My story “Fifty Shades of Grey Matter” features in Fiddleblack‘s first annual anthology — Apparitional Experience — which is devoted to ghostless ghost stories. It goes on sale today and is available here.

“Fifty Shades of Grey Matter” is described, on the website, as “a completely pure example of concept horror” that is “worth the cover price alone”.

From the website:

A response to the idea of “ghost stories without ghosts,” this anthology includes stories by John McManus, Todd Grimson, Andrew Gallix and other authors familiar to fans of Fiddleblack’s hard-to-parse self-definitions (antipastoralism and concept horror). The collection’s twelve stories are nothing if not equally enunciative, atmospheric and carved sharply into floorboards and muck-spattered glass. No, there’s nary an actual ghost involved, but this work is clearly haunted.

Apparitional Experience is built by twelve writers investigating on their own terms, examining nostalgia and risk, and how these elements can reconfigure our perceptions of self against place, how we’re sometimes duped into rationalizing our own existence. Here, our ghosts are not the reappearing spectral dead. Our ghosts take the shape of people and relationships once lost or forcibly forgotten, faded missions and feelings, and motivations no longer there. The writers of Apparitional Experience have written something for the fallen dreams, in a sense, for the very possibility of loss of control in our everyday lives, and the isolationist thoughts that possibility might bring.

This anthology demonstrates twelve interpretations of these elements from authors with rather different bodies of work all converging at a single dark center. John McManus characterizes rural perversity, and Mark Welborn walks us down a beautiful, densely haunted hiking trail. Joe Ricker and Charles Dodd White independently reinvigorate conventions for the modern Southern Gothic. Elias Marsten gives us rote antipastoralism, Kevin Catalano brings us an example of hyperintensive horror without limits, and Nicholas Rombes channels a particularly asphyxiating H.P. Lovecraft to counter a dark and new journalistic account of the Great Recession by Daniel Roberts. Bringing in the book’s final third is a dizzying piece of Thomas Ligotti-inspired work by Adam S. Cantwell, followed by an astringent body horror narrative by Karin Anderson. Todd Grimson’s woozy three-part flash fiction recalls David Lynch, and, to close, worth the cover price alone, is a completely pure example of concept horror by Andrew Gallix.

Apparitional Experience, as you may find, does not make for light reading in any sense of the phrase. There is much more to fear in the natural world, fear enough that these authors do not ever find true mirrors to the supernatural in their work. Rather, they discover that there are no ghosts. There is nothing out there past the concrete, past the trees. In the face of that person you hate and fear, there is no evil spirit, no broken. There is nothing all around us. Nothing at all.