A Collection of Weird Tales

Foreword by Laird Barron

Cover artwork by Santiago Caruso

ISBN: 978-1-61498-083-4

308 pages

May 2014

EPUB e-book available

“The stories of Simon Strantzas exemplify a style of horror that might be compared to the novellas of T. E. D. Klein.”—Thomas Ligotti

“I gather Thomas Ligotti finds similarities in Simon Strantzas's style and my own. I don’t really see it myself -- but considering the source, and considering Strantzas's beautifully crafted stories, I must say I consider it a compliment.”—T. E. D. Klein

“Burnt Black Suns demonstrates Strantzas’s remarkable narrative skills, his unerring, feverish sense of pace, and his absolute willingness to hurl himself into the darkest ranges of his excellent imagination.”—Peter Straub

“In Burnt Black Suns Strantzas casts far into time and space to find the alien, and what comes back wriggling inside his net is ghastly.”—Adam Nevill

“With Burnt Black Suns, Strantzas continues a trajectory into deeper darkness . . . and in some respects the odyssey has brought him closer to the primal core of the tradition and its rawest, purest essentials.”—From Laird Barron’s foreword

In this fourth collection of stories, Simon Strantzas establishes himself as one of the most dynamic figures in contemporary weird fiction. The nine stories in this volume exhibit Strantzas’s wide range in theme and subject matter, from the Lovecraftian “Thistle’s Find” to the Robert W. Chambers homage “Beyond the Banks of the River Seine.” But Strantzas’s imagination, while drawing upon the best weird fiction of the past, ventures into new territory in such works as “On Ice,” a grim novella of arctic horror; “One Last Bloom,” a grisly account of a scientific experiment gone hideously awry; and the title story, an emotionally wrenching account of terror and loss in the baked Mexican desert. With this volume, Strantzas lays claim to be discussed in the company of Caitlín R. Kiernan and Laird Barron as one of the premier weird fictionists of our time.

Simon Strantzas is the author of the story collections Beneath the Surface (2008), Cold to the Touch (2009), and Nightingale Songs (2011). His stories have appeared in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, the Black Wings series, and elsewhere. He resides in Toronto, Canada.