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Gargoyle Safari
“Marano’s range is astonishing. Here is an author who has steeped himself in life and literature, and who fashions his fictions into beautiful palimpsests that reveal both the underlayer of inspiration as well as the glowing epidermis that is his unique vision and voice.” —C.M. Muller (from his introduction)
“In Gargoyle Safari, Marano not only molds language—shifting style with the subgenre and influences of each story—but conjures it with the ease of some prose-wizard. Each tale carries its own distinct flavor, its own inventive approach, and a wild imagination that never strays into inaccessibility. The weirdness runs just deep enough to lend an umami-rich undertone, the kind that invites you to peel back the surface and discover what lurks underneath. Gargoyle Safari is one of the best collections I’ve read in years.” —C. F. Page, author of Native Fear and The Swallowed Town
Cults, criminals, monsters, and maniacs abound in the highly anticipated debut collection from a writer quickly becoming known as one of the most unique and stylish voices in contemporary dark fiction.
This collection gathers 12 of the author’s best and most celebrated stories published to date, as well as two brand new pieces, for a nightmarishly beautiful blend of hardboiled horror and occult noir ideal for fans of Keith Rosson, Johnny Compton, and Laird Barron. These tales meld terrors both subtle and shocking, classic and cutting-edge…
An infamous influencer’s grisly demise and alleged possession are investigated in The Mythologization of Tymber Prescott in Five Selected Photos (a 2022 Brave New Weird Award winner). Equal parts splatter and sentiment, ’Till the Road Runs Out (a Signal Horizon pick for best PseudoPod episodes of the year) sees a queer modern-day Bonnie and Clyde speeding toward their dream life run afoul of a feral cult that worships death. Elsewhere, readers will find an aging TV horror hostess forced to contend with the unexpected loss of her job and thwart the twisted fantasy of a violent predator on Halloween night; an ambitious student pursuing a missing author all the way to the grave (and beyond) using clues in the vanished man’s final manuscript; and a cynical photojournalist who discovers escalating horrors at the scene of a gruesome car crash, which may not be the accident it initially appears.
These are just a few of the macabre revelations awaiting those brave enough to explore the pages of Gargoyle Safari by Luciano Marano, whose writing has for years earned outspokenly generous praise from editors and readers alike.
Featuring a special introduction by C.M. Muller.
“Luciano Marano writes horror like an undercover reporter from the margins of a haunted world in mid-collapse. With a shrewd eye for detail, square-jawed prose, and the occasional fleck of gold in a pitch-black heart, Gargoyle Safari’s mad ones and monsters won’t let readers escape.” —Gordon B. White, finalist for the Shirley Jackson and Bram Stoker Awards
“In Gargoyle Safari, Marano not only molds language—shifting style with the subgenre and influences of each story—but conjures it with the ease of some prose-wizard. Each tale carries its own distinct flavor, its own inventive approach, and a wild imagination that never strays into inaccessibility. The weirdness runs just deep enough to lend an umami-rich undertone, the kind that invites you to peel back the surface and discover what lurks underneath. Gargoyle Safari is one of the best collections I’ve read in years.” —C. F. Page, author of Native Fear and The Swallowed Town
Cults, criminals, monsters, and maniacs abound in the highly anticipated debut collection from a writer quickly becoming known as one of the most unique and stylish voices in contemporary dark fiction.
This collection gathers 12 of the author’s best and most celebrated stories published to date, as well as two brand new pieces, for a nightmarishly beautiful blend of hardboiled horror and occult noir ideal for fans of Keith Rosson, Johnny Compton, and Laird Barron. These tales meld terrors both subtle and shocking, classic and cutting-edge…
An infamous influencer’s grisly demise and alleged possession are investigated in The Mythologization of Tymber Prescott in Five Selected Photos (a 2022 Brave New Weird Award winner). Equal parts splatter and sentiment, ’Till the Road Runs Out (a Signal Horizon pick for best PseudoPod episodes of the year) sees a queer modern-day Bonnie and Clyde speeding toward their dream life run afoul of a feral cult that worships death. Elsewhere, readers will find an aging TV horror hostess forced to contend with the unexpected loss of her job and thwart the twisted fantasy of a violent predator on Halloween night; an ambitious student pursuing a missing author all the way to the grave (and beyond) using clues in the vanished man’s final manuscript; and a cynical photojournalist who discovers escalating horrors at the scene of a gruesome car crash, which may not be the accident it initially appears.
These are just a few of the macabre revelations awaiting those brave enough to explore the pages of Gargoyle Safari by Luciano Marano, whose writing has for years earned outspokenly generous praise from editors and readers alike.
Featuring a special introduction by C.M. Muller.
“Luciano Marano writes horror like an undercover reporter from the margins of a haunted world in mid-collapse. With a shrewd eye for detail, square-jawed prose, and the occasional fleck of gold in a pitch-black heart, Gargoyle Safari’s mad ones and monsters won’t let readers escape.” —Gordon B. White, finalist for the Shirley Jackson and Bram Stoker Awards
- GenresHorror
198 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 12, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 26, 2026
Fourteen ways to prove we had it coming
BWAF Score: 7/10
TL;DR: Gargoyle Safari is what happens when a journalist’s eye, a horror nerd’s obsession, and a barely restrained feral energy collide at full speed. Marano can make you cry over a dying criminal, gag at celluloid intestines, and question your Instagram habits in the same sitting. This is a debut that bites and doesn’t let go.
In the title story of this collection, a witch named Leiko, having just been drugged and sucker-punched by the man she once loved, wakes up on a collapsing rooftop above a burning city and thinks, “We truly are on shaky ground here,” and then starts cackling at her own joke. That’s the energy of this collection. The ground is always giving way, the monsters are always closing in, and somebody is usually laughing, because what the hell else are you going to do?
Luciano Marano‘s debut collection gathers fourteen pieces that range across subgenres like a jukebox loaded with everything from delta blues to death metal. Social media horror told through Instagram photo descriptions. Splatterpunk road romance between queer outlaws fleeing a murder into a cult’s blood ritual. A prose poem narrated by the shotgun Hemingway used to kill himself. The tonal swings are massive, mostly intentional, and the fact that it holds together at all is a minor miracle of voice.
The opening story, “The Mythologization of Tymber Prescott in Five Selected Photos,” is a goddamn stunner. It maps the disintegration of a young influencer through five social media posts, described in the clinical, slightly reverential tone of a true crime retrospective. The horror sneaks in through details: a symmetrical bruise resembling a symbol, eyes darkening from green to black, fingernails grown long and ragged. By the final image, you feel like you’ve been scrolling through something you shouldn’t have seen. It mimics the sensation of watching a real person unravel online, unable to look away and unable to help.
Marano came to fiction by an unusual route. A Navy veteran from rural western Pennsylvania, he served as a Mass Communication Specialist before earning a photography degree at the Art Institute of Seattle. His first fiction appeared in the extreme horror anthology DOA III in 2017, alongside Jack Ketchum and Edward Lee, which is a hell of a debut neighborhood. His journalism earned him Feature Writer of the Year twice from the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association, and that eye for detail shows up constantly here. Before this collection, he published the werewolf novella trilogy The Ambush Moon Cycle through Raven Tale and Humbug, a noir riff on A Christmas Carol, through Crystal Lake. His short work has appeared in Nightscript, PseudoPod, and The Best New Weird Horror, which reprinted the Tymber Prescott story after it won the 2022 Brave New Weird Award. What’s striking is the range: he’s not a splatterpunk guy who occasionally gets literary, or a quiet horror writer who sometimes gets nasty. He seems committed to doing both, sometimes in the same paragraph.
The collection’s biggest flex is its refusal to repeat itself. “Struggle as You Will to Rise” is told entirely in the voice of a man visiting his girlfriend’s comatose husband, reading him King novels while casually describing how he’s systematically destroying the man’s family. It peels back layers of sociopathy until you realize you’re reading something truly vile, made worse by the narrator’s chatty self-amusement. “‘Till the Road Runs Out” goes the opposite direction: a love story between Hicks, a career criminal pushing forty, and Dakota, the young man he saved in prison. It’s violent and profane and shamelessly romantic, and when Hicks bleeds out in the passenger seat while Dakota screams at him to hold on, my chest got tight. You believe these people because they want specific, concrete things.
“Flickering Dusk of the Video God” is where the recurring obsession with monsters as cultural artifacts gets its most inventive treatment. A washed-up B-movie director returns to find his dead father’s video store has become the center of a cult worshipping something that manifests through VHS static. The prose mimics analog degradation: tracking lines in the narrator’s vision, reality stretching like warped tape. A woman who’s been “rewound” by the Video God has celluloid for guts. When he stabs her and film-strip entrails come unspooling out, it’s the kind of image you either love or throw the book for. I loved it.
There are weaker entries. “Shotgun Sunset” is too brief to do much beyond demonstrate Marano can write a pretty sentence. “Gobble,” about activists breaking into a genetically modified turkey farm, shifts from satire to carnage so abruptly you’re not sure what to feel. But then “My Eyes Are Closed to Your Light” hits, and it’s so fucking good it makes you forgive the uneven spots. Stacey, a former student hunting for her vanished writing professor in caves beneath a crumbling cemetery, is brilliant and ruthless, a woman whose worship of a man’s talent is inseparable from her plan to consume it. The refrain of “Salinger had Joyce Maynard / Kerouac had Edie Parker” accumulates weight until it sounds less like literary reference and more like a predator’s prayer.
The closing story, “Love Is a Ghost You See With Your Heart,” alternates between a writer’s nonfiction essay about horror and a domestic ghost story narrated by someone who murdered their spouse, keeping you guessing which voice is real until they collapse into each other. It’s metatextual in a way that could be insufferable but feels earned, because by that point Marano has spent the entire collection asking the same question: what do we need our monsters for?
His answer, stated outright in the title story’s final line, is that we need them badly. The gargoyles on the buildings, the creatures in the static, the black dogs running alongside the truck at midnight. Take them away and we become the worst versions of ourselves. Not a new idea, but he prosecutes it with so much energy and craft and genuine affection for the genre that it feels vital anyway. A confident, occasionally messy collection from a writer who has more to say. I’ll be listening.
BWAF Score: 7/10
TL;DR: Gargoyle Safari is what happens when a journalist’s eye, a horror nerd’s obsession, and a barely restrained feral energy collide at full speed. Marano can make you cry over a dying criminal, gag at celluloid intestines, and question your Instagram habits in the same sitting. This is a debut that bites and doesn’t let go.
In the title story of this collection, a witch named Leiko, having just been drugged and sucker-punched by the man she once loved, wakes up on a collapsing rooftop above a burning city and thinks, “We truly are on shaky ground here,” and then starts cackling at her own joke. That’s the energy of this collection. The ground is always giving way, the monsters are always closing in, and somebody is usually laughing, because what the hell else are you going to do?
Luciano Marano‘s debut collection gathers fourteen pieces that range across subgenres like a jukebox loaded with everything from delta blues to death metal. Social media horror told through Instagram photo descriptions. Splatterpunk road romance between queer outlaws fleeing a murder into a cult’s blood ritual. A prose poem narrated by the shotgun Hemingway used to kill himself. The tonal swings are massive, mostly intentional, and the fact that it holds together at all is a minor miracle of voice.
The opening story, “The Mythologization of Tymber Prescott in Five Selected Photos,” is a goddamn stunner. It maps the disintegration of a young influencer through five social media posts, described in the clinical, slightly reverential tone of a true crime retrospective. The horror sneaks in through details: a symmetrical bruise resembling a symbol, eyes darkening from green to black, fingernails grown long and ragged. By the final image, you feel like you’ve been scrolling through something you shouldn’t have seen. It mimics the sensation of watching a real person unravel online, unable to look away and unable to help.
Marano came to fiction by an unusual route. A Navy veteran from rural western Pennsylvania, he served as a Mass Communication Specialist before earning a photography degree at the Art Institute of Seattle. His first fiction appeared in the extreme horror anthology DOA III in 2017, alongside Jack Ketchum and Edward Lee, which is a hell of a debut neighborhood. His journalism earned him Feature Writer of the Year twice from the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association, and that eye for detail shows up constantly here. Before this collection, he published the werewolf novella trilogy The Ambush Moon Cycle through Raven Tale and Humbug, a noir riff on A Christmas Carol, through Crystal Lake. His short work has appeared in Nightscript, PseudoPod, and The Best New Weird Horror, which reprinted the Tymber Prescott story after it won the 2022 Brave New Weird Award. What’s striking is the range: he’s not a splatterpunk guy who occasionally gets literary, or a quiet horror writer who sometimes gets nasty. He seems committed to doing both, sometimes in the same paragraph.
The collection’s biggest flex is its refusal to repeat itself. “Struggle as You Will to Rise” is told entirely in the voice of a man visiting his girlfriend’s comatose husband, reading him King novels while casually describing how he’s systematically destroying the man’s family. It peels back layers of sociopathy until you realize you’re reading something truly vile, made worse by the narrator’s chatty self-amusement. “‘Till the Road Runs Out” goes the opposite direction: a love story between Hicks, a career criminal pushing forty, and Dakota, the young man he saved in prison. It’s violent and profane and shamelessly romantic, and when Hicks bleeds out in the passenger seat while Dakota screams at him to hold on, my chest got tight. You believe these people because they want specific, concrete things.
“Flickering Dusk of the Video God” is where the recurring obsession with monsters as cultural artifacts gets its most inventive treatment. A washed-up B-movie director returns to find his dead father’s video store has become the center of a cult worshipping something that manifests through VHS static. The prose mimics analog degradation: tracking lines in the narrator’s vision, reality stretching like warped tape. A woman who’s been “rewound” by the Video God has celluloid for guts. When he stabs her and film-strip entrails come unspooling out, it’s the kind of image you either love or throw the book for. I loved it.
There are weaker entries. “Shotgun Sunset” is too brief to do much beyond demonstrate Marano can write a pretty sentence. “Gobble,” about activists breaking into a genetically modified turkey farm, shifts from satire to carnage so abruptly you’re not sure what to feel. But then “My Eyes Are Closed to Your Light” hits, and it’s so fucking good it makes you forgive the uneven spots. Stacey, a former student hunting for her vanished writing professor in caves beneath a crumbling cemetery, is brilliant and ruthless, a woman whose worship of a man’s talent is inseparable from her plan to consume it. The refrain of “Salinger had Joyce Maynard / Kerouac had Edie Parker” accumulates weight until it sounds less like literary reference and more like a predator’s prayer.
The closing story, “Love Is a Ghost You See With Your Heart,” alternates between a writer’s nonfiction essay about horror and a domestic ghost story narrated by someone who murdered their spouse, keeping you guessing which voice is real until they collapse into each other. It’s metatextual in a way that could be insufferable but feels earned, because by that point Marano has spent the entire collection asking the same question: what do we need our monsters for?
His answer, stated outright in the title story’s final line, is that we need them badly. The gargoyles on the buildings, the creatures in the static, the black dogs running alongside the truck at midnight. Take them away and we become the worst versions of ourselves. Not a new idea, but he prosecutes it with so much energy and craft and genuine affection for the genre that it feels vital anyway. A confident, occasionally messy collection from a writer who has more to say. I’ll be listening.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 22, 2026
This collection really surprised me. I
had read Humbug, written by the
same author, which I highly
recommend, but this collection was
something totally different. Every
story spoke to me in different ways,
My absolute favorite was Struggle As
You Will to Rise. I can't really say
much about it without spoiling, but
you should buy the book for this story
alone! This collection is one that
deserves multiple reads.
had read Humbug, written by the
same author, which I highly
recommend, but this collection was
something totally different. Every
story spoke to me in different ways,
My absolute favorite was Struggle As
You Will to Rise. I can't really say
much about it without spoiling, but
you should buy the book for this story
alone! This collection is one that
deserves multiple reads.
February 18, 2026
After discovering Luciano Marano’s wonderful book Humbug over the holidays, I was thrilled to get a copy of his new collection, Gargoyle Safari. I’m certainly glad I did.
Gargoyle Safari is an exceptional horror anthology, and I DO love me a good anthology. These "bite-sized terrors" are perfect for reading before bed, though in this case, they are more likely to keep you awake with the lights on!
The collection ranges from the mysteriously supernatural, like the titular “Gargoyle Safari,” to the terrifyingly mundane, such as the deeply unsettling “Struggle as You Will to Rise,” and then to the darkly comic “Love Is a Ghost You See With Your Heart.” Anthologies often include at least one clunker, but this one held my attention from start to finish. Every entry earns its place, with a few true standouts.
The opening story, “The Mythologization of Tymber Prescott in Five Selected Photos”, is a masterclass in escalating dread, using a unique modern structure to tell a hauntingly familiar story. I want this as an A24 film immediately.
The title story delivers sharp urban fantasy, blending contemporary magic with shifting moral lines; its characters and worldbuilding feel expansive enough to anchor a novel, or even a series - the enigmatic main character Leiko seems to have countless , fascinating stories, just waiting to be told.
“Gobble” is a horrifying, SyFy-original-style romp, while “The Brief, Reluctant Retirement and Shocking Resurrection of Spooky Sophie” offers satisfying, gory fun.
Overall, I am really impressed with each of the tales here. They are all great examples of the varying flavors of modern horror, a beautiful buffet of terrors, from the mystical to the mundane, but each one more delicious than the last!
Gargoyle Safari is an exceptional horror anthology, and I DO love me a good anthology. These "bite-sized terrors" are perfect for reading before bed, though in this case, they are more likely to keep you awake with the lights on!
The collection ranges from the mysteriously supernatural, like the titular “Gargoyle Safari,” to the terrifyingly mundane, such as the deeply unsettling “Struggle as You Will to Rise,” and then to the darkly comic “Love Is a Ghost You See With Your Heart.” Anthologies often include at least one clunker, but this one held my attention from start to finish. Every entry earns its place, with a few true standouts.
The opening story, “The Mythologization of Tymber Prescott in Five Selected Photos”, is a masterclass in escalating dread, using a unique modern structure to tell a hauntingly familiar story. I want this as an A24 film immediately.
The title story delivers sharp urban fantasy, blending contemporary magic with shifting moral lines; its characters and worldbuilding feel expansive enough to anchor a novel, or even a series - the enigmatic main character Leiko seems to have countless , fascinating stories, just waiting to be told.
“Gobble” is a horrifying, SyFy-original-style romp, while “The Brief, Reluctant Retirement and Shocking Resurrection of Spooky Sophie” offers satisfying, gory fun.
Overall, I am really impressed with each of the tales here. They are all great examples of the varying flavors of modern horror, a beautiful buffet of terrors, from the mystical to the mundane, but each one more delicious than the last!
February 22, 2026
As a huge fan of short fiction, I have read thousands of short stories from hundreds of collections. I've never encountered a collection in which every story hit the mark - until now. This brilliant assemblage of wildly unique yet oddly cohesive tales runs the gamut of dark fiction from straight horror to urban fantasy and everything in between. Marano's prose is captivating and the characters leap off the page. I am truly amazed by his versatility and depth and I can't wait to see what he comes up with in the future. That being said, Gargoyle Safari is easily the best collection I have read in my 50+ years of devouring books! 🖤📚
March 13, 2026
Luciano Marano writes with a punchy crime lilt, but his fiction is pure horror. Gargoyle Safari is his debut collection and feels almost like a throwback to Matheson, King, and Barker—a classical that feels like a warm blanket. Lots of great stories here, both in premise and craft.
Highlights for me were: "Struggle As You Will to Rise", "The Mythologization of Tymber Prescott in Five Selected Photos", "The Brief, Reluctant Retirement and Shocking Resurrection of Spooky Sophie", "Black Dog Blues", "Bleeding Black", and "Love is a Ghost You See With Your Heart."
Highlights for me were: "Struggle As You Will to Rise", "The Mythologization of Tymber Prescott in Five Selected Photos", "The Brief, Reluctant Retirement and Shocking Resurrection of Spooky Sophie", "Black Dog Blues", "Bleeding Black", and "Love is a Ghost You See With Your Heart."
March 31, 2026
Gargoyle Safari is a throwback to horror's past in the best way. Luciano Marano has a strong literary voice that is grounded not in the the hazy, abstract horror so favored by authors of the day, but instead firmly planted in the stark, visceral horror of 80's paperbacks, and 90's horror anthology television shows. I could almost just hear the Crypt Keeper quipping and cackling after finishing some of these stories, which made me grin from ear to ear, let me tell you. I'll definitely be eagerly anticipating more from this author in the future.
Favorite stories include: The Mythologization of Tymber Prescott, Flickering Dusk of the Video God, My Eyes Are Closed to Your Light, and Love is a Ghost You See With Your Heart.
Favorite stories include: The Mythologization of Tymber Prescott, Flickering Dusk of the Video God, My Eyes Are Closed to Your Light, and Love is a Ghost You See With Your Heart.
May 14, 2026
A truly entertaining collection of stories. None were terribly scary to me, but they were all really well chosen. All of them did a lot to develop the individual world. Also, most of the characters are assholes. Which is entertaining. I think my favorite story is 'Till the Road Runs Out.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews