Dear Readers,
What scares you?
Think about it. What makes your heart skip a beat? Or do double duty on the way home in the dark? What keeps you up at night, hesitating to stretch your hand across the pool of quivering shadow between your bed and the lamp? What gives you cold sweats at 2:00 a.m. and flushes your cheeks with hot, fresh blood and slight embarrassment when you remember it later in the broad, baking noon? What lurks in your closet? Beyond the moon? Inside the vast and twisted recesses of your mind?
We’re all afraid of something.
Ponder that as the leaves begin to change. As the world dies and autumn draws its rusty, crackling breath. As you slip beneath the placid surface of the everyday into the horrors that lurk and whisper and cackle coldly in the pages of this volume. Ponder that as an old woman dies, a wandering bard (or someone more sinister?) crosses a desert of ice, and we learn just what, not one but two, walls fail to let us forget.
We’re all afraid of something. How about you?
Happy Halloween, Samhain, and Día de los Muertos,
Brigid Ehrmantraut
Editor-in-Chief
Curator of Starlight, Space Opera, and Sorcery