Malcolm Devlin

Malcolm Devlin's And Then I Woke Up introduces readers to a world reeling from an unusual plague. Monsters now lurk in the streets, while terrified survivors arm themselves and roam the countryside in packs. Or perhaps something very different is happening. When a disease affects how reality is perceived, it’s hard to be certain of anything... Spence is one of the “cured” living at the Ironside rehabilitation facility. Haunted by guilt, he refuses to face the changed world until a new inmate challenges him to help her find her old crew. But if he can’t tell the truth from the lies, how will he know if he has earned the redemption he dreams of? How will he know he hasn’t just made things worse?

And Then I Woke Up

Rachel Swirsky

Scotto Moore

Joma West

Marion Deeds

Hiron Ennes

Aimee Pokwatka

Tordotcom Publishing is proud to present a sneak peek of its 2022 debut novel and novella authors. In modern day Los Angeles, a shadowy faction led by the Governor of California develops the arcane art of combat linguistics, planting the seeds of a future totalitarian empire in Scotto Moore's Battle of the Linguist Mages. Marion Deed's Comeuppance Served Cold is a hard-boiled historical fantasy of criminality and magic, couched in the glamour of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries. In the tradition of Mira Grant and Stephen Graham Jones, Malcolm Devlin’s And Then I Woke Up is a creepy, layered, literary story about false narratives and their ability to divide us. Celebrated short fiction author Rachel Swirsky returns with January Fifteenth, a gut-wrenching, near-future novella humanizing the experimental, practically science fictional policy of universal basic income. Margaret Atwood meets Kazuo Ishiguro in Joma West's Face, a sci-fi domestic drama that reimagines race and class in a genetically engineered society fed by performative fame. Meet the cure for the human disease in this dark and infectious debut from Hiron Ennes. Leech is Edgar Allen Poe mixed with Ridley Scott, Jeff VanderMeer with a side of Charlotte Brontë, The Thing from the thing's point of view. It will worm its way deep into your bones and hold you hostage to your own insatiable human fascination. Pepper Rafferty has lived her entire adult life knowing two things: that the famous artist, Ula Frost's, paintings are purported to harbor magical powers and that Ula Frost is the woman who gave her away. Aimee Pokwatka's Self-Portrait with Nothing is a heartstopping quest for truth written for a post-modern age with the world-melding of David Mitchell and the intimacy of Marilynn Robinson. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Tordotcom Publishing 2022 Debut Sampler

Rob is a Crescent kid. Born and raised in the sheltered circle of grey semis, built to house the employees of The City Works and their families. Under the eye of the reclusive Mr Olhouser, the residents of The Crescent go about their work, their lessons and their law, accompanied by the never-ending sound of The Works machinery deep under the ground.

When Lee Wrexler moves into The Crescent, he brings with him something dangerous from the outside. Not just a reputation for trouble, but an outside perspective that will show Rob that the home he always thought he had a measure of is a stranger and far more unsettling place than he could have imagined…

Malcolm Devlin’s Engines Beneath Us is a powerful and unsettling novella of how the individual spirit is crushed by the pressure to conform, from a contemporary master of weird fiction.

Engines Beneath Us

Unexpected Places to Fall From, Unexpected Places to Land

Unexpected Places to Fall From, Unexpected Places to Land crosses genres and dimensions, exploring the consequences of a rare cosmic anomaly. In the exact same moment, all possible versions of Prentis O'Rourke will cease to exist. By accident, by malice, by conflict, by illness - Prentis will not simply die. He will go extinct. These are the stories of the journeys we take and the journeys we wish we'd taken.Malcolm Devlin's second short story collection ranges from science fiction to folk horror as Prentis O'Rourke's demise echoes across the dimensions. Scientists, artists, ex-nuns, taxi drivers, time travellers and aliens - the same people living varied lives in subtly different worlds. Something unprecedented will happen, and it will colour them all.Crossing multiple realities, countless versions of ourselves, and shifting backwards and forwards through time, these are stories of forking paths and unexpected destinations - of flying and falling and getting up to try again.

Richard Thomas

Paul Tremblay

Alison Moore

Sarah Read

Gary Budden

Dan Coxon

Richard Hirst

Stephen Hargadon

Annie Neugubauer

When Eliot first spies the booth at the end of the pier, he wonders what it is. The canvas is faded, the striped pattern barely visible beneath years of dirt. The wooden boards are stained and bare. It's the crude, handwritten sign that draws him closer, makes him reach out to pull the curtain aside. Enter the Shadow Booth, it says, and you will never be the same again. Welcome to The Shadow Booth, a new journal of weird and eerie fiction, edited by Dan Coxon. Drawing its inspiration from the likes of Thomas Ligotti and Robert Aickman, The Shadow Booth explores that dark, murky hinterland between mainstream horror and literary fiction. Volume 1 contains stories by: Gary Budden, Dan Carpenter, Malcolm Devlin, Stephen Hargadon, David Hartley, Richard V. Hirst, Timothy J. Jarvis, Alison Moore, Annie Neugebauer, Sarah Read, Joseph Sale, Richard Thomas and Paul Tremblay.

The Shadow Booth: Vol. 1

The world is a far stranger place than we give it credit for. There, in the things we think familiar, safe, are certain aspects. Our fears and desires given form. Moments that defy explanation. Shadows in our home.In Malcolm Devlinaas debut collection, change is the only constant. Across nine stories he tackles the unease of transformation, growth and change in a world where horror seeps from the mundane. Childhood anxieties manifest as debased and degraded doppelgAAngers, fungal blooms are harvested from the backs of dancers and lycanthropes become the new social pariahs. The demons we carry inside us are very real indeed, but You Will Grow Into Them.Taking weird fiction and horror and bending them into strange and wondrous new shapes, You Will Grow Into Them follows in the grand tradition of Aickman, Ligotti and Vandermeer, reminding us that the mundane world is a much stranger place than it seems.

Malcolm Devlin

Books

Your next favorite book is out there