Lanternfish Press – serie

“To this hour the image of Carmilla returns to my memory with ambiguous alternations—sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church. Sometimes, I start from a reverie, certain I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing-room door.”Isolated in a remote mansion in a central European forest, Laura longs for companionship—until a carriage accident brings another young woman into her life: the secretive and sometimes erratic Carmilla. As Carmilla’s actions become more puzzling and volatile, Laura develops bizarre symptoms, and as her health goes into decline, Laura and her father discover something monstrous.Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s compelling tale of a young woman’s seduction by a female vampire was a source of influence for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which it predates by over a quarter century. Carmilla was originally serialized from 1871 to 1872 and went on to inspire adaptations in film, opera, and beyond, including the cult classic web series by the same name.

After her father's untimely death, Theresa faced a rocky and unstable childhood. But there was one place she felt safe: her grandmother's house in Mason, a depressed former copper mining town in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Gram's passing leaves Theresa once again at the mercy of the lasting, sometimes destructive grief of her Ojibwe mother and white stepfather. As the family travels back and forth across the country in search of a better life, one thing becomes clear: if they want to find peace, they will need to return to their roots. The Mason House is at once an elegy for lost loved ones and a tale of growing up amid hardship and hope, exploring how time and the support of a community can at last begin to heal even the deepest wounds.

In this anthology, scholar of the fantastic David Sandner explores the first hundred years of Frankenstein’s influence. Dr. Frankenstein’s monster is one of the most iconic figures in English literature, popularized through decades of writing, film, and comedy. But even before the invention of film, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein profoundly impacted scores of writers, gathering force for the genre that would ultimately become what we know as science fiction.  This collection of short stories and excerpts from work published between 1818 to 1918 demonstrates what a pioneering myth Frankenstein has always been—from the very day when lightning first struck and it opened its eyes on the world. “Fear of age and death often creeps coldly into my heart; and the more I live, the more I dread death, even while I abhor life. Such an enigma is man—born to perish—when he wars, as I do, against the established laws of his nature.” –Mary Shelley, The Mortal Immortal

Algernon Blackwood has influenced weird fiction and horror writers down to the present day, with H.P. Lovecraft naming him among the modern masters of the genre.  East of Vienna, a canoe trip down the length of the Danube River turns strange and horrifying.  The two men traveling find it bad enough when they are forced to camp on an isolated island in the middle of nowhere while gale-force winds howl and waters rise. But soon, the threats take on a supernatural tinge. Wild sounds and visions in the night convince the men that they’re being hunted by beings from another dimension, who are not so much malicious as vastly, cosmically indifferent to their welfare–and hungry.  The Willows, which first appeared in The Listener and Other Stories (1907), is one of his best-known tales. Noted weird fiction writer Ruthanna Emrys enlivens the text with sprightly commentary and traces the streams of story to their headwaters in a poetic and penetrating introduction.

“I am writing this grief journal at the repeated advice of my therapist. I’m writing it to myself, as my own reader. I hate readers. Mostly because I hate myself.”You could say Kyle Jr. grew up in a dysfunctional family. That’d be an understatement. His mother’s wealthy family disinherited her for marrying the working-class Kyle Sr., and she’s never forgiven him (or KJ) for that.When his father’s suicide turns his life upside down, KJ fills his therapist-recommended grief journal with plenty of sarcasm, excerpts from sweary, punny high-school short stories, and fourth-wall-breaking asides. Through all the bravado and swagger, a portrait emerges of a young man confronting a dark past with genuine compassion and keen insight. He’s determined to reconcile with its legacy–and to survive.

A 2025 SHIRLEY JACKSON AWARD NOMINEEFrom the author of The Night Library of Sternendach comes a haunting sci-fi horror for fans of Jeff VanderMeer and Lina Rather.Dr. Therese Blake is a homebody archaeologist devoted to the history of planet Earth. But when her sister Lissy makes a stunning discovery near an abandoned colony on a distant exoplanet, the sisters team up to discover its secrets.Eerie, luminescent images cover the walls of an underground cavern. The glass garden looks like a payday to Lissy, who’s been struggling to turn a profit to keep her salvage crew fed and paid. Therese, however, insists on careful academic procedure. She can’t figure it out: Is the anomaly an artificial creation–or a living organism?As the anomaly’s mystery draws the sisters into an obsessive orbit, it turns out neither greed nor science can offer protection from its relentless gravity.

Orrie and Emma’s family has been cursed for centuries, and as the siblings approach adulthood, the curse is starting to rear its head once again. Their father, Aggie, returns from war a stranger. His arrival shatters the fragile semblance of normality the family has cultivated in his absence. One by one, sordid secrets claw their way to the surface, exposing the rot underneath.It’s not long before the deaths begin–and the voices in the walls grow louder.This contemporary retelling of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, set in the American heartland, takes an unflinching look at how foreign war scars the intimate landscape of home–not just in the days of ancient Greek tragedy but in every time and place.

In a distant future, a little girl named Anny makes toy mice out of scraps and dust. Anny has never seen a real mouse, just as she’s never seen the planet her family came from many generations ago. All she knows is her home, Tsedt: an isolated village of human colonists’ descendants and their friendly helper robots.But then one day the Amau arrive in Tsedt: plastic people with luminous eyes, intent on taking young humans to the distant city of Harbor to be educated. It’s not long before Anny is flown away to a place unlike any she’s seen before.

In the middle of the night, Daniel and his mother flee their burning home in Mississippi for a bus bound to Chicago. There they find brief peace and safety at his grandparents’ house. But Daniel’s mother cannot resist the siren call of a tumultuous relationship and soon abandons Daniel to go back to her abusive partner.At thirteen, Daniel believes he’s almost a man. So it’s his responsibility to rescue his mother. When an ancient spirit attached to his family becomes interested in his quest, their partnership will both test and temper the love between family members and the lengths they’re willing to go to save one another.

A guilty secret haunts young widow Else as she tries to drown her conscience among the glittering lights of 1920s Berlin.Else’s husband August returned from the Great War shattered in mind and body. Soon after, she finds herself a widow. Her best friend Hans, a gay man who also lost his partner in the war, joins her on a mission to disappear. There’s no work to be found in the devastated economy, nothing for them to build. But dance parties, cabarets, and hallucinatory nightclubs fill the tormented streets of the Weimar Republic, beacons in the night. Hans introduces Else to Mae, a sophisticated bonne vivante who teaches Else new ways to forget. But as inflation rises and the social order crumbles, Else finds that her dark secrets refuse to be blotted out. At last, she must reckon with her ghosts–or let Mae’s treacherous friendship destroy everything that is left of her.

In the gridlocked harbor of San Francisco's Barbary Coast, a ship hung with red paper lanterns draws crowds eager to gamble and drink. Aboard this red-lit ship, the fates of two young women will be altered irrevocably—and tied forever to that of an ancient lighthouse keeper who longs to be free. Set against the backdrop of Gold Rush–era San Francisco's Chinese immigrant community, Ship of Fates is a coming-of-age fairy tale that stretches across generations.

Born into abject poverty in the British Empire, our narrator aspires to a better life as a ship’s surgeon—until a tyrannical captain provokes a mutiny, forcing him into a life of piracy and eventually to a tropical commune of maroons called New Madagascar. Told through a series of confessions to those who visit the narrator during his imprisonment at Marshalsea, The Anatomist's Tale relates one man’s brush with the heady freedom of outlaws—and the price of returning to “civilization.”

Reader, have you ever wondered who struck fear into the heart of H. P. Lovecraft? It was Robert Chambers. Now, the terror visits you.  A wicked link in a terrifying lineage, the tales contained in The King in Yellow have inspired generations of American horror writers. Look toward unspeakable Hastur and tell yourself these are only tales. Behold the Yellow Sign and convince yourself that, after all—it’s only a book.   Welcome, dear reader, to Carcosa.  Edited with notes and an introduction by John Edgar Browning.

On the day that Minister Peters boards a train from South Carolina heading north, he has nothing left but ghosts: the ghost of his murdered wife, the ghost of his drowned daughter, the ghosts of his father and his grandmother and the people who disappeared from his town without trace or explanation. In the cramped car, Minister finds himself in close quarters with three passengers also joining the exodus from the South—people seeking a new life, whose motives, declared or otherwise, will change Minister's life with devastating consequences.

In a neighborhood known as the Bramble Patch, the Lyons family endures despite poverty, racism, and the ghoulish appetites of an underworld kingpin called the Barghest. As the years pass and the neighborhood falls into decay, along with the town that surrounds it, what’s left of the Bramble Patch will learn the saying is true: These bones are gonna rise again.

Award-winning fantasy author Fran Wilde returns to her roots in Clock Star Rose Spine, which brings together poems previously published in Uncanny Magazine, Fireside Magazine, and more with a selection of work never before published. In this collection illuminated with whimsical fountain pen illustrations, Wilde explores family histories, feminism, visual art, disability, mythology, and of course the sea with tangible yearning and keen insight.

In the aftermath of his mentor's death, grad student Adler is left to piece together—and clean up—the project she left behind: an adaptive and increasingly malevolent artificial intelligence, kept locked in a virtual "box" that’s no longer quite enough to keep him in check. As he tries to manage the AI and continue Dr. Kent's research, Adler soon discovers her sociopathic creation is determined to escape his enclosure to wreak havoc on the outside world.

As a firstborn son of a master craftsman, Henri Blanchard is expected to inherit the family barrel organ workshop, but he would prefer to make bobbin lace like his best friend Aimée. In an effort to put his misgivings aside and prove himself a worthy heir, he attempts dramatic feats that draw derision from the townsfolk and finally land him in jail, accused of murder. Threatened with the hangman’s noose, he is forced to flee the cozy village of Mireville—and discover a world beyond that may be big enough for even the rarest bird to find a nest.

Two stoic lobstermen harboring a secret affection. A lonely architect building houses and machines from the exoskeletons of scorpions in a desert town. A girl painfully growing into new wings. A flock of crows and an untidy vulture observe and collect these moments of human tenderness as they build an archive of brightness. Each love story becomes, in its own way, the end of a world—and the beginning of a new one.

When Dr. Van Vierlans receives an invitation from Mrs. Elizabeth Morgenstern to give a lecture at her island mansion off the coast of South Carolina, he doesn't think twice. There’s a generous honorarium, and he relishes the chance to revisit the Sea Islands, where he once studied the Gullah language. The lavish house he arrives at is strangely out of time. No other historians appear, nor does an audience, as he passes the time chatting in Gullah with the household servants. Just when his suspicions become difficult to ignore, Mrs. Morgenstern plies him with a sumptuous feast that distracts him from her true motives–which may prove more sinister than anything he’s prepared to imagine.