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Following the death of reclusive photographer Aphrodite Kamestos the police would like to talk to Cass Neary, but before they can bring her in, Cass accepts a job offer and hops on a plane.In Helsinki, she authenticates a series of disturbing but stunning images taken by a famous fashion photographer who has cut himself off from the violent Nordic music scene where he first made his reputation. Paid off by her shady employer, she buys a one-way ticket to Reykjavik, in search of a lover from her own dark past.But when the fashion photographer's mutilated corpse is discovered back in Finland, Cass finds herself sucked into a vortex of ancient myth and betrayal, vengeance and serial murder, set against a bone-splintering soundtrack of black metal and the terrifying beauty of the sunless Icelandic wilderness.In Available Dark, the sequel to the award-winning Generation Loss, Cass Neary finds her own worst fears confirmed: it's always darkest before it turns completely black.

Cass Neary is not afraid of living on the edge. A photographer whose shots of New York's punk scene in the seventies briefly earned her fame, cache, and a cultish kind of cool, Cass has spent much of her life since then in the dark, watching and waiting. But thirty years later she is alone, adrift, and falling rapidly into oblivion. So when an old acquaintance asks her to interview a fellow photographer - a notorious recluse who lives on an island off the coast of Maine - she accepts. There, she stumbles across a decades-old crime still claiming new victims. Amid this inhospitable hinterland, Cass comes to realise that her final shot might also be her shot at redemption. First published in 2007, Generation Loss is a mesmerizing literary crime thriller from the author of A Haunting on the Hill.

A groundbreaking voice in contemporary Latin American literature, María Fernanda Ampuero confronts machismo, inequity, and violence in her latest short story collection. An undocumented woman answers a job posting only to find herself held hostage, a group of outcasts obsess over popular boys drowned while surfing, and two girls suspect sinister behavior from the missionaries lodging in their home.Simultaneously terrifying and exquisite, Human Sacrifices is “tropical gothic” at its finest. Ampuero considers the decay and oppression beneath the surface of our humid and hostile world, where those on the margins must pay the price for the comfort and safety of the elite. These twelve stories contemplate the nature of exploitation and abuse, illuminating the realities of those society consumes and leaves behind.

Moving into an old and decaying house, Martin Swann discovers a box of video cassettes in the garden shed. One of them is a bootleg copy of a morbid and disturbing film by obscure French director, Jean Rien.The discovery leads Martin on a search for the director's other films, and for a way to understand Rien's filmography, drawing him away from his home and his lover into a shadowy realm of secrets, rituals and creeping decay. An encounter with a crazed film journalist in Gravesend leads to drug-fuelled visions in Paris - and finally to the Mexican desert where a grim revelation awaits.The Witnesses Are Gone is a first-hand account of a journey into the darkest parts of the underworld - a look behind the screen on which our collective nightmares play.

Andie can see no other way to escape a wedding than by hiding in a tree. Esther starts a new life in a King's Cross hotel with a bad-tempered ventriloquist dummy, while Gina finally leaves a group of infuriating friends - but not before providing them with a suitable replacement.Ways of Living is Gemma Seltzer's keen exploration of what it means to be a modern woman inhabiting the urban landscape. Ten stories of ordinary women going to extraordinary lengths to be understood, acting in bold and unpredictable ways as they map their identities onto London's streets.How do we speak and listen to each other? Who gets to talk? And what is the true power of quiet in a noisy world?

WINNER OF THE 2013 WORLD FANTASY AWARDEpisodes from the casebook of a police officer in the West Midlands:A young woman needs help in finding the buried pieces of her lover... so he can return to waking life.Pale-faced thieves gather by a disused railway to watch a puppet theatre of love and violence.Why do local youths keep starting fires in the ash woods around a disused mine in the Black Country?A series of inexplicable deaths uncover a secret cult of machine worship.When a migrant worker disappears, the key suspect is a boy driven mad by memories that are not his own.Among the derelict factories and warehouses at the heart of the city, an archaic god seeks out his willing victims.Blurring the occult detective story with urban noir fiction, Where Furnaces Burn offers a glimpse of the myths and terrors buried within the industrial landscape. First published in 2012, Joel Lane’s World Fantasy Award-winning collection is a true modern classic of weird fiction that cemented his place as one of the most important and distinctive British writers of the weird.

Simon and Marie can't seem to have a baby. They decide to flee the city for an idyllic village, where things, they tell themselves, must be better. But their new home is gloomy, threatening, tinged with tragedy - things have not been the same since the factory closed down and the broadcast antenna was erected. In the trees, no birds are singing, and people have started disappearing...The Country Will Bring Us No Peace is celebrated Quebecois author Matthieu Simard's first work to be translated into English and published in the UK; a strange and poignant novella exploring grief and its aftermath.

Deliverywoman is the stunning debut collection from Eva Wyles - thirteen short stories that dive into the complexities of human connection, the pursuit of meaning, and modern-day loneliness. Across a diverse cast of characters - from teachers and gas station workers to hedonistic revellers and wealthy gamers - Wyles explores the strange dimensions of our world and the dangers of ordinary life, with needle-sharp writing both real and surreal. Deliverywoman sits alongside A.M.Homes' The Safety of Objects and Ottessa Moshfegh's Homesick for Another World, announcing the arrival of a powerful new voice in contemporary fiction.

Named one of the ten best fiction books of 2018 by the New York Times en Espanol, Cockfight is the debut work by Ecuadorian writer and journalist Maria Fernanda Ampuero.In lucid and compelling prose, Ampuero sheds light on the hidden aspects of the home: the grotesque realities of family, coming of age, religion, and class struggle. A family's maids witness a horrible cycle of abuse, a girl is auctioned off by a gang of criminals, and two sisters find themselves at the mercy of their spiteful brother. With violence masquerading as love, characters spend their lives trapped reenacting their past traumas.Heralding a brutal and singular new voice, Cockfight explores the power of the home to both create and destroy those within it.

'The problems started the day we moved to Hastings...'When Gareth E. Rees moves to a dilapidated Victorian house in Hastings he begins to piece together an occult puzzle connecting Aleister Crowley, John Logie Baird and the Piltdown Man hoaxer. As freak storms and tidal surges ravage the coast, Rees is beset by memories of his best friend's tragic death in St Andrews twenty years earlier. Convinced that apocalypse approaches and his past is out to get him, Rees embarks on a journey away from his family, deep into history and to the very edge of the imagination. Tormented by possessed seagulls, mutant eels and unresolved guilt, how much of reality can he trust?THE STONE TIDE is a novel about grief, loss, history and the imagination. It is about how people make the place and the place makes the person. Above all it is about the stories we tell to make sense of the world.

Ten tragicomic tales of environmental and personal disaster from the margins of town and country.A troubled hipster is seduced by an electricity pylon.Sinister omens manifest in a supermarket car park.A motorway bridge becomes a father.Malevolent bacteria plague a polar icebreaker.A bioengineered abomination lurks in a Gloucestershire railway terminusThe weekly bin collection pushes a man over the edge.A former squatter clings to her home on a crumbling cliff.Joyriders are foiled by Anglo Saxon floodwaters.Vampiric entities stalk B&Q.And fiery catastrophe comes to the zoo.Gareth E. Rees's first collection of short fiction explores lives on the verge of breakdown, where ordinary people are driven to extremes by the effects of late capitalism and ecological collapse.

Cocker spaniel by his side, Gareth E. Rees wanders the marshes of Hackney, Leyton, and Walthamstow, avoiding his family and the pressures of life.He discovers a lost world of Victorian filter plants, ancient grazing lands, dead toy factories and tidal rivers on the edgelands of a rapidly changing city.As strange tales of bears, crocodiles, magic narrowboats, and apocalyptic tribes begin to manifest, Rees embarks on a psychedelic journey across time and into the dark heart of London itself.First published by Influx Press in 2013, Marshland is a deep map of the east London marshes where nothing it as it seems, blending local history, folklore, and weird fiction in a genre-straddling classic of contemporary place writingThis fully revised and expanded 2024 edition features brand-new material and never before-seen photographs from the author’s archive.

'Nothing ever changes. We just tell ourselves it does.'Set in a post-industrial landscape of the present, the near future, and the imagined, Joel Lane's seminal collection The Lost District explores human encounters with the unknown: sexual discovery, drug-inspired visions, the lonely paths of madness, and the shadow realms on the other side of death.A neighbourhood fades into corrupt echoes of itself; a porn actor's scars reveal the forces controlling his life; a musician is haunted by the madness of a deceased singer; and a man literally follows his ex-lover to the end of the world.Ranging from grim urban horror to strange erotic fantasies to bitter allegories of loss and exploitation, the stories in The Lost District link the hidden places in the urban and small-town landscapes to the secret spaces inside all of us.First published in the USA in 2006, and long out-of-print, The Lost District has never been published in the UK until now, further enforcing Joel Lane's reputation as one of the most significant and distinctive British writers of the weird.

Above Sugar Hill is an unforgettable collection of short stories set in Washington Heights, New York City. Located between 145th and 181st Street - roads no one from outside the neighbourhood is expected to visit. It is a visceral, vital work of site-specific fiction. These tales of New York take place between 1973 and 2001 - a Puerto Rican Independentista fends off the FBI, a young girl spots Marilyn Monroe more than ten years after Monroe's suicide, an opera-singing housing activist goes missing and presumed to have been murdered. Above Sugar Hill is a literary map of Upper Manhattan memories, uncompromising narratives and complicated truths.

After slipping through the cracks of modern life and into the amoral underground beyond work-a-day society, George F finds himself at the heart of London's political frontline, where anarchy, alcohol and addiction stalk the streets of a different city to the one you know. From life on the street to behind the barricades, from the occupation of derelict buildings to inevitable evictions and confrontation with law and order, from euphoria to despair, Total Shambles follows the journey of an idealistic writer as he tries to thrive and survive in the contentious world of squatting in London.

One November morning, Tom Jeffreys set off from Euston Station with a gnarled old walking stick in his hand and an overloaded rucksack. His aim was to walk the 119 miles from London to Birmingham along the proposed route of HS2. Needless to say, he failed. Over the course of ten days of walking, Jeffreys meets conservationists and museum directors, ery farmers and suicidal retirees. From a rapidly changing London, through interminable suburbia, and out into the English countryside, Jeffreys goes wild camping in Perivale, ees murderous horses in Oxfordshire, and gets lost in a land ll site in Buckinghamshire. Signal Failure weaves together poetry and politics, history, philosophy and personal observation to form an extended exploration of people and place, nature, society, and the future. In part, Signal Failure is the story of the author's multiple shortcomings - his inability to understand the city he lives in, to forge a meaningful relationship with his home-county hometown, to emulate those great nature writers he admires so much, to put up a tent or read a map.It is also a wide-ranging critique of humanity's most urgent failures: of capitalism, of community, of the city and the suburbs, of architecture and agriculture, of bureaucratic democracy, and, in the end, of our age-old failure to nd our place in the world we live in.

The year 2036; in a broken down and dysfunctional post-Federal America, Ex-Marine Frank Dubois journeys from LA to Detroit on a mission to find redemption from his past actions in the 20 year Syrian war.In present day Hollywood, a British film director hustles to get his movie made in a cut throat and sycophantic business. Somehow, these two worlds collide.Bindlestiff begins with a simple image of a man mending the hole in his shoe with some glue and a cut off piece of rubber. And from there explodes into a broiling satire on race, identity, family, friendship, war, peace, sex, drugs but precious little rock and roll.Part screenplay, part novel, Bindlestiff is about the power of storytelling and how we use narratives to make sense of the world."If it's broke, fix it."

"We architects must be idealists. We construct not just individual buildings, but whole cities. We plan cities, and in doing so, change lives."Plastic Emotions is a novel based on the true life story of Minnette de Silva -forgotten feminist icon and the first female Sri Lankan architect. In a gripping, elegant and lyrical story, Shiromi Pinto paints a complex picture of de Silva, charting her affair with infamous Swiss modernist Le Corbusier and her efforts to build a post-independence Sri Lanka that is heading towards political and religious turmoil.Moving between London, Chandigarh, Colombo, Paris and Kandy, at a time of communal violence in Sri Lanka, the rise of the civil war, and troubles with building a brand new city in north India, Plastic Emotions explores the life of a young, trailblazing south Asian woman at a time of great political turbulence across the globe.

Berlin: long-celebrated as a city of artists and outcasts, but also a city of teachers and construction workers. A place of tourists and refugees, and the memories of those exiled and expelled. A city named after marshland; if you dig a hole, you'll soon hit sand.The stories of Berlin are the stories BUILT ON SAND. A wooden town, laid waste by the Thirty Years War that became the metropolis by the Spree that spread out and swallowed villages whole. The city of Rosa Luxemburg and Joseph Roth, of student movements and punks on both sides of the Wall. A place still bearing the scars of National Socialism and the divided city that emerged from the wreckage of war. BUILT ON SAND centres on the personal geographies of place, and how memory and history live on in the individual and collective imagination. This novel offers a portrait of a city three decades on from the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the legacy of that history in a city that was once divided but remains fractured and fragmented.

Car parks: commonplace urban landscapes, little-explored and rarely featured in art and music, yet they shape the aesthetics of our towns and cities. Hotspots for crime, rage and sexual deviancy; a blind spot in which activities go unnoticed. Skateboarding, car stunts, drug dealing, dogging, murder.Gareth E. Rees believes that the retail car park has as much mystery, magic and terror as any mountain, meadow or wood. He's out to prove it by walking the car parks of Britain, journeying across the country from Plymouth to Edinburgh, much to the horror of his family, friends - and, most of all - himself. He finds Sir Francis Drake outside B&Q, standing stones in a retail park, and a dead body beside Sainsbury's.In this darkly satirical work of non-fiction, Gareth E. Rees presents a troubling vision of Brexit Britain through a common space we know far less about than we think.

London, a city of constant transition, transaction, translation. London does not exist; London is a language without a place and it is the aphasic city; it's the mother of all languages.Lucifer Over London is a new anthology nine narrative essays written by a host of international prize-winning authors including Chloe Aridjis, Viola di Grado, Xiaolu Guo, Joanna Walsh and Zinovy Zinik.First published in Italy by Humboldt Books, Lucifer Over London is now appearing in English for the first time. This is a version of London as seen from the immigrants of recent migrations, of deportations to come, from those who create London even as they contradict it.

HOLD TIGHT is the book that kick started the 'Grime Library'. Bursting into bookshops in July 2017 to rave reviews and a sold out event at Rough Trade East, HOLD TIGHT paved the way for Grime-related books such as Wiley's Eskiboy (Penguin 2017), Dan Hancox's Inner City Pressure (4th Estate 2018), and DJ Target's Grime Kids (Trapeze 2018, now being made into a television series).This new edition of HOLD TIGHT features new chapters for 2018, a brand new introduction from Boakye and a brand new cover. Celebrating over sixty key songs that make up Grime's DNA, Jeffrey Boakye explores the meaning of the music and why it has such resonance in the UK. Boakye also examines the representation of masculinity in the music and the media that covers it.Both a love letter to Grime and an investigation into life as a black man in Britain today, HOLD TIGHT is insightful, very funny and stacked with sentences you'll want to pull up and read again and again.

What happens when we leave the places we’re from? What do we lose, who do we become, and what parts of our pasts are unshakeable?Linda Mannheim’s second short story collection tells the stories of twelve people who have relocated – both voluntarily and involuntarily. Opening with the Miami-set thriller 'Noir', these exquisitely rendered stories will leave you reeling.This Way To Departures is a deeply affecting portrait of American society and the constant search for a place to call 'home'.

Isabelle is alone in Strasbourg. The day after her partner leaves to travel abroad, she receives news of her father's suicide, his body found hanging in a park back home in Crystal Palace. Isabelle misses her flight back to London and a new university job, opting to stay in her partner's empty flat over the winter.Obsessed with the many strange coincidences in Strasbourg's turbulent history, Isabelle seeks to slowly dissolve into the past, succumbing to visions and dreams as she develops her meticulous research about the city. Stalked by the unnerving spirit of the Erl-King she fears something else has died along with her father; the spectres of Europe communicating a hidden truth beneath the melancholy.How Pale the Winter Has Made Us rummages through the crumbling ruins of a life, building cartographies of place and death under a darkening sky.

A lonely woman invites danger between tedious dates; a station guard plays a bloody game of heads-or-tails; an office cleaner sneaks into a forbidden room hiding grim secrets.Compelling and provocative, Annabel Banks's debut short fiction collection draws deeply upon the human need to be in control - no matter how devastating the cost.

In this dark and toothsome collection, Anna Vaught enters a strange world of apocryphal feasts and disturbing banquets. Famished explores the perils of selfish sensuality and trifle while child rearing, phantom sweetshop owners, the revolting use of sherbet in occult rituals, homicide by seaside rock, and the perversion of Thai Tapas. Once, that is, you've been bled dry from fluted cups by pretty incorporeals and learned about consuming pride in the hungriest of stately homes. Famished: seventeen stories to whet your appetite and ruin your dinner.

"A return - this seems to be one of the things I'm expected to write about. And now that I return, now that I find myself here, I haven't even left the airport and I'm already toying with the idea of writing a return, perhaps just to surrender."Nine stories. Nine ways of not being at home. Nine confrontations to the limits of fiction and memoir. Jolts is a playful and honest exploration of the joys and sorrows of lives lived in-between places. A collection that travels across time, space, and language, in order to deliver the gospel of the Latin American short story.Sdrigotti rises to peak form with JOLTS, following a series of cult publications - Shitstorm, Dysfunctional Males and Triptico. With this book he joins the likes of Eley Williams and Clare Fisher as another special Influx Press short story writer.

Between Beirut And The Moon is the exuberant and hilarious debut from the hugely talented young Lebanese author, Naji Bakhti.A young boy comes of age within the confines of post-civil-war Beirut, with conflict, and comedy lurking round every corner.Adam dreams of becoming an astronaut but who has ever heard of an Arab on the moon? He battles with his father, a book-hoarding journalist with a penchant for writing eulogies, his closest friend, Basil, a Druze who is said to worship goats and believe in reincarnation, and a host of other misfits and miscreants in a city attempting recover from years of political and military violence.Adam's youth oscillates from laugh out loud escapades, to near death encounters, as he struggles to understand the turbulent and elusive city he calls home.