Search Worlds Without End

Sturgeon Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, January 2010. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011, edited by Rich Horton, and Galactic Empires (2017), edited by Neil Clarke. It is included in the collection Twember (2013).

A dark Southern Gothic vision of ghosts, witchcraft, secret powers, snake-handling, kudzu, Melungeons, and the Great Depression.

Michael Gibson has returned to the quiet home of his forebears and now takes care of his grandmother Sadie--old and sickly, but with an important story to tell about growing up poor and Melungeon (a mixed race group of mysterious origins) in the 1930s, while bedeviled by a snake-handling uncle and empathic powers she barely understands.

In a field not far from the Gibson family home lies an iron-bound crate within a small shack buried four feet deep under Kudzu vine. Michael somehow understands that hidden inside that crate is potentially his own death, his grandmother's death, and perhaps the deaths of everyone in the valley if he does not come to understand her story well enough.

Celestial Inventories features twentytwo stories collected from rare chapbooks, anthologies, and obscure magazines, along with a new story written specifically for this volume. All represent the slipstream segment of Steve Rasnic Tem's large body of tales: imaginative, difficult-to-pigeonhole works of the fantastic crossing conventional boundaries between science fiction, fantasy, horror, literary fiction, bizarro, magic realism, and the new weird. Several of these stories have previously appeared in Best of the Year compilations and have been the recipients of major F & SF nominations and awards.

Table of Contents:

• The World Recalled - (2004) - short fiction
• The Disease Artist - (2006) - short story
• Halloween Street - (1999) - short story
• When We Moved On - (2009) - short fiction
• The Woodcarver's Son - (1993) - short story
• Invisible - (2005) - short story
• Head Explosions - (2007) - short fiction
• Chain Reaction - (2010) - short fiction
• The Secret Flesh - (1991) - short story
• Origami Bird - (2002) - short fiction
• In These Final Days of Sales - (2001) - short story
• Little Poucet - (1993) - short story
• The Bereavement Photographer - (2003) - short story
• Firestorm - (1982) - short story
• The Mouse's Bedtime Story - (1999) - short story
• Last Dragon - (1987) - short story
• The Monster in the Field - short fiction
• The High Chair - (2006) - short fiction
• Dinosaur - (1987) - short story
• Giant Killers - (2010) - short fiction
• The Company You Keep - (2005) - short story
• Celestial Inventory - (1991) - short fiction

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Magic: An Anthology of the Esoteric and Arcane (2012), edited by Jonathan Oliver. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Seven (2013), edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Achaeologist Reed Taylor is called back to his hometown of Simpson Creeks, Kentucky - a town devastated by the collapse of a coal waste dam - ti dig into the earth now covering his family's old farm, and the bodies of his mother and his father. But in a terrifying rendezvous with his own pasthe discovers that his memories of the dead are not only palpable, but capable of fantastic transformation.

In the worlds of Steve Rasnic Tem a father takes his son "fishing" in the deepest part of downtown, flayed rabbits visit a suburban back yard, a man is haunted by a surrealistic nightmare of crutches, a father is unable to rescue his son from a nightmare of trees, a bereaved man transforms memories of his wife into performance art, great moving cliffs of detritus randomly prowl the world, a seemingly pointless life finds final expression in bits of folded paper, a nuclear holocaust brings about a new mythology, an isolated man discovers he's part of a terrifying community, a photographer discovers the unexpected in the faces of dead children, and a couple's aging dismantles reality.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Simon Strantzas
• City Fishing - (1980) - short fiction
• Angel Combs - (1994) - short story
• The Poor - (1982) - short story
• A House by the Ocean - (2014) - short fiction
• Wheatfield with Crows - (2013) - short story
• Crutches - (1983) - short story
• Leaks - (1987) - short story
• Houses Creaking in the Wind - (1998) - short story
• Escape on a Train - (1990) - short story
• Among the Old - (1988) - short story
• In the Trees - (1990) - short story
• Out Late in the Park - (2003) - short story
• The Cabinet Child - (2009) - short fiction
• The Figure in Motion - (2010) - short fiction
• An Ending - (2004) - short story
• Twember - (2012) - short story
• Origami Bird - (2002) - short fiction
• Firestorm - (1982) - short story
• When We Moved On - (2009) - short fiction
• The Company You Keep - (2005) - short story
• 2:00 pm: The Real Estate Agent Arrives - (2008) - short story
• The Carving - (2005) - short story
• Jesse - (1991) - short story
• Preparations for the Game - (1982) - short story
• Little Cruelties - (1986) - short story
• The Men and Women of Rivendale - (1984) - short story
• Hungry - (1992) - short story
• Miri - (2011) - short story
• Underground - (1992) - short story
• Vintage Domestic - (1992) - short story
• Grandfather Wolf - (2010) - short story
• The Bereavement Photographer - (2003) - short story
• Invisible - (2005) - short story
• Between the Pilings - (2015) - short story
• Red Rabbit - (2016) - short story

WFA nominated short story. It originally appeared in the anthology Perpetual Light (1982), edited by Alan Ryan. The story is included in the collections Celestial Inventories (2013), Figures Unseen: Selected Stories (2018).

Stoker Award nominated short story. It originally appeared on Sci Fiction, March 2, 2005. The story can also be found in the anthology Fantasy: The Best of the Year, 2006 Edition, edited by Rich Horton. It is included in the collections Celestial Inventories (2013) and Figures Unseen: Selected Stories (2018).

"All my life I've dreamed of the dead."

Thanatrauma: the dread of it erodes you, the shadows waiting at the end, the impending conclusion, the troubling dream from which you will not wake.

These 21 stories - four published here for the first time - explore some of our fundamental fears: death, loss, grief, and aging.

In "Reflections in Black," a man takes a phantasmagoric Halloween journey in search of a former love.

In "The Parts Man," a man enters a desperate contract with a sinister entity in a long, vintage automobile.

The darkly beautiful "The Dead Outside My Door" is a haunting post-apocalyptic tale unlike any you've ever read.

Other offerings include "Whatever You Want," in which a Christmas wish has terrible consequences;

"Torn," a bizarre vision of a highly personalized hell;

and "The Way Station," a tribute to the legendary Stefan Grabinski.

Also featured is a special bonus, "August Freeze," from the lost, undistributed Winter 1985 issue

Two interwoven memoirs of love, loss, and family with a haunted, frightening edge.

In 2000, American Fantasy Press published an unassuming chapbook titled The Man on the Ceiling. Inside was a dark, surreal, discomfiting story of the horrors that can befall a family. It was so powerful that it won the Bram Stoker Award, International Horror Guild Award, and World Fantasy Award--the only work ever to win all three. Now, Melanie Tem and Steve Rasnic Tem have re-imagined the story, expanding on the ideas to create a compelling work that examines how people find a family, how they hold a family together despite incomprehensible tragedy, and how, in the end, they find love.

Loosely autobiographical, The Man on the Ceiling has the feel of a family portrait painted by Salvador Dali, where story and reality blend to find the one thing that neither can offer alone: truth.

WFA and Stoker Award winning novelette.

The Man on the Ceiling is the Tems' stunning semi-autobiographical short story about living with the devastating fears that lurk in our everyday lives. An examination of common dreads that will haunt you every time you see a shadow cross a wall or hear a noise in the dark, especially in the safety of your own home.

The story was originally published as a chapbook. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Fourteenth Annual Collection (2001), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and Poe's Children: The New Horror: An Anthology (2008), edited by Peter Straub. The story is included in the collection In Concert: The Collected Speculative Fiction of Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem (2010) and was expanded to the full novel The Man on the Ceiling (2008).

Contributors include D. M Thomas, Margaret Atwood, Ray Bradbury, Marge Piercy, Diane Ackerman and many others.

Daniel is trapped in Ubo. He has no idea how long he has been imprisoned there by the roaches.

Every resident has a similar memory of the journey: a dream of dry, chitinous wings crossing the moon, the gigantic insects dropping swiftly over the houses; the creatures, like a deck of baroquely ornamented cards, fanning themselves from one hidden world into the next.

And now each day they force Daniel to play a different figure from humanity's violent history, from a frenzied Jack the Ripper to a stumbling and confused Stalin, to a self-proclaimed god executing survivors atop the ruins of the world. As skies burn and prisoners go mad, identities dissolve as the experiments evolve, and no one can foretell their mysterious end.

Twember is Steve Rasnic Tem's first ever collection of science fiction stories, gathering together the very best of his SF from across a distinguished career, drawing on work from 1980 right through to the current day. With four stories that originally appeared in Asimov's and others from Interzone, Destinies, and elsewhere, Twember showcases Tem at his best. The book also features two brand new pieces written especially for this collection.

"Steve Rasnic Tem is a rare treasure, waiting to be discovered by many more of the world's most sophisticated and mature readers." - Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion

"...a near-perfect short story." - Scientifically Bookish (of A Letter for the Emperor)

"A heartbreaking story of the loving ties between family members, and of mortality, postponed yet never repealed. And of hope." - Lois Tilton, Locus Online (of Visitors)

Table of Contents:

• Twember: An Introduction - essay
• A Letter from the Emperor - (2010) - short story
• Twember - (2012) - short story
• The Day Before the Day Before - (2009) - short story
• Pathetic Fallacy - (1993) - short story
• Forward - (1980) - short story
• Visitors - (2011) - short story
• Cubs - (2000) - short story
• Forty-three Thousand Sunsets - (2012) - short story
• Ephemera - (2011) - novelette
• At Play in the Fields - (2011) - short story
• The Long Afternoon of the Human Race - (2012) - short story