FANTAStic Short Fiction

Posted by David R.

Something very nice about short story collections is that you can often sit down and finish a story in one sitting.  These fantasy-based short fiction stories have the added appeal of being imaginative, clever, and innovative. 

Perchance to Dream: Selected Stories by Charles Beaumont
A new Penguin edition of the legendary fantasist's most inventive and imaginative of tales; a collection of stories that illustrates the boundless talents of its author.

Beaumont dreamed up fantasies so vast and varied they burst through the walls of whatever box might contain them. Supernatural, horror, noir, science fiction, fantasy, pulp, and more: all were equally at home in his wondrous mind. These are stories where lions stalk the plains, classic cars rove the streets, and spacecraft hover just overhead. Here roam musicians, magicians, vampires, monsters, toreros, extraterrestrials, androids, and perhaps even the Devil himself. With dizzying feats of master storytelling and joyously eccentric humor, Beaumont transformed his nightmares and reveries into impeccably crafted stories that leave themselves indelibly stamped upon the walls of the mind. In Beaumont’s hands, nothing is impossible: it all seems plausible, even likely.


Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti
Lovecraftian yet original tales of horror and the dark fantastic, by a lesser known and innovative voice in the fantastic fiction field.

Ligotti’s stories take on decaying cities and lurid dreamscapes in a style ranging from rich, ornamental prose to cold, clinical detachment. His raw and experimental work lays bare the unimportance of our world and the sickening madness of the human condition. Like the greatest writers of cosmic horror, Ligotti bends reality until it cracks, opening fissures through which he invites us to gaze on the unsettling darkness of the abyss below.








I Am Crying All Inside and Other stories: The complete short fiction of Clifford D. Simak, Volume One by Clifford D. Simak

An under-read name in science fiction history, the short stories of Clifford D. Simak contain a cultural influence extending from Harlan Ellison anthologies to Ridley Scott's Film Alien. Collected here in the fantastic new edition are thrilling favorites such as "Small Deer" and "Madness from Mars".