In the Flesh — Kealan Patrick Burke

Apathetic Flesh is brimful of realistic characters immersed in nightmares hauntingly familiar for many of us, but it is to Godfrey's credit that even the outlandish events you'll uncover here are made believable by a distinct absence of melodrama and fanfare. These are real people, complete with anxieties and instabilities and in these stories, as in the real world, such things can be fatal.

~ From the Introduction, by Kealan Patrick Burke



How are we expected to react to flesh that is warm and youthful, and yet infused with a corrupt spirit, a soulless black spark, a lack of any real feeling? Such flesh, too many have learned, will not heed the demands of concern. It will, through time, harden and become insolent. And when faced with close human interaction, it will not caress, but molest…

…not comfort, but condemn…

…not rise in excited gooseflesh, but grow ashen in cold depravity.

It will not be awed by the greatness of being, but remain odd to the touch.

There are men, women, and children walking these pages whose flesh rides their bones in various stages of apathy, empathy, sympathy, and gaping insanity. Many find themselves lost and alone, inhabiting a flesh-laden yet dispassionate world.

For some, this is justice. A kind of payback, perhaps.

For a few, it is a tragedy.



“Apathetic Flesh is one of the most disturbing tales I've read this year.”

~ Robert Crawford, Cemetery Dance



“Darren Godfrey is indeed the real thing: a horror writer's horror writer and a horror reader's top choice.”

~ Mort Castle, Two Times Bram Stoker Award Winner and Nominee for the Audie, Shirley Jackson, and International Horror Guild Awards



“Darren O. Godfrey's Dysfunction is a story about family ties gone horribly knotted. It brings to life some of those images that occur when you look at your parents and wonder what your children will do to you, how they will do it, and why. It is a story about repression and release. And it is inhabited by one of the strangest child characters I've run across. This story might make parents want to hug their children, and children call their parents, wishing they were closer; or it might just hurt.”

~ Bram Stoker Award Winning Author, David Niall Wilson