From the mind of four-time Bram Stoker Award winner Tim Waggoner comes 18 provocative tales of terror that explore the darkest corners of the human mind. This comprehensive collection concludes with an unforgettable metafictional story on what it takes to be a horror writer. With this carefully curated selection of short stories. discover why no matter how much we try, in our deepest subconscious, Old Monsters Never Die.
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Men in Black meets Hellraiser in this rollicking mash-up of urban fantasy and cosmic horror from four-time Bram Stoker Award-Winning author Tim Waggoner.
Creatures from dark dimensions infesting your home? Demonic beings trying to drive you insane? Alien gods attempting to destroy your universe?
Just call Maintenance.
This underpaid and overworked secret organization is dedicated to battling forces that seek to speed up Entropy and hasten the Omniverse’s inevitable death.
Neal Hudson is a twenty-year veteran of Maintenance. A surveyor who drives through the streets of Ash Creek, Ohio constantly scanning for the deadly energy known as Corruption. Since the death of his previous partner, Neal prefers to work alone, and he’s not happy when he’s assigned to mentor a rookie.
But they better learn to get along fast.
The Multitude, a group of godlike beings who seek to increase Entropy at every opportunity, are creating an Atrocity Engine. This foul magical device can destroy the Earth, and they don’t care how many innocent lives it takes to build it. (Spoiler alert: It’s a lot!)
Just another day on the job. . . .
“Waggoner offers a fresh variation on the trope of a covert agency combating evil in his blood-drenched Custodians of the Cosmos series opener.”
—Publishers Weekly
“This gripping dark fantasy boasts an indelible cast and an unwavering pace.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“The Atrocity Engine is a wild ride full of entertaining scenarios and scary monsters!”
—Booklist
“The Atrocity Engine is a kick-ass cross-genre thrill ride of a novel! Holy moly! Tim Waggoner is easily one of today’s best horror writers.”
—Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of Cave 13 and Necrotek
“This is edge-of-your-seat Horror Fantasy. It’s as if Stephen King wrote Men in Black!”
—Scott Sigler, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Earthcore
“Fast-paced, cleverly thought-through, and deeply unnerving in all the right places—urban horror fantasy with a decidedly creepy difference. Don’t read it in the dark!”
—Diane Duane, New York Times bestselling author of Tales of the Five: The Librarian
“A brutal, dark, and disturbing novel that will live in your nightmares. It’s so good!”
—Horror Reads
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Let Me Tell You a Story, the next volume in Tim Waggoner’s Writing in the Dark series from Raw Dog Screaming Press, will be released Oct. 5th, 2023.
In Let Me Tell You a Story Waggoner presents stories from his own publishing career and uses them to illustrate techniques and point out ways to improve. “In both Writing in the Dark and Writing in the Dark: The Workbook, I included a short story of mine and critiqued it based on the principles outlined in those books. Readers responded well to this feature, so I decided to focus a new book on critiquing stories drawn from throughout my career, discussing what worked, what didn’t, and what I might do differently if I had the chance to rewrite the stories. I hope readers will find Let Me Tell You a Story to be as interesting – and most importantly as useful – as its predecessors.”
“Tim’s writing voice is like that of a teacher who really cares about his students and their writing journey—however far along you may be.”
—Sadie Hartmann, Mother Horror, 101 Horror Books to Read Before You’re Murdered
“Offering sensible, actionable, and invaluable tips for developing craft, Tim Waggoner’s Writing in the Dark guides feature on my list of must-read texts for all students and teachers of writing. Scarily good advice from a master of horror practice.”
—Lee Murray, five-time Bram Stoker Award winner, co-author of the Path of Ra series
“You can trust Tim to teach you not so much how to write, per se, but how to think like a horror writer. This basically means that you’ll instinctively know how to chill someone with a disturbing idea, outsmart them with an outrageous twist ending, or caution them with a clever moral lesson, and it will all come naturally to you. He’s a masterful educator on the dark side.”
—Michael A. Arnzen, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Play Dead
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Tim Waggoner received a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Nonfiction for his work on Writing in the Dark: The Workbook. The award was presented during the Annual Bram Stoker Awards® Banquet at StokerCon™ 2023 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on June 17, 2023.
The Bram Stoker Awards recognizes superior achievement in horror literature. It is given by the Horror Writers Association, a nonprofit international organization of writers and publishing professionals dedicated to promoting dark literature and the interests of those who write it. The full 2022 awards list can be read here. About Writing in the Dark: The Workbook
Like Tim Waggoner’s Bram Stoker Award-winning Writing in the Dark, a manual for how to write horror fiction, this workbook covers a wide variety of topics, ranging from monster, idea, and plotline creation to avoiding clichés and developing the art of suspense. The workbook, however, foregrounds practice over discussion to help writers master these concepts. Both texts stand on their own while working together to provide you with the direction and tools you need to maximize your own authorship.
The wealth of examples, exercises, and tutorials in Writing in the Dark: The Workbook are designed to inspire and stretch the imagination. Waggoner draws from his own experiences in addition to other professional writers, among them Laird Barron, Maurice Broaddus, Nadia Bulkin, Ramsey Campbell, Mort Castle, Tananarive Due, Christopher Golden, Grady Hendrix, Daniel Kraus, Joe R. Lansdale, Elizabeth Massie, Graham Masterton, Seanan McGuire, John Shirley, and many others.
Featuring an introduction by Michael A. Arnzen, Writing in the Dark: The Workbook will resonate with young authors who are just getting started on their careers as well as veterans of the horror genre and craft.
“I had a chance to read through Tim Waggoner’s Writing in the Dark this week, and it is excellent! Comprehensive, accessible, no-frills, and packed with the advice that writers like Tim and myself wish we had been given when we started.”
—Brian Keene
“One of the best non-fiction texts on the art and business of writing horror-suspense since King’s On Writing.”
—Lee Murray, multi-award-winning writer and editor
“I felt more as if I were sitting in a dive bar, discussing secrets of the universe with my feet up. He can take the toughest topic—from theme to voice to motivation and conflict—and talk someone through it as if reviewing his favorite new movie.”
—Dave Simms, Cemetery Dance
“Tim Waggoner’s Writing in the Dark is an instant classic in the small canon of ‘how to books’ specifically directed at that special breed of authors known as horror writers . . .”
—Michael A. Arnzen
Hardcover and Paperback
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Twenty years ago, a cult attempted to create their own god: The Lord of the Feast. The god was a horrible, misbegotten thing, however, and the cultists killed the creature before it could come into its full power. The cultists trapped the pieces of their god inside mystic nightstones then went their separate ways. Now Kate, one of the cultists’ children, seeks out her long-lost relatives, hoping to learn the truth of what really happened on that fateful night. Unknown to Kate, her cousin Ethan is following her, hoping she’ll lead him to the nightstones so that he might resurrect the Lord of the Feast – and this time, Ethan plans to do the job right.
Flame Tree Press
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