Dark Gods
by T.E.D. Klein
introduction by S.T. Joshi
with an essay by Dejan Ognjanovic
Dark Gods by T.E.D. Klein is a weird fiction masterpiece. It is difficult to overestimate the impact these tales made as they appeared one by one in anthologies, starting in 1979 and culminating in the novella that capped the collection in 1985. Taking the merest hints from Machen and Lovecraft, Klein develops realms of inexorable, insidious threat, which his cast of otherwise ordinary people either never suspected or fail to recognise until it is too late.
Imagine: attempting to reach a loved one during the chaos of the 1977 New York Blackout and suddenly encountering the thrice-cursed “Children of the Kingdom” . . . following the Tarot cards that counterpoint the irony-laden chitchat of the people who displaced a raving old man from the cryptic “Petey”. . . living with the nightmarish truth behind your mentor’s fiction as you await the “Black Man with a Horn” . . . or discovering, in “Nadelman’s God," that the nihilistic deity you committed to paper decades ago in a fit of adolescent pique has found a zealous new acolyte.
Klein’s supple, deceptively simple prose is as capable of wit as it is of dread as he gradually lifts the veil separating his meticulously described contemporary world from the dark worlds of uncertainty and horror that impinge upon it.
About the Chiroptera Press edition
This edition includes a new introduction by S. T. Joshi and an extensive essay written by Dejan Ognjanovic. Dust jacket art by Paul Romano and interior art by Jonathan Dennison. Text has been revised from the original Viking edition, and its production has been closely overseen by the author.
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Cover art by Paul Romano
Interior art by Jonathan Dennison
Paperback Edition
312 pages. Smyth-sewn binding, French flaps. Offset printed on acid-free archival paper.
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About the Author
Theodore "Eibon" Donald (T.E.D.) Klein is an American horror writer and editor. Klein has published very few works, but they have all achieved positive notice for their meticulous construction and subtle use of horror.
Critic S. T. Joshi writes, "In close to 25 years of writing Klein has only two books and a handful of scattered tales to his credit, and yet his achievement towers gigantically over that of his more prolific contemporaries."
