Thirteen Conjurations

In this third short story collection, following up on Midnight Call (2008) and Tempting Providence (2010), Jonathan Thomas continues to demonstrate the skill and emotive power that have made him a dynamic new voice in contemporary weird fiction. This volume opens with a quartet of tales elaborating upon Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, including "Mobymart After Midnight" (a delightful skewering of Walmart culture) and "King of Cat Swamp," an ingenious riff on "The Call of Cthulhu." Other stories treat a variety of weird themes: "Way Up When," about a man who has remarkable precognitive powers; "The Comeuppance Hour," in which the makers of a skeptical TV show about occult phenomena find more than they bargain for; and "A Retouch in Camonica," about strange happenings in an Italian archaeological site. The volume concludes with a "Swedish-American Triptych," in which various protagonists encounter the bizarre in a far Baltic land. Each tale is crafted meticulously and enlivened by a wit and mordant satire that renders them unique in recent weird writing. "Jonathan Thomas pushes us toward . . . fresh hells, as in his pages we recognize the still startling twenty-first-century disjunction between our own fragmentary human skull and our own residual ape-like jaw."-From Barton L. St. Armand's Foreword "Jonathan Thomas has an enviably impressive range-from the gentle to the gruesome, from science fiction through fantasy to the spectral and horrific-but his wit is reliable, and so is the clarity of his eye, and the precision of his prose. He's an asset to all his fields."-Ramsey Campbell