Reel Dark, 1st ed., Signed

Welcome to a macabre cinema for the imagination, to screenings of twisted tales projected not on a movie screen but on the page.

In Reel Dark you’ll find stories and poems by authors ranging from new voices to bestsellers to Bram Stoker Award finalists. Genres inside include suspense, horror, science fiction, and fantasy. You’ll meet Baby Jane as you never imagined her, a lone deputy whose pursuit of justice conjures a darker and wilder West, a director who puts FAR too much of himself into his film, a young woman haunted by a stranger who warns her of a demise linked to the cinema, and an aging actress who may have been too good at her roles.

Where lines between reality and fantasy blur, where frames flicker at 24 frames per second, we catch a glimpse of strangers’ dreams and nightmares. As David Lynch puts it, “This whole world is wild at heart and weird on top.”

As Karen Head writes in her poem responding to Lynch, “In the movies / everything is illusion.” But in a world with cameras everywhere, how do you know whether you’re in a movie?