You can know something is a trap and walk right into it anyway. There’s a vicious kind of glee in the snap of steel jaws springing closed, biting through skin and splintering bone. You can think aha, I knew it as you swallow the pain.

We pull in the first wrong thing at two a.m., under a choppy wind and reddening moon. It’s not discovered until two fifty-five a.m, after the great nets have been poured through the processing machines and seas of pelagic fish spill over the lip of the conveyor belt. It’s an apprentice who spots it.

We firmly believe that dark fiction is a bulwark against the forces of the world eager to reduce our human experience to dollars and cents. Horror, dark fantasy, and all kinds of weird and bizarre literature is powerful nutrition for the creative soul.

Dan Coxon has won a World Fantasy Award (Heartwood: A Mythago Wood Anthology), a Saboteur Award (Being Dad) and two British Fantasy Awards (Writing the Uncanny and Writing the Future, both co-edited with Richard V. Hirst). He has been shortlisted for the British Fantasy Awards a total of eight times, and was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Awards.

in my vision, I taste happiness. I watch the sun’s dance & listen to the music of laughter. I run through a garden & somehow, I am a child again, trying to catch butterflies but they keep slipping through my fingers; like happiness, like love, like everything else I chase.