In Gemma Files’s horror-fantasy debut, former Confederate chaplain Asher Rook has cheated death and now possesses a dark magic. He uses his power to terrorize the Wild West, leading a gang of outlaws, thieves, and killers, with his cruel lieutenant and lover, Chess Pargeter, by his side.

Pinkerton agent Ed Morrow is going undercover to infiltrate the gang, armed with a shotgun and a device that measures sorcerous energy. His job is to gain knowledge of Rook’s power and unlock its secrets. But there is someone else who has Rook in her sights: the Lady of Traps and Snares, a bloodthirsty Mayan goddess who will stop at nothing to satisfy her own desires.

Caught between the good, the bad, and the unholy, Morrow will have to ride out a storm of magical mayhem to survive, in this debut novel, the first book of Files’s “weird Western Hexslinger trilogy…[which] is chock full of hellish horrors” (Mike Allen, author of Unseaming).

Welcome to Hex City. Population: magicians.

Thanks to hexslinger “Reverend” Asher Rook, sorcerers now have a sanctuary where they can live and work in peace. But a storm is coming–a tempest known as Chess Pargeter.

Infuriated by his former lover Rook’s betrayal and sacrificed in the name of the Mayan goddess who is Rook’s current consort, Chess leaves a trail of death and destruction in his wake. Caught up in Chess’s crusade are Pinkerton-agent-turned-outlaw Ed Morrow and a young woman spiritualist.

But there are more than Chess’s own demons to be reckoned with, including a resurrected lawman with a bone to pick–and a final judgment to deliver.

A new Civil War is brewing. With the city of Bewelcome as its headquarters, Allan Pinkerton’s Detective Agency leads a siege on Hex City, the town founded by “Reverend” Asher Rook and his consort, the Mayan goddess Ixchel. Monsters prowl the battleground, rocket trails of spells crisscross the sky, and an unnatural rain falls.

Sides must be taken, but Pinkerton-agent-turned-outlaw Ed Morrow, spiritualist Yancey Kloves, and even Rook must choose what ruin or redemption means to each of them. Meanwhile, Chess Pargeter gears up for the greatest fight of his life–and death. A battle out of hell itself …

If you go down deep enough, you find all sorts of things …

In her second collection from Trepidatio Publishing, award-winning author Gemma Files takes her listeners on journeys out beyond safe borders—from the trackless depths of the sea, to the empty desert frontiers of the Weird West, even to the edges of cracks between worlds. Here, in these narrow spaces between the known and the unknown, behind the paper-thin curtains of reality, lurk monsters both human and ancient: selkies and avenging revenants, voodoo priestesses and pirate sorcerers, ghosts and vampires, and the most famous murderer of all time.

But however strange the things found in these deep places, what draws them up, and calls them back, are forces the human heart knows all too well: grief and vengeance, rage and loss … and, most terrible of all, love.

Lois’s headlong quest to discover the truth about the disappearance of Mrs. Whitcomb almost immediately begins to send her much further than she ever wanted to go, revealing increasingly troubling links between her subject’s life and her own. Slowly but surely, the malign influence of Mrs Whitcomb’s muse creeps into every aspect of Lois’s life, placing her son in danger.

Come closer, friend. Let me tell you a story.

Heard the one about the Airbnb that eats your dreams or the iron-crowned king who preys on his own bloodline from the air, still smoldering centuries after being burnt alive? How about the cloudy antique bottle you can wish your excess rage inside, or that crooked alley down which something waits to replace your disappointing child with a far more pleasant facsimile? We all know the truth, especially in times like these—in an anxiety-ridden, sleepless world such as ours, it’s only ever our very worst dreams that come true. Here streets empty out and people pull themselves apart like amoebas, breeding murderous doppelgangers from their own flesh; houses haunt, ideas possess, and a cold and alien moon stares down, whispering that it’s time to spawn. New myths rise and ancient evils descend. From the seemingly mundane terrors of a city just like yours to all the most dark and distant places of a truly terrible universe, nothing is as it seems … not even that dimly-recalled cinematic memory you’ve been chasing all these years, the one you think might be just something you stumbled upon while flipping through channels after midnight. The one that still disturbs you enough to raise a cold sweat all over your body, whenever you try to will its details clear.

Hot on the heels of her 2018 This Is Horror Award–winning short story collection Spectral Evidence, critically horror author Gemma Files compiles fifteen more of her most startling recent nightmares—a creepily seductive downward spiral of dark poetry and existential dread, entirely suitable to the slow apocalypse going on all around us. So take your mind off your troubles and send it somewhere the rules still operate, if only to punish those who violate them.

The first horror story collection from the author of Experimental Film, “one of the most powerful and unique voices in weird fiction today” (Paul Tremblay, award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts)

These seventeen tales take listeners into the uniquely twisted mind of “one of Canada’s most promising new horror writers” (Publishers Weekly). From a live necrophilia show starring reanimated corpses to a confrontation between a security guard and inhuman squatters, from who can be found at an all-night laundromat to what lies in wait at the bottom of the sea, from undead addictions to all-consuming obsessions, Kissing Carrion is “a journey through some of the most beautifully rendered visions of darkness and death to be published this past year” (SF Reader).

For almost thirty years, Shirley Jackson Award–winning horror author Gemma Files has consistently served up tale after tale celebrating monstrosity in all its forms: the imperfect, the broken, the beautifully alien, and the sadly familiar. Her characters make their own choices and take their own chances, slipping from darkness into deeper darkness yet never losing their humanity—not even when they’re anything but.

An embittered blood-servant plots revenge against the vampires who own him; a little girl’s best friend seeks to draw her into an ancient, forbidden realm; two monster-hunting sisters cross paths with an amoral holler-witch again and again, battling both mortal authorities and immortal predators. From the forgotten angels who built the cosmos to the reckless geniuses whose party drug unleashes a plague, madness, monsters and murder await at every turn. And in “The Speed of Pain,” sequel to the International Horror Guild Award–winning story “The Emperor’s Old Bones,” we find that even those who can live forever can’t outrun their own crimes …

Following in the footsteps of her critically praised Kissing Carrion, The Worm in Every Heart, and We Will All Go Down Together, this is the first of two new Gemma Files collections from Trepidatio Publishing, bringing together nine of her best stories from the past ten years. So whether you’re returning to Files’ dark dreamlands or visiting for the first time, we advise you to get ready to review the Spectral Evidence.

In the shadows of war and history, the mirror between man and monster breaks …

From the haunted hills of Roman Britain to the sewers of occupied Warsaw … in the bloodied streets of Revolutionary Paris, and the anarchy of World War II Shanghai … out of the wilds of America, India, Africa and Europe … down the long savage darkness of the centuries, monsters have fed upon us. They are shapeshifters, vampires, sorcerers and spirits—things named only in myth, and things for which we have no name. They are our demons, our reflections, our desires and our nightmares. And all too often, they are … only human.

In this second collection from Gemma Files—featuring the award-winning ‘The Emperor’s Old Bones’ (winner of the 1999 International Horror Guild Award for Best Short Fiction), and five never-before-published stories—we tour the overlooked intersections between wilderness and civilization where secret dances of fear and pain are performed and hunters and hunted change roles.