For almost thirty years, Shirley Jackson Award-winning horror author Gemma Files has consistently served up tale after tale celebrating monstrosity in all its forms: the imperfect, the broken, the beautifully alien and the sadly familiar. Her characters make their own choices and take their own chances, slipping from darkness into deeper darkness yet never losing their humanity—not even when they’re anything but.
An embittered blood-servant plots revenge against the vampires who own him; a little girl’s best friend seeks to draw her into an ancient, forbidden realm; two monster-hunting sisters cross paths with an amoral holler-witch again and again, battling both mortal authorities and immortal predators. From the forgotten angels who built the cosmos to the reckless geniuses whose party drug unleashes a plague, madness, monsters and murder await at every turn. And in “The Speed of Pain,” sequel to the International Horror Guild award-winning story “The Emperor’s Old Bones,” we find that even those who can live forever can’t outrun their own crimes….