A Prisoner's Cinema

by Justin Lee

"You ready to harrow Hell, Honey?" In this debut story collection from Justin Lee, the reader will descend into a phantasmagoria at once sensual, violent, grotesque, and unbearably tender. A hypnotist summons gods and unearths life-destroying memories. A demon haunts a child-murderer on the eve of his execution. And a mother’s fetus irrevocably fuses to her body like a conjoined twin. 

Hells of the heart and mind are dredged. Christ confronts Cthulhu. And beauty comes stained in blood.

Here, guilt and erotic compulsion and the hyperventilating dread of damnation give shape to a landscape haunted by monsters both timeless and eerily new, the familiar demons of ancient memory stalking alongside the disfigurements of the present. 

A Prisoner’s Cinema casts pitiless light on the shadows of souls who have forgotten God or stubbornly ignore Him. And yet there is grace—even for the monsters among us.

Genres: Horror, Fiction, Short Stories

264 pages, Hardcover

Published December 2, 2025

About the author

Justin Lee received his MFA from the University of California, Irvine, where he now lectures. His fiction has appeared in Juked, Gargoyle Magazine, and Three-Lobed Burning Eye Magazine. He is at work on a novel.

Reviews

[George Cross]

“I looked down at my body, at the red sheen of my abdomen, the fresh patriotic stripes on my white briefs, the shades of spent life jellied in lines down my legs.
I am beautiful, I thought. I am a god.”

1. A Prisoner’s Cinema
2. Lovecraft
3. Command These Stones
4. Scenes from a Long Gestation
5. Lightning in the Cloudless Sky
6. Worship in the Land of the Dead
7. The Crimson Hexagon
8. Gods and Spiders
9. Faintly Falling
10. Nicodemus
11. Pages from the Effects of Arthur Wayne Pierce
12. Never Find Us Here