THE KING IS NOT DEAD

The King Is Not Dead brings together eighteen dark tales crossing centuries, continents and imagined futures. From eighteenth-century France and the First Crusade to the mining towns of Wales, Calcutta, Arles, Whitby, Nagasaki, Vietnam, Rome, Mexico, Paris and Mars, historical figures, artists, soldiers, prostitutes, children, ghosts, vampires, fanatics, mutated animals and alien creatures inhabit worlds where culture and catastrophe are never far apart.

Literature, painting, music, mythology and historical memory run through the collection as naturally as violence, eroticism, body horror and pulp excess. Van Gogh and Gauguin, Joyce, echoes of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Irish folklore, the Crusades, Nagasaki, the Vietnam War and pre-Columbian myth surface inside stories that blur the boundaries between high culture and popular imagination, past and future, beauty and decay.

Horror, dark fantasy, science fiction, surrealism, speculative fiction, black humor and the grotesque constantly overlap: haunted childhoods give way to war zones and brothels, alien landscapes and post-apocalyptic cities, while art, desire, faith and memory are dragged through mutation, violence and ruin.

The King Is Not Dead is a restless, literary and visionary journey through the fantastic, where history and imagination keep contaminating each other and familiar worlds return altered, darker and stranger.