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A wheel of ravens revelled loudlyOver a bitter battle of bold fightersWho lost their lives and lay in mud,A feast of flesh for the frenzied birds...From Adam Bolivar, balladeer extraordinaire and author of The Ettinfell of Beacon Hill, comes a landmark volume of poetry that harkens back to the adventurous myths of the Anglo-Saxons and the Dark Ages...Alliterative verse was the traditional poetic form used in Old English poems such as Beowulf and The Wanderer, as well as in Old Norse sagas and the Poetic Edda of the Icelanders. Outlawed by the Normans as a symbol of nativist rebellion after their conquest of England in the year 1066, this ancient form is now all but forgotten. A Wheel of Ravens is the first ever collection of original verse written in the Old English alliterative style. Braiding together threads of early English paganism, folkloric elements-including a speculative pre-history of the storytelling tradition of Jack Tales-and the dream-cycle of H. P. Lovecraft, Adam Bolivar offers an intricate poetic tapestry bursting with myth and story, as unique as it is remarkable.This groundbreaking work will surely be of great interest to fans of Seamus Heaney's Beowulf: A New Verse Translation and Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology. With a foreword by Dennis Wilson Wise (a noted authority on Tolkien and epic fantasy), an introduction by the author, and a useful glossary. Richly illustrated with images of Anglo-Saxon artifacts, artwork and more.

HALLOWEEN HEARTS: POETRY INSPIRED BY RAY BRADBURY AND EDGAR ALLAN POEAdele Gardner's Halloween Hearts is a welcome celebration of all things Halloween, whether they take place on October 31st or not. Disciples of All Hallows' Eve, enter of your own free will . . . haunted houses, trick-or-treaters, vampires, demonic foxes, witches and their familiars, revenants both longed-for and uninvited, and the creeping mists of autumn all have their place in these pages.Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe-icons of the American imagination, pilgrims of the nightside territories of the mind-have a special place in Gardner's works. The poetry in this volume is inspired by much of what makes each of these authors special to so many readers: Poe's sensitivity to loss and melancholia, and to horror and terror, and Bradbury's enthusiastic embrace of Halloween and other dark aspects of Americana, along with his refusal to allow death to be the final word in our relationship with our loved ones. With "Eureka" "Nevermore," "Poe's Prophets," and other poems, Gardner explores Poe's hallowed place in our haunted hearts. And in the title poem, which opens the book, Gardner lovingly celebrates Ray Bradbury and his unique alchemy of nostalgia, dread, and Halloween eternal.". . . this book has been a long time coming, with its black cats and witches, ghosts and the grave, vampires and writers that haunt the night. Whether their subjects are traditional to Halloween or on tangential themes, all these poems are Halloween to me-that season so melancholy and elegiac, yet also fierce, with shining teeth, pointy grins, and a cat's fang-filled mischief." -Adele Gardner, from the introductionWith a foreword by S. T. Joshi and an introduction by the authorIllustrated ¿ Featuring art by Gustave Doré and Dan Sauer

Behind the torn facade of the living world lurks a realm of vivid darkness. Strange currents ebb and flow in the stellar void, spawning monsters, ghosts, and abominations beyond human understanding. DARKER THAN WEIRD collects ten years of weird fiction that defies and sometimes utterly destroys the boundaries of genre. From dystopic nightmares to gruesome science fiction, modern terrors to ancient gods, horror is the common thread in this dark tapestry of tales. Fourteen unsettling explorations of the supernatural, the ghastly, and the existentially grotesque. Read them at your own risk.

IN THE GRAND TRADITION of Clark Ashton Smith; of H. P. Lovecraft's Fungi from Yuggoth, of Edgar Allan Poe and George Sterling and other masters of Weird Poetry...JOHN SHIRLEY-the Bram Stoker Award-winning writer; the noted novelist, author of Demons and Cellars and Lovecraft Alive and City Come A-Walkin' and Stormland and the A Song Called Youth trilogy and Black Butterflies; the songwriter; the lyricist for the Blue Öyster Cult... and frequent contributor to the weird poetry journal Spectral Realms-presents his first book of poems.His themes range widely: from irony-infused cautionary tales to the dangers of romance in a vein of nightmare; to the diabolic glimpsed from the corners of the eye; to the lyricism of streetcorners; to the magic energy of inescapable regret; to cosmic horror, secret sovereigns, and apocalypse... leavened by subtle glimpses of hope.This volume is lavishly illustrated by noted weird artist Dan Sauer, whose surreal photomontage work illuminates the savage beauty and dark epiphanies of Shirley's verse.

SCOTT J. COUTURIER has distinguished himself with poems of uncanny beauty and dread, appearing in the pages of Spectral Realms, The Audient Void, Eternal Haunted Summer, and other journals of the Weird. His poems are singularly sensitive to the darker aspects of nature. Jackanapes Press is pleased to offer I Awaken in October-Couturier's first volume of poetry-which collects a cornucopia of seasonal horrors and autumnal delights.In I Awaken In October, rites of autumnal adulation are performed alongside offerings to every phase of the Year's Wheel, seasons sequentially explored through lenses of veneration, dread, and supernatural awe. All wending back to that most bittersweet of moments, when once more we awaken-just as the dead do-to October's majesty. Follow the path to Summer's end, where the last gold-litten days malinger into cobweb; where gleaming trails of jack-o -lanterns light the way; where Queen Mab and Cernunnos reign.With a foreword by Rebecca Buchanan, and an introduction by the author.Featuring 20 full-page illustrations by Dan Sauer.

WELCOME TO THE WEIRD, WEIRD, WEIRD, WEIRD WORLD OF JOHN SHIRLEY...How deep into the weird will you go? Will you wade to your knees? Your waist? Your shoulders? Will you get in over your head?This truly unique story collection from the acclaimed and unsettling John Shirley is organized into four sections. The first section is Really Weird Stories. The second is Really, Really Weird Stories. The third is Really, Really, Really Weird Stories. The fourth is-oh yes-Really, Really, Really, Really Weird Stories. And the author means what he says: each section is weirder than the last, doubling its strangeness a section at a time. The collection starts out disquieting; it becomes disturbing, then it gets outrageously weird-then mind-bending. Yet each story is a compelling narrative.Some of the stories are set in the "real world;" others have a supernatural or science-fiction basis, or come from a place where genres are destroyed by explosive vision. In this edition there are four new stories, including the Lovecraftian Antarctic adventure "A Boy and His Shoggoth," and, published here for the first time, "The Whisperer Made Visible"-a tale of secret treaties with horrors eldritch and invisible.This updated edition of Really, Really, Really, Really Weird Stories is one of the most impressive feats of sustained and varied weirdness since Harlan Ellison's landmark Dangerous Visions anthologies. Your mind is strong. Take the risk...