“El Charro” is a short horror story by award-winning author John Langan, one of 35 entries in the audio anthology Come Join Us by the Fire.

A man wakes up in a cell with his badly-beaten friend. And something else. Something hungry.

Come Join Us by the Fire, edited by Theresa DeLucci, is an audio-only horror anthology of 35 short stories from Nightfire Books, a horror imprint of Tor Books. The collection showcases the breadth of talent writing in the horror genre today, with contributions from a wide range of bestselling genre luminaries including China Mieville, Chuck Wendig, Richard Kadrey, and Victor LaValle; Shirley Jackson Award winners Paul Tremblay, Priya Sharma, and Sam J. Miller; Nebula Award winners Brooke Bolander, Alyssa Wong, Kij Johnson; and many, many more.

In upstate New York, in the woods around Woodstock, Dutchman’s Creek flows out of the Ashokan Reservoir. Steep-banked, fast-moving, it offers the promise of fine fishing, and of something more, a possibility too fantastic to be true. When Abe and Dan, two widowers who have found solace in each other’s company and a shared passion for fishing, hear rumors of the Creek, and what might be found there, the remedy to both their losses, they dismiss it as just another fish story. Soon, though, the men find themselves drawn into a tale as deep and old as the Reservoir. It’s a tale of dark pacts, of long-buried secrets, and of a mysterious figure known as Der Fisher: the Fisherman. It will bring Abe and Dan face to face with all that they have lost, and with the price they must pay to regain it.

John Langan has, in the last few years, established himself as one of the leading voices in contemporary horror literature. Gifted with a supple and mellifluous prose style, an imagination that can conjure up clutching terrors with seeming effortlessness, and a thorough knowledge of the rich heritage of weird fiction, Langan has already garnered his share of accolades.
This new collection of nine substantial stories includes such masterworks as Technicolor, an ingenious riff on Poe’s Masque of the Red Death; How the Day Runs Down, a gripping tale of the undead; and The Shallows, a powerful tale of the Cthulhu Mythos. The capstone to the collection is a previously unpublished novella of supernatural terror, Mother of Stone.