A Mythos of Monsters and Madness assembles thirteen loosely connected tales of terror from horror writer Jeremiah Dylan Cook.
Opening this collection are a pair of contest winning flash fiction pieces. “Feeding Time” follows a gravedigger protecting his community from what lurks in the woods, and “The Hungry Cemetery” details a university service obligation gone dreadfully wrong.
“Lost Vintage,” a short story, and “Legend Trip,” a work of flash fiction original to this book, offer glimpses at a haunted Victorian Mansion that materializes in different locations.
Two short stories appear in print for the first time within this collection, having previously been adapted for audio on The NoSleep Podcast. In “The House Flipping Find,” a renovation reveals an ancient journal connected to a monstrous curse, and in “The Abyss Within,” an autopsy exposes a staircase to a lightless underworld.
“Monster in the Mine” is a short story that identifies a potential source of evil for the town of Hazel Peak, a locale that appears in many of this book’s tales.
Women are driven to madness by exposure to occult objects in a duo of short stories, “Seven Entries in the Midnight Path,” and “Our King Needs Subjects,” which is also original to this collection.
“The Threshold,” a novelette about a mysterious door leading to horrifying realities connected to Robert W. Chamber’s The King in Yellow and H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, is compiled in one place for the first time here and trailed by three frightening short stories.
During the Old West era, strangers turned allies face an eldritch force awoken from the depths of a mine in “The Sheriff and the Samurai.”
“The Red Duke” presents three friends attending a concert where the audience is in for a gruesome performance followed by an encore of cosmic horror.
The sleeping god of R’lyeh surfaces in the final narrative of this book, “After He Wakes.”
Fans of John Carpenter Movies, NoSleep Reddit Threads, and Lovecraftian fiction should find a lot to be enthralled by in A Mythos of Monsters and Madness.
Jeremiah Dylan Cook is a horror writer whose work has been published by The NoSleep Podcast, Castle Bridge Media, Tales to Terrify, Ghost Orchid Press, Cabbit Crossing Publishing, Timber Ghost Press, The Lovecraft eZine, Hippocampus Press, Necronomicon Press, and Eye Contact. He won Purple Wall Stories February 2021 Writing Competition, and the Ligonier Valley Writers 2018 Flash Fiction Contest. While pursuing his bachelor’s degree at St. John’s University, Jeremiah received the Mario Mezzacappa Memorial Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry and Prose. He completed his Master of Fine Arts in Writing Popular Fiction at Seton Hill University. Jeremiah is an affiliate member of the Horror Writers Association and the Managing Editor of New Pulp Tales. You can follow him on twitter @JeremiahCook1, where he loves to discuss David Bowie, Resident Evil, and the works of H.P. Lovecraft.
I typically don’t read a ton of horror but these short stories hooked me. I’ve listened to the author before on the NoSleep podcast so I knew this book would be good, but reading the stories all together was something else entirely. A perfect mix of dark & creepy. I couldn’t put it down! I highly recommend, even if you won’t typically reach for horror. One of my favorite reads this year!