New dark-fantasy, folk-horror novel, Trail of Shadows, by Mike Allen, uncovers the power of spirits and nightmares in Appalachia. Publishing October 7, 2025.

Two-time World Fantasy Award finalist Mike Allen spins a tale of spirit beings, serial killers, and supernatural horrors.

Nathan's freshman year in college delivers alternative rock, relationship adventures, and a plague of waking nightmares. He flees campus for the Appalachian Trail, hoping to leave his personal demons behind. But a scream for help from a boy made of shadows rips his reality to pieces.

The rescue of the boy ends in a blood-soaked struggle that teaches Nathan monsters are real. And that he is one of them. Forgotten powers and hungers from his childhood manifest in claws that can tear apart flesh and spirit.

​But wonders soon bring terrors as the revelation of Nathan's true nature exposes his existence to enemies he never knew he had. As he desperately seeks the ancestor who can unlock the secrets of his heritage, a shape-shifting mass murderer stalks close behind. And even worse things await him in the shadows of the spirit realm.

Mike Allen wears many creative hats, at least one of them tailor-made by his wife and partner-in-crime Anita. An author, editor, and publisher of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, Mike has written, edited, or co-edited thirty-nine books, among them this dark fantasy novel Trail of Shadows; his sidearms, sorcery, and zombies sequence The Black Fire Concerto and The Ghoulmaker’s Aria; and his latest horror collection Slow Burn. Unseaming and Aftermath of an Industrial Accident, his first two volumes of horror tales, were both finalists for the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Story Collection, and his dark fable “The Button Bin” was a nominee for the Nebula Award for Best Short Story. Another collection, The Spider Tapestries, contains experiments in weird science fiction and fantasy. As editor and publisher, Mike has been nominated twice for the World Fantasy Award: first, for his anthology Clockwork Phoenix 5, the culmination of the Clockwork Phoenix series, showcasing tales of beauty and strangeness that defy genre classification, and for Mythic Delirium, the magazine of poetry and fiction he edited for twenty years. He’s also a three-time winner of the Rhysling Award for poetry. His six poetry collections include Strange Wisdoms of the Dead, a Philadelphia Inquirer Editor’s Choice selection, and Hungry Constellations, a Suzette Haden Elgin Award nominee. With Anita, he runs Mythic Delirium Books, based in Roanoke, Virginia. Their cat Pandora assists.

Broken Eye Books is an independent press, here to bring you the odd, strange, and offbeat side of speculative fiction. Our stories tend to blend genres, highlighting the weird and blurring its boundaries with horror, sci-fi, and fantasy. More information can be found at brokeneyebooks.com or by contacting Scott Gable <[email protected]>.

Interested in 22 short horror reads on the cheap? For just one more day, the Horror Short Reads StoryBundle is available (through February 27). This is a terrific book bundle deal with deliciously twisted books from both Broken Eye (including Pretty Marys All in a Row, Catfish Lullaby, and The Obsecration) and other wonderful publishers.

Snag your copies today!

​Broken Eye Books is publishing the collected fiction of S.P. Miskowski’s Skillute Cycle. This omnibus edition collects four previously published works—the novel Knock Knock and the novellas Delphine Dodd, Astoria, and In the Light—along with a brand-new novelette.
 
Late 1960s in the backwater town of Skillute, WA. Three bored young girls unwittingly unleash a malevolent spirit. The girls and the townsfolk will never be the same.
 
The Complete Skillute Cycle by S.P. Miskowski will be available in 2025. Stay tuned for more information.
 
S.P. Miskowski is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, for literature and for drama. Her books have been recognized with four Shirley Jackson Award nominations and two Bram Stoker Award nominations. Her stories have appeared in many anthologies including Haunted Nights, Human Monsters, Looming Low I and II, The Madness of Dr. Caligari, Uncertainties III, October Dreams 2, The Best Horror of the Year Vol. 10, and Darker Companions: 50 Years of Ramsey Campbell, and in magazines including Identity Theory, Black Static, Vastarien, Supernatural Tales, and Cosmic Horror Monthly. Her grunge noir novel I Wish I Was Like You was named This Is Horror “Novel of the Year 2017” and received a Charles Dexter Award from the readers of Strange Aeons.
 
Praise for the Skillute Cycle
"... a fascinating meditation on the nature of horror." (Molly Tanzer, author of A Pretty Mouth, on Knock Knock)
 
"... the story achieves a momentum all its own, rushing headlong to a shattering finale, and the prose, which Miskowski uses with such care and accuracy throughout, in the final pages attains a fever dream intensity." (Peter Tennant for Black Static, reviewing Knock Knock)
 
"... not only expands and illuminates the tragedy in the brilliant novel, Knock Knock, but also further proves Miskowski possesses that talent most enviable in a writer: she makes you BELIEVE." (Simon Strantzas, author of Nightingale Songs, on Delphine Dodd)
 
"... rich in realistic detail, it also uses storytelling and dreams to produce a sense of a world of strange and alarming mysteries lying just beyond our own and always ready to break through." (David Longhorn, editor of Supernatural Tales, reviewing Delphine Dodd)
 
"... part Hitchcock, part David Lynch, and all Miskowski's distinctive, thoughtfully crafted, slow-burn literary terror." (Molly Tanzer, author of Vermilion, on Astoria)
 
"... a white-knuckle terror trip across the landscape of the Pacific Northwest […] Miskowski is unafraid to plumb the darkest impulses of the female psyche […] We can bolt the door and turn on the light, but in the end, Miskowski warns us, no matter what we do, our demons are coming for us." (Lynda E. Rucker, author of The Moon Will Look Strange, on Astoria)
 
"... a cleverly constructed tale [...] a fitting final chapter to a work of great power and authority..." (Peter Tennant for Black Static, reviewing In the Light)
 
"... ​a flair for imbuing mundane things with a strange sense of menace [...] a beansprout grown in a cup and a moth fluttering around a child's bedroom take on subtle qualities of malevolence..." (Rob Russin for Geeks Out, reviewing In the Light)
 
"A wonderful and fitting end to the Skillute Cycle, though it's a shame to say goodbye. Full of beauty and life and dark magic, the Skillute books are a joy to read." (Alison Littlewood, author of The Unquiet House, on In the Light)
 
Broken Eye Books is an independent press, here to bring you the odd, strange, and offbeat side of speculative fiction. Our stories tend to blend genres, highlighting the weird and blurring its boundaries with horror, sci-fi, and fantasy. More information can be found at www.brokeneyebooks.com.

Broken Eye Books is publishing the novel Better Living Through Alchemy, an occult mystery set in the strange, rainy streets of Seattle, by Evan J. Peterson. Coming this summer.

Kelly Mun is a private detective... with an uncanny sense of smell. She runs Non-Linear Investigations with her cousin Critter, using psychic and esoteric methods to try to earn a living. When a mysterious businesswoman hires them to find the source of a deadly new street drug called bardo, Kelly's life gets even stranger than usual in this occult-noir Seattle. 

The monsters are incidental.

Our upcoming year is shaping up to be amazing with these four new titles. The Obsecration is at the printer now, and the others will be soon to follow. All are available for pre-order.

The Obsecration by Matthew M. Bartlett
It’s Leeds. It's 2018. And the patrons in the Look Diner await their meals, drawn by something greater than hunger, something stronger than the need for shelter from the oppressive heat and humidity of summer. Waitresses hustle. Cooks sharpen knives and light burners, giving birth to blue blossoms of flame. Something is happening tonight. Something is stirring in the greased air sliced by whirling ceiling fans. You and I, we have a corner booth. A front row seat. 

Who Lost, I Found by Eden Royce
Who Lost, I Found is a collection of Black Southern speculative fiction from author Eden Royce, who weaves together several subgenres like a sweetgrass basket: Southern Gothic, weird fiction, dark fantasy, and folk horror. All inspired by her Gullah Geechee heritage and its cautionary stories, and the hoodoo that runs throughout, whether everyone acknowledges it or not.

Power to Yield and Other Stories by Bogi Takács​
Power to Yield is a collection of ten pieces spanning speculative genres from science fiction to the New Weird, featuring chaotic interspecies cooperation, an AI child discovering Jewish mysticism, rental apartments that drink your blood—and a novella focusing on neurodivergent people trying to survive on a planetoid where thoughts shape reality.

Trail of Shadows by Mike Allen 
Nathan didn’t understand the warning any more than he understood his newfound abilities or the transformation that allowed him to phase through walls, that enabled him to stalk through the mind-warping spaces of the spirit realm. Only a long-repressed memory from his grandmother’s farm in the Appalachian hills offers any hint of his heritage.

​New weird fiction novel from Edward Morris, Alphabet of Lightning, tries to fix our war-raged future by diving into our shadowy past. Centuries to come, humanity has blown itself off the map with nuclear weapons but has slowly rebuilt. Those who rule from the megalopolis of the former American Eastern Seaboard have created a perpetual, clean energy source that could eliminate war. But one rogue soldier, drummed out of the service, hacks the device for personal gain—to travel through time and become a god.

Typhon Demarest is followed through time by the Illegitimi, whose operatives protect the accumulation of information. But time-travel works strangely, and they must spawn backward, into the bodies of their ancestors.

Humanity’s only hope is born into a severely disabled miner’s kid in rural central Pennsylvania in the 1920s, and this Shamus Connelly has a very special gift that has a habit of keeping him alive while also nearly killing him—just like his endless curiosity.

The kid wants to be a detective when he grows up, and in this first book of the There Was a Crooked Man series, he uncovers a mystery beyond anyone’s wildest nightmares and sets the stage for this worlds-spanning, centuries-deep tour de force:

https://www.brokeneyebooks.com/store/c52/Alphabet_of_Lightning.html

From the Author: “When I was a kid, I had a reading stack for science fiction and a reading stack for horror that were neck-and-neck. And one day, a story I was trying to write about some local legends in my hometown just clicked in my head. The story was so big that a grownup would have to write it. So I decided to keep at it until I became one. Very simple synthesis: what if all of capitalism and colonialism and the horrible things we’ve done to each other and ourselves and the planet could be traced back to one guy? What if we all were, in fact, Great Cthulhu? How would that look? How did that come to be?

“The Crooked Man embodies cartoonist Walt Kelly’s classic line, ‘We have met the enemy, and he is us.’ He is the uncanny valley we all feel when we see human beings do inhuman things. The horror of this series lies in that deliberative process. And what it’s like for a child who just had that particular nightmare in any form to walk back out onto Main Street, USA, the next morning after the dream and see all the ways the Crooked Man is truly real. And how any of us are supposed to survive that knowledge—or this world.

“It’s very simple. You wake up, and you write down the first sentence of what happened in the dream. And the last sentence. Then you remember everything else. And if you’re really lucky, the person you take into your confidence about it expresses in total shock, ‘I had that dream, too.’”

Praise for Alphabet of Lightning

• “Edward Morris is a fearless writer, expanding the boundaries of what is possible with the weird. Read him.” (Jeff VanderMeer, bestselling author of the Southern Reach trilogy, Dead Astronauts, and Borne)
• “Alphabet of Lightning is told in a voice that puts me in mind of such writers as William S. Burroughs and Joseph S. Pulver Sr. It’s not that he sounds like them specifically, but he is that daring and poetic a wordsmith. In a world of books generally populated with uninspired blandness, such originality of voice is a quality to be prized highly. But the originality doesn’t end with the voice. In Morris’s remarkable narrative, ‘Past and Future are but different Towns, side-by-side in the same direction.’ In the vividly rendered travels documented herein, besides a protagonist with superhuman powers, you’ll encounter some titans from history as well, but I won’t spoil the fun by naming them. Alphabet of Lightning is refreshing, invigorating, complex, and fascinating . . . and you’re telling me these uncanny travels aren’t over, yet? Morris has me ready to buy the next ticket.” (Jeffrey Thomas, author of Punktown)
• “Edward Morris uses words the way Miles Davis used notes.” (Trent Zelazny, author of Fractal Despondency)
• “Edward Morris’s remarkable, stone force novel falls into the post-WWII canon of great post-apocalyptic science fiction. It stands with Earth Abides, No Blade of Grass, and ‘Lot,’ and when you stand with Stewart, Christopher, and Ward Moore, you are standing on sacred ground. The post-apocalypse school of science fiction, it has been speculated, is a metaphor for our present. The seared landscape and shaken polity of our time can best be grasped through a subcategory of fiction that holds at its heart the dirtiest kind of realism. The series is a terrifying, masterfully written, unforgiving precis of an unbearable present become an unbearable future, and Morris serves this as well as any writer of our time. His landscape is gutted, his vision soars.” (Barry N. Malzberg, SFWA Grand Master)
• “Doc Smith’s Lensman books were once dubbed The History of Civilization. But I’m afraid that grand and ambitious overarching description has been boldly ripped out of Doc Smith’s cold, cold hands by Edward Morris with his wild-eyed opus. Replete with scores of unforgettable characters and scenes, the book rampages across space and time with a take-no-prisoners bad attitude. Formalistically daring and esthetically subtle, full of pyrotechnics and epiphanies, it’s what you might get if you mashed up Alfred Bester’s The Stars my Destination with Robert Wilson’s Julian Comstock, Neal Barrett’s Through Darkest America, and its sequel Dawn’s Uncertain Light, and H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Color Out of Space’—then had Jodorowsky film the result! Nothing like it on the planet!” (Paul Di Filippo, author of Cosmocopia and A Princess of the Linear Jungle)
• “It is an honor to have lived and worked long enough to have other writers riffing on my work the way Morris riffs on The Guns of the South in this series.” (Harry Turtledove, author of damn near everything)

Edward Morris has been nominated for the British Science Fiction Association Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Pushcart Prize in Literature. His short fiction has appeared over 150 times worldwide in markets from Interzone to The Lovecraft Ezine, Perihelion SF, and Big Pulp. Print anthologies include The Children of Gla’Ki: Tribute Stories to Ramsey Campbell, Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year, The Worlds of Philip Jose Farmer, and ReAnimators!  His short stories have been translated into Japanese, Italian, Finnish, Polish, Hungarian, and most recently, Egyptian Arabic with Dr. Ahmed Al-Turki’s fantastic translation of “Jihad Over Innsmouth” from The Book of Cthulhu. Morris is a multiple sclerosis survivor who lives and works in Portland, Oregon, as an author and bouncer.
​
Broken Eye Books is an independent press, here to bring you the odd, strange, and offbeat side of speculative fiction. Our stories tend to blend genres, highlighting the weird and blurring its boundaries with horror, sci-fi, and fantasy. More information can be found at www.brokeneyebooks.com.

Two new anthologies from Broken Eye Books, bringing you wonderfully weird short stories from so many delightful authors. 

I Am the Revolution. Repeat!
Whether Change brings you revolutionary tales of resilience and growth, defiance and upheaval from

WC Dunlap • Rachel Pollack • Nick Mamatas • Evan J. Peterson • Rena Mason • S.B. Divya • Gerald L. Coleman • Mary Anne Mohanraj • Craig Laurance Gidney • Nadia Bulkin • Bogi Takács • Margaret Killjoy

Tomorrow is here! Superpowered nationalists, CRISPR babies, alien communists, bloodsucking buildings, holy street justice, otherworldly anarchists, resurrection in the post-apocalypse, and more. There will be no going back. 

The Kids Are All Weird
Cooties Shot Required presents stories of the wondrous and secret lives of kids from

Anya Martin • Eden Royce • Nemma Wollenfang • Premee Mohamed • Laurie Tom • DaVaun Sanders • Abie Ekenezar • Clinton J. Boomer • Brian Hugenbruch • Haralambi Markov • Ada Hoffmann • Malon Edwards • Eliza Chan • Damien Angelica Walters

So you know, strange kids doing strange things, the secret goings-on of youth. There's some monster hunting, rewriting of reality, fighting with parents, a secret mystical fighting tournament, getting lost in the mall, drifting through space, avenging a bird mama's lost egg, building a dragon . . . the usual.

The kids are all weird. And we wouldn't want it any other way!

Both anthologies are available in paperback and hardcover, and pre-orders will start shipping in April.

Broken Eye Books is publishing Orrin Grey’s cyberpunk horror novel Neon Reliquary as a serial on Eyedolon. Part 1 is available now to patrons.
 
You are Soma Caldwell, an operative for Eidolon, the corporation that is the only employer, the only government, the only law in a city where the sun never shines, surrounded by an endless expanse of darkness that is peopled by unstoppable monsters. It's been this way for as long as you can remember. For as long as anyone can remember. The city is a perfect machine, and you're the implement that helps keep it running smoothly.
 
Now though, your employers have asked you to do something you've never done. You have to go into the Cauldron, that blighted spot in the center of the city where some forgotten disaster reduced the surrounding metropolis to ruin, and bring back an asset that may not want to return. It will be dangerous of course. The Cauldron is cut off from the tide—the endless sea of information that laps always at your brain—and home to strange creatures that will kill you if they can.
 
There are more dangers waiting for you than just the Cauldron though. Answers to questions you didn't even know you had, that will change what you think you know about the city, about Eidolon, and about the world in which you live. It will take all your skill to survive, but even if you do, what will be left for you when you return?
 
FROM THE AUTHOR
“Like a lot of people my age,” says Orrin, “I came up on cyberpunk. Stuff like Shadowrun and Akira and William Gibson's Neuromancer, sure, but also junk food like Albert Pyun's Nemesis, the Rutger Hauer monster flick Split Second, or even the inexplicable Double Dragon movie. So when Broken Eye Books approached me to see ‘what a cyberpunk story from Orrin Grey would look like,' I didn't run the other way as was my first instinct.
 
“Here's the thing, my fiction, as a rule, looks backward rather than forward. Horror, as a genre, is often fixated with how the past is not dead, how it continues to haunt us, and my work is no exception. I tend toward the antiquarian rather than the science fictional. Yet as I said, I came up on cyberpunk, and it has always been the 'punk' part of that portmanteau that appealed most to me.
 
“So what would a cyberpunk story by Orrin Grey look like? It would draw from the anime I watched in high school but touched with an occult bent. Things like Doomed Megalopolis or the Shin Megami Tensei games. Survival horror video games where the fog closes in to form permeable rooms occupied by half-glimpsed, misshapen forms. The films of Guillermo del Toro and the everlasting dark of William Hope Hodgson's Nightland. Under and over and around all that though, it would also be something else—deeply suspicious of capitalism, imperialism, fascism, and rich old white guys, as all good cyberpunk should be.”
 
Read ”Crucible,” part 1 of Neon Reliquary, today on Eyedolon by becoming a patron.

We are thrilled to reveal the cover for our forthcoming witchy ​folk horror novel from Stoker Award–winning Gwendolyn Kiste, Boneset & Feathers, with luscious cover artwork from Gawki.

And the very first reviews are coming in:

From Sci Fi and Scary: "Kiste enchants as she juxtaposes witches and power with vulnerability and community."

From S.J. Budd: "I don't want to give out spoilers but it's spectacular! Gwendolyn Kiste takes the magical and makes it real, makes beautiful the macabre. I really loved this book, I've read it twice already!"

Boneset & Feathers is available for pre-order now.

BONESET & FEATHERS

You don’t know their fire is coming until it’s too late.

No witch has ever been permitted a peaceful life.

It starts with crows tumbling out of the clouds and the spectral voices on the wind that won’t leave Odette alone. And the midnight visits to the graveyard... 

Odette wants to forget magic, but her magic doesn’t want to forget her.

Her worst nightmare is about to come true—the witchfinders are returning. And this time, the decree is clear: burn the witch that got away.

We've got a couple of really great anthologies lined up for you with Whether Change: The Revolution Will Be Weird  (weird tales of the revolution) and Cooties Shot Required: There Are Things You Must Know  (tales of the weird lives of kids). But there're also several new titles announced...

There are 12 new books on the schedule from now through 2021. And each one can be pre-ordered on the Kickstarter. So you've got lots of options!

Fall/Winter 2020

•  Whether Change: The Revolution Will Be Weird  (anthology)
•  Cooties Shot Required: There Are Things You Must Know (anthology)
•  Busted Synapses by Erica L. Satifka (novella): Rural cyberpunk of frustrated ambitions mixed with life-altering changes and cyber-mystery. 
•  Boneset & Feathers by Gwendolyn Kiste (novel): Folk horror of a witch's trials at the hands of her witchfinder pursuers.
•  There Was a Crooked Man by Edward Morris (novel): Weird and epic time-hopping sci-fi horror.

Spring/Summer 2021

•  The Obsecration by Matthew M. Bartlett (novel): Surreal horror of a powerful wizard's resurrection... in Leeds!
•  The Mosquito Fleet by Andrew Penn-Romine (novel): Star-spanning weird space opera with synthetic humans and a fungal mystery.
•  My Drowning Chorus by Matt Maxwell (novel): The continuation of Queen of No Tomorrows.
•  The Song of Spores by Bogi Takács (novel): Weird space opera with fungal aliens, shapeshifters, a sentient spaceship and its symbiotic pilot, and so much more.

Fall/Winter 2021

•  Hairsbreadth by Craig Laurance Gidney (novel): Contemporary fairy tale of a girl born with strange powers, both wondrous and dark.
•  The Carnivàle by W.C. Dunlap (novel): Surreal and post-apocalyptic political horror show.
•  Blossoms Blackened like Dead Stars by Lucy A. Snyder (novel): Cthulhian space opera of strange supersoldiers and alien tech.

We want to keep bringing you amazing books with stunning covers and killer stories. (The Kickstarter ends on Thursday, July 30 2020 9:00 AM PDT.)