Taverns of the Dead
edited by Kealan Patrick Burke

Taverns are timeless places, as familiar and welcome as the spirits that rest themselves atop the bar. Through the ages, in times of war, of famine, of love and death, they have stood in silence, radiating the promise of a soporific sojourn from the horrors and the worries of the outside world. We are drawn to them by this promise, by the notion that we may be protected and comforted by the light, the animated chatter and the warmth inside those smeared glasses. When we go there, it is with no fear at all.

But taverns can be deadly places, where ghosts walk, the shadows talk and not everyone is your friend.

With Taverns of the Dead, editor Kealan Patrick Burke has reserved a table and gathered together some of the finest writers in modern horror and dark fantasy to share their most terrifying bar stories with you, the unsuspecting patron.

Pull up a chair and prepare to be regaled by tales of monsters, madness, ghosts and gore, in a place we know all too well...

Featuring stories by: Peter Straub, David Morrell, Ramsey Campbell, Neil Gaiman, Charles L. Grant, Jack Cady, Tim Lebbon, Steve Rasnic Tem, Chet Williamson, Thomas F. Monteleone, Charles de Lint, P.D. Cacek, Melanie Tem, Thomas Ligotti, Norman Partridge, Gary A. Braunbeck, Peter Crowther, Roberta Lannes, Christopher Fowler, Yvonne Navarro, C. Bruce Hunter, Chaz Brenchley, Tom Piccirilli, Jeff VanderMeer, Edward Lee, Nicholas Royle, and Terry Lamsley.

With an introduction by F. Paul Wilson and a foreword by Kealan Patrick Burke.

Reviews & Praise:
"Burke (Quietly Now) offers an intoxicating blend of original and reprint fiction in an anthology with an all-star cast of contributors who know that the damnedest stories come out in bar settings, where inhibitions are low and emotions run the gamut from hilarity to despair. An Irish pub whose air is supernaturally tainted by the political hatreds of its patrons infects musicians who gig there with the will to kill in Chet Williamson's "The Smoke in Mooney's Pub." Paranoia runs deep in Ramsey Campbell's "The Winner," where a wanderer who makes his way into a local watering hole misinterprets the customs of the locals and finds cryptic bar talk leading him to a dismal fate. In Gary Braunbeck's haunting "The King of Rotten Wood," a tavern is just a convenient locale where the dead lecture the living about the proper way to remember them. There are stories to suit just about every taste here, ranging from the comic Lovecraftian inflections of Neil Gaiman's "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar" to the light dark fantasy of Charles L. Grant's "Friday Night at the Wicked Swan." There's even a spectacularly choreographed barroom brawl in Norman Partridge's "Buckets of Blood," a straight-no-chaser shot of dark suspense. Horror readers who appreciate both vintage and nouveau will find this book well stocked and well worth tapping."

NOW OUT OF PRINT WITH PUBLISHER