 short stories and seven novels in print.
He has appeared in Cemetery Dance, Eldritch Tales, Unnerving, Deathrealm, Big Pulp and One Buck Horror, as well as anthologies such as Hot Blood: Seeds of Fear, Hot Blood: Fear the Fever, Shock Rock II, Lullabies for Suffering, Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories, Behold!, Shadows Over Main Street 2, Horror Library V, Best of Horror Library, Dark Visions Vol. 1, Ominous Realities, Death's Realm, I Can Taste the Blood and Savage Beasts. His work will appear soon in The Seven Deadliest and I Can Hear the Shadows.
His novels include The Bell Witch, Kill-Off and the serialized apocalyptic epic The Fearing. Thunderstorm Books and Grey Matter Press will release a one-volume version of The Fearing in 2021, in limited edition hardcover, soft cover and digital. Short fiction collections include Little Deaths: The Definitive Collection and Little Black Spots, both published by Grey Matter Press.
Taff's novella collection, The End in All Beginnings, was called one of the best novella collections by Jack Ketchum and was a Stoker Award Finalist. His short "A Winter's Tale" was also a Stoker Finalist.
His upcoming anthology Dark Stars, a tribute to that seminal '80s work Dark Forces, will be published by Tor/Nightfire 11/2/21.
His website is at johnfdtaff.com. Follow him on Twitter @johnfdtaff.
He has appeared in Cemetery Dance, Eldritch Tales, Unnerving, Deathrealm, Big Pulp and One Buck Horror, as well as anthologies such as Hot Blood: Seeds of Fear, Hot Blood: Fear the Fever, Shock Rock II, Lullabies for Suffering, Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories, Behold!, Shadows Over Main Street 2, Horror Library V, Best of Horror Library, Dark Visions Vol. 1, Ominous Realities, Death's Realm, I Can Taste the Blood and Savage Beasts. His work will appear soon in The Seven Deadliest and I Can Hear the Shadows.
His novels include The Bell Witch, Kill-Off and the serialized apocalyptic epic The Fearing. Thunderstorm Books and Grey Matter Press will release a one-volume version of The Fearing in 2021, in limited edition hardcover, soft cover and digital. Short fiction collections include Little Deaths: The Definitive Collection and Little Black Spots, both published by Grey Matter Press.
Taff's novella collection, The End in All Beginnings, was called one of the best novella collections by Jack Ketchum and was a Stoker Award Finalist. His short "A Winter's Tale" was also a Stoker Finalist.
His upcoming anthology Dark Stars, a tribute to that seminal '80s work Dark Forces, will be published by Tor/Nightfire 11/2/21.
His website is at johnfdtaff.com. Follow him on Twitter @johnfdtaff.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 5, 2025
BWAF Score: 6/10
TL;DR: A six-pack of long, moody horrors that aims for the sublime and lands on solidly spooky. Taff blends cosmic dread with human messiness, and while a couple entries overstay the party, the collection’s best pieces hum with craft, warmth, and a mean little afterbite for readers who like their nightmares conversational and sad-funny.
John F.D. Taff is a steady hand in contemporary dark fiction, known for character-first dread and anthology-grade polish. If you’ve read his acclaimed collection The End in All Beginnings or his editorial work on Dark Stars, you’ll recognize the mix here: intimate voices staring down the big bleak sky, trying to joke with it and sometimes getting a joke back. This book, from Bad Hand Books, continues that lane with longer, slower-burn tales that prioritize mood over monster calories.
Six long stories, each a different doorway to the same black motel. A Vietnam vet nicknamed Asia brings home a mysterious, blue-eyed teen and unspools a banjo-haunted confession. A gray sea and the Carpathia whisper old-country rot toward Normandy. A carnival barker dares a kid to walk into trouble. A man mutters “She’s coming” and means it the worst way. A cop hears a sound in this world and another called Midnight Land. The capstone peers at endings with a pitiless, elegiac squint. The connective tissue is ordinary people nudged toward cosmic weather.
Taff’s secret weapon is voice. He writes talkers who feel like your uncle at a too-long wake, funny until they’re not. The opener’s Memphis motel sequence, with the battered Gibson Granada and the hungry kid soldier, is pure Americana grief that drifts, almost politely, into occult debt. The “Carpathia” piece marinates you in sickly foam and old-world dread without rushing the payoff, and “Midnight Land” turns a familiar lawman archetype into a metronome for crossing between realities. These stories are humane even as they twist the knife. The monsters are there, sure, but it’s the human bargains and reverse-psychology seductions that make you queasy.
The writing is plainspoken with pockets of lyric heat, lots of dialogue that feels lived-in, and openings that grab cleanly. The scene construction favors long, steady accretion over jump scares, so when turns come, they feel earned. Taff does image systems like a working musician: recurring notes of boats, bruised skies, and bad bargains. The downside is length and sameness of cadence; two stories push past their ideal runtime, and a couple of codas say out loud what the scene already told us. The noir shading helps, but the middle stretch could’ve used a surgical cut to keep the blood pressure up.
Grief, guilt, and the petty economies of power abound. Cosmic horror here isn’t just tentacles in the attic; it’s the knowledge that the universe will let you make a bad choice and then remember it with you forever. Body boundaries blur when identity falters; music becomes a ledger of debts; ships cleave gray water like fate cutting through a family. The aftertaste is sad salt and cigarette paper, the feeling of a promise you shouldn’t have made finally knocking on your door.
In a year stuffed with maximalist weird, this sits in the sober, grown-up wing where John Langan and Brian Evenson hang out, but with more talky warmth and barstool humor. It isn’t a career-redefiner, yet its best entries show why Taff gets blurbs from heavy hitters and keeps landing in “serious horror” conversations.
Competent, often affecting, occasionally luminous, with a couple shaggy middles keeping it from the year’s upper shelf. Final word: come for the voices and the human ache; stay if you’re patient with the dark.
Read if you want cosmic horror with beating hearts and busted knuckles; you like long stories that simmer instead of sprint; you live for character voices that sound like real people, not lore dumps.
Skip if you need constant escalation and creature-forward set pieces; you’re allergic to melancholy, memory, and moral hangovers; you prefer sharp 20-page bangers over novella-length mood pieces.
TL;DR: A six-pack of long, moody horrors that aims for the sublime and lands on solidly spooky. Taff blends cosmic dread with human messiness, and while a couple entries overstay the party, the collection’s best pieces hum with craft, warmth, and a mean little afterbite for readers who like their nightmares conversational and sad-funny.
John F.D. Taff is a steady hand in contemporary dark fiction, known for character-first dread and anthology-grade polish. If you’ve read his acclaimed collection The End in All Beginnings or his editorial work on Dark Stars, you’ll recognize the mix here: intimate voices staring down the big bleak sky, trying to joke with it and sometimes getting a joke back. This book, from Bad Hand Books, continues that lane with longer, slower-burn tales that prioritize mood over monster calories.
Six long stories, each a different doorway to the same black motel. A Vietnam vet nicknamed Asia brings home a mysterious, blue-eyed teen and unspools a banjo-haunted confession. A gray sea and the Carpathia whisper old-country rot toward Normandy. A carnival barker dares a kid to walk into trouble. A man mutters “She’s coming” and means it the worst way. A cop hears a sound in this world and another called Midnight Land. The capstone peers at endings with a pitiless, elegiac squint. The connective tissue is ordinary people nudged toward cosmic weather.
Taff’s secret weapon is voice. He writes talkers who feel like your uncle at a too-long wake, funny until they’re not. The opener’s Memphis motel sequence, with the battered Gibson Granada and the hungry kid soldier, is pure Americana grief that drifts, almost politely, into occult debt. The “Carpathia” piece marinates you in sickly foam and old-world dread without rushing the payoff, and “Midnight Land” turns a familiar lawman archetype into a metronome for crossing between realities. These stories are humane even as they twist the knife. The monsters are there, sure, but it’s the human bargains and reverse-psychology seductions that make you queasy.
The writing is plainspoken with pockets of lyric heat, lots of dialogue that feels lived-in, and openings that grab cleanly. The scene construction favors long, steady accretion over jump scares, so when turns come, they feel earned. Taff does image systems like a working musician: recurring notes of boats, bruised skies, and bad bargains. The downside is length and sameness of cadence; two stories push past their ideal runtime, and a couple of codas say out loud what the scene already told us. The noir shading helps, but the middle stretch could’ve used a surgical cut to keep the blood pressure up.
Grief, guilt, and the petty economies of power abound. Cosmic horror here isn’t just tentacles in the attic; it’s the knowledge that the universe will let you make a bad choice and then remember it with you forever. Body boundaries blur when identity falters; music becomes a ledger of debts; ships cleave gray water like fate cutting through a family. The aftertaste is sad salt and cigarette paper, the feeling of a promise you shouldn’t have made finally knocking on your door.
In a year stuffed with maximalist weird, this sits in the sober, grown-up wing where John Langan and Brian Evenson hang out, but with more talky warmth and barstool humor. It isn’t a career-redefiner, yet its best entries show why Taff gets blurbs from heavy hitters and keeps landing in “serious horror” conversations.
Competent, often affecting, occasionally luminous, with a couple shaggy middles keeping it from the year’s upper shelf. Final word: come for the voices and the human ache; stay if you’re patient with the dark.
Read if you want cosmic horror with beating hearts and busted knuckles; you like long stories that simmer instead of sprint; you live for character voices that sound like real people, not lore dumps.
Skip if you need constant escalation and creature-forward set pieces; you’re allergic to melancholy, memory, and moral hangovers; you prefer sharp 20-page bangers over novella-length mood pieces.
May 2, 2026
Shots fired at Lovecraft! It's one thing to complain about his personality and racism, but saying he has bad prose is wild to me. When I was a kid, I feel like Lovecraft was the first writer to make me care about a story's prose on a sentence to sentence basis rather than merely taking in the plot. Lovecraft is like Eminem: it's one thing to dislike him as a person, but it's another to try to pick a rap battle with him over his technical skills.
Anyway, I shouldn't let the anti-Lovecraft Afterward distract me from talking about the book. This volume is cosmic horror with strong social themes and a King-style storyteller approach to prose. Most stories start with one narrator, who then meets a new character who winds up narrating a super long story to them. Lots of good offerings, but my favorite story was “Fin de Siècle”.
Anyway, I shouldn't let the anti-Lovecraft Afterward distract me from talking about the book. This volume is cosmic horror with strong social themes and a King-style storyteller approach to prose. Most stories start with one narrator, who then meets a new character who winds up narrating a super long story to them. Lots of good offerings, but my favorite story was “Fin de Siècle”.
May 11, 2026
Some great storytelling here. I also read The End in all Beginnings, and enjoyed that too. I will certainly be picking up more of Taff's work.
March 26, 2026
I was unfamiliar with this author and am very impressed with these six short novellas, particularly "Her Mouth Was Filled With Secret Soup." Trippy!
November 11, 2025
Such a great introduction to Taff's work for me. The author has a great, old-school grasp of horror, touching on ghost stories, folk horror, and (most prominently in this collection) cosmic horror. His characters are incredibly fleshed out, which raises the stakes in stories where the stakes are already pretty damn high. Makes for a hell of a page-turner -- this one was hard to put down. "Fin de Siecle" and "All the Stars Die One by One" stand out as my favorite pieces -- I'm just a true sucker for the eldritch fear of the cosmos, and these two really hit my buttons in the right way.
If I had one complaint, it would be the proofreading -- particularly in the final, eponymous story. I don't hold the occasional typo or error against a book -- what fun would that be? But "All the Stars Die One by One" had enough mistakes that I couldn't help but feel distracted. Which is a real shame, because that story's metal as hell.
Overall, a great collection -- I'm going to have to dig through Taff's back catalogue now.
If I had one complaint, it would be the proofreading -- particularly in the final, eponymous story. I don't hold the occasional typo or error against a book -- what fun would that be? But "All the Stars Die One by One" had enough mistakes that I couldn't help but feel distracted. Which is a real shame, because that story's metal as hell.
Overall, a great collection -- I'm going to have to dig through Taff's back catalogue now.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews