Nightingale Songs — Simon Strantzas

In the dead of night, there are footsteps in the hall . . .
In the dead of night, your past mistakes will haunt you . . .
In the dead of night, you hear a discordant tune . . .
In the dead of night, the nightingale sings . . .

Simon Strantzas, master of the subtle and the bizarre, returns with a dozen strange tales and eerie mysteries. From the shores of a remote oil-stained sound to deep within the familiar heart of suburbia, these are the songs of broken people who cannot find a way to fix themselves, who must search the dark for salvation. Like a siren, the nightingale sings them onward to face their end. But it sings for you too. A requiem in your honor. Because, for you, it is already too late.

Table of Contents

In the Nightingale, Waiting for the Curtain to Rise, an Introduction by John Langan
Out of Touch
Her Father's Daughter
The Deafening Sound of Slumber
Unreasonable Doubt
Tend Your Own Garden
The Nightingale
Pale Light in the Jungle
An Indelible Stain upon the Sky
Something New
Mr. Kneale
Everything Floats
When Sorrows Come
Afterword


"Nightingale Songs is a dark gem. Strantzas demonstrates once again why he is so highly regarded amongst connoisseurs of the macabre and the fantastic." - Laird Barron

"Simon Strantzas displays a gift for evoking disturbing atmospheres and creating odd, frightening encounters with the uncanny . . . " - Lisa Tuttle "He does not show you the gate to this new Golden Age of weird fiction that is upon us, but leads you through it." - Joseph S. Pulver

"Strantzas deftly establishes ordinary and seemingly innocuous situations that spin out of the characters' control and always end with an uneasy sense of menace, even when their resolution is ambiguous or cryptic." - Publishers Weekly

"Like the subtly disquieting locations in which they take place -- a suburban house obscured by weeds and dark butterflies, the basement of a former home grown suddenly unfamiliar, a sleep clinic where the patients never meet -- Simon Strantzas' elegant stories worry at the reader's sense of certainty. The songs they sing won't comfort you. But you will remember them." - Glen Hirshberg