Hazeland

Seven all-new stories from the streets of Hazeland. Stories that resist easy categories, falling between fantastic horror and weird fantasy and strange crimes. A weary and ragged veteran returns to his childhood neighborhood finding it gone but for one house and the ghosts within it need his help. A private detective digs at the secret behind gentrification in downtown and the fabricated and inhuman residents who'ved moved in. A girl at a mysterious block party confronts her past and future and a finds herself in a place that might not ever exist. A ragtag crew of filmmakers chases down the Bigfoot of the Southland and instead finds something terrible that wants to be set free. An industrial/goth singer flees to LA and finds that someone just like her already blazed the career she's seeking, haunting her assumed identity. Two luckless strongarm men try to rob the wrong bar on the wrong night, finding not easy money but a witch who is painfully bored. A book forger attends an auction where her former career is one of the featured lots, yet that is not the strangest thing for sale that night. 231 pages, trade format, $16.99

Cait MaCready wrote a book, a book that the powerful Queen of No Tomorrows knew about before it was even started and wanted to take for herself. The struggle between them destroyed the Queen and it very nearly destroyed Cait. Six months after, she's sleepwalking through life, trying to convince herself that she's recovered, that she's still alive. But she's hearing voices, not the Queen or the god she tried to call down. Something from the water, something that haunts the edge of sleep. Instead of giving in, Cait fights it but her strength can't hold out forever. When Cait crosses paths with an Appalachian witch in search of her lost brother and a local developer ends up dead with water in his lungs from Cretaceous seas and guts filled with fish that went extinct millions of years ago, Cait finds that denial and running away from what happened will only work for so long. Then the LAPD come calling and worse than that, something out of time is testing the boundaries of the shoreline and wondering if it is safe to come forth now. Waiting to see if it can stop being the Thing That Wants and instead become Thing That Takes. But how can Cait hold on when the Thing in the waters knows what she's afraid of? How can she resist the call of the drowned chorus? How can she fight when the thing can call anything that's touched the water, when the waters themselves remember all that has happened within them? And those waters are only rising.