J.C. Smith - Autumn in the Abyss (Horror short stories)

When enigmatic poet Henry Coronado disappears six months after the New Year’s Eve, 1959, Welcoming Chaos event, he takes with him a profound secret wrapped within the words of his poem, Autumn In The Abyss. Fifty years later, an ill man’s research into Coronado’s work and life reveals that poetry can indeed change the world, or leave it in ruins.

The Word is a living thing...and often with lethal intentions.

Reality is the strangest mirror...

“The stories in John Claude Smith's new collection take their characters to the limits of human experience, the places where our bodies come asunder in the face of the abyss. Positioning his stories in the seams of our cultural history, Smith chronicles the efforts of artists of all stripes--poets, musicians, sculptors, filmmakers--to break through our common experience to another, more essential one that is painted in blood. It's a quest that draws these artists into proximity with the serial-killer in the book's single and singular tale of a police detective's obsessive manhunt. Whether with pen or carving knife, Smith's characters will not stop until they have gone too far, into a space where revelation and terror are part of the same, vast thing." —John Langan, author of The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies