Thanatrauma

World Fantasy Award winner Tem (The Night Doctor) is at his sharpest and most crushing in this collection of 21 horror shorts. In “Saudade,” a grieving widower takes a cruise at his daughters’ behest and discovers that vacations can become nightmares when you bring your terror with you. “Sleepover” takes readers to a sinking town where a family struggles to stay calm in the midst of disaster. In “The Walls Are Trembling,” a woman contends with a banshee who comes to her in the night to scream out warnings about tragedies that have already occurred. And the hellish, hallucinatory “Torn” offers a chilling portrait of the afterlife. The common thread throughout is an inexorable sense of loss; the empty places Tem’s characters navigate become their own rich, tangible landscapes of negative space. Tem maintains a dreamy, seething style that renders the worlds he creates at once familiar and deeply alien. This is essential for fans of dark speculative fiction, surrealist travelogues, and meditations on loss. (Nov.)