Böcker av James Champagne

Every city casts a shadow, some longer than others. And the city of Thundermist, Rhode Island casts one of the longest shadows of all. With a population of 40,000 people, it might not seem like the most populated place on earth, but every citizen there has a story to tell, some more sinister than others. Look past the city's pious Catholic façade and you shall see dead children floating face down in its sewers, witches corrupting susceptible minds with blasphemous books, and demons capering on the frescos of its haunted churches. It is a city where even the most innocent of objects-a quilt, a video game, a snow globe, a notebook-can act as a key that unlocks the doors to Doom, Delirium, and Death. The city has long since faded away: all that lingers is its nightmares, in the form of these ten testimonials from the damned, tales of strange and unproductive thinking. Will you open these pages and conduct an autopsy of your own on this dead city? But be warned: the scalpel that dissects the shadows is also the scalpel that cuts both ways.

If all books are gateways to other realities, then Grimoire is a portal into a realm of the most profound darkness, a twilight world of black flowers thriving under the monstrous shadows cast forth across time by the writers and poets of the 19th-century French Decadence, the art of the Surrealists, and the weird fictions of H.P. Lovecraft and his acolytes. Each of the eleven stories, or Neo-Goth Narratives, which make up this collection presents the reader with a worldview of cosmic nihilism, a morbid atmosphere haunted by the revenants of the fin de siècle practitioners of black magic. Those who lose themselves in these sunless and Satanic vistas will learn arcane words of power, experience forbidden knowledge, and encounter fantastic and grotesque alien beings whose forms and powers we are unable to comprehend, whose very presence can drive one to insanity. Grimoire is no mere book: it is a 90,000 word scream from the Abyss of non-existence, a descent into Hell itself, a dream journal of God's nightmares. Let the Danse Macabre begin!