Children of the Fang and Other Genealogies by John Langan

Release Date: 2020, August 18
Genre: Fantasy, Horror, Short-Stories
Author: John Langan
Publisher: Word Horde

An aspiring actress goes to an audition with a mysterious director. An editor receives the last manuscript of his murdered friend. A young lawyer learns the terrible connection between her grandfather and an ancient race of creatures. A bodyguard drives her employer across a frozen road toward an immense hole in the earth. In these stories and others, John Langan maps the branches of his literary family tree, tracing his connections to the writers whose dark fictions have inspired his own.

Table of Contents:

Introduction by Stephen Graham Jones

“Sweetums”

“Hyphae”

“Muse”

“Zombies in Marysville”

“With Max Barry in the Nearer Precincts”

“Into the Darkness, Fearlessly”

“Children of the Fang”

“Episode Three: On the Great Plains, in the Snow”

“Trag?idia”

“Ymir”

“Irezumi”

“The Horn of the World’s Ending”

“The Underground Economy”

“The Communion of Saints”

“Aphanisis”

“Gripped”

“Inundation”

“To See, To Be Seen”

“What You Do Not Bring Forth”

“Vista”

“Slippage”

Cover Art by Matthew Jaffe
Cover Design by Scott R. Jones

Previous Praise

For John Langan:

“Think Henry James and Joyce Carol Oates with just a few paragraphs of Joe Lansdale…”
—Tor.com

“John Langan is a writer of superb literary horror. Both House of Windows and The Fisherman are dark and unsettling contemporary masterpieces.”
—Peter Straub, New York Times bestselling author

“John Langan’s Sefira and Other Betrayals (Hippocampus), an outstanding collection of horror stories by a literary writer whose work will unnerve you as deeply as Shirley Jackson’s.”
—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

“John Langan is a beast of a contemporary horror writer. Sefira and Other Betrayals would be career-defining for some authors. In Langan’s case, this is merely his best work this decade.”
—Laird Barron, author of Black Mountain

“John Langan is a Leviathan of modern weird fiction.”
—Paul St. John Mackintosh, L. A. Review of Books

“John Langan is one of the few great wizards who not only understands but as mastered the magic of the darkly weird. His prose is both beautiful, fantastical dream and terrifying nightmare, subtle in its delivery and staggering in its implication. In Sefira and Other Betrayals, readers stand on the shore of a strange sea full of monsters, with its tide of secrets and emotions tugging the ground out slowly from underneath. Undoubtedly, readers can’t help but be drawn in by its surreal and inexorable undertow.”
—Mary SanGiovanni, author of Behind the Door and host of Cosmic Shenanigans podcast

“With Sefira and Other Betrayals John Langan cements the fact that he is one of the strongest voices in literary horror. His willingness to tell a story that pulls no punches is refreshing. The fact that his prose is so richly textured is beautiful. It’s a divine combination that is resent in all of works and I love and envy the man’s talent.”
—James A. Moore, author of Boomtown and the Seven Forges fantasy series.

About the Author

John Langan is the author of two novels and four collections of stories. His second novel, The Fisherman, won the Bram Stoker and This Is Horror Awards. He is one of the founders of the Shirley Jackson Awards, for which he served as a juror during their first three years. He reviews horror and dark fantasy for Locus magazine. He lives in New York’s Mid-Hudson Valley with his wife and younger son, and is slowly disappearing into an office full of books. And more books.

Visit him online at johnpaullangan.wordpress.com.

https://wordhorde.com/