Reel Dark
Twisted Projections on the Flickering Page
Hal Bodner, Karen Head, Caroline Shriner-Wunn, Russ Bickerstaff, James Chambers, James Dorr, Sean Eads, J. G. Faherty, Jude-Marie Green, L. Andrew Cooper, Amy Grech, Jay Seate, Pamela Turner, Rose Streif, Sean Taylor, Jason S. Walters, Mike Watt, Jay Wilburn
174 pages · Released May 1, 2015 · Blackwyrm
Content report card
Reel Dark parent’s guide: what’s inside
LGBTQ+ themes
Substance use
What it offers
Positive role models
A note for parents
This is an anthology of dark horror and suspense stories by multiple authors, explicitly marketed as macabre and twisted. The collection includes psychological horror, paranoia, madness, and disturbing themes; one story explicitly references a gunfight. While it's not excessively graphic based on available descriptions, the thematic content—vengeful spirits, control/manipulation, warnings of death, blurred reality—is designed for mature readers comfortable with unsettling narratives. The low confidence reflects limited metadata; individual story content varies.
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From the publisher
THE CUTTING ROOM FLOOR CUTS BACK 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. From the battle for recognition b... THE CUTTING ROOM FLOOR CUTS BACK 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. From the battle for recognition between a child actress and a vengeful, long-forgotten film star in "Whatever Happened to Peggy...Who?" to a madman controlling a student a la The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in "Caligarisme," to a hapless Dreamist, whose talent propels him into a nightmare of jealousy and revenge in "The Dreamist," the authors have created worlds filled with madness, twisted desires, and broken dreams. The genres inside include suspense, horror, science fiction, and fantasy. You'll meet a lone deputy whose pursuit of justice harkens back to the wild West (complete with a gunfight), a director who literally puts himself into his film, a young woman haunted by a mysterious stranger who warns her of her impending demise, and an aging actress who may have been a little too good at playing her roles. In a world where the lines between reality and fantasy blur, where film 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?"
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ISBN 9781613181744 · Blackwyrm