Nightshade and Damnations cover art

Nightshade and Damnations

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About this listen

An expedition in South America uncovers a terrifying race of men without bones who literally suck the life out of their prey. A man in 20th-century London makes a horrifying discovery about a monster found off the coast of Brighton in 1745. A sea captain goes ashore on a deserted island and finds what seem to be the bones of a previously unknown species of monster, only to learn that the bones tell a much more tragic tale than he could ever have imagined. A war correspondent, none other than Kersh himself, is sailing to America when he meets a strange man who claims to be 438 years old. These are the plots of just a few of the weird tales you will find in this book.

©1968, 2018 Gerald Kersh (P)2019 Valancourt Books LLC Anthologies & Short Stories Fiction Horror Science Fiction Scary Short Story

Critic reviews

"Gerald Kersh had a wild imagination matched by a vivid, near-hallucinatory style. Many of his concepts are so original that they blur the distinction between fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and horror, but the cumulative impact of his short stories is horrific in the extreme." (Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural)
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Laudable work from Valancourt Books in retrieving from obscurity this genuinely excellent collection of short stories by cult British novelist Gerald Kersh. Originally published in 1968 (the year of Kersh's death), this book was edited by Harlan Ellison and blends speculative fiction, weird tales, alternative history, horror and fantasy with a whimsical flair that puts it somewhere between H.G. Wells and the bizarre magic realism of Steven Millhauser (which, to me, is a very good thing indeed). Due to Kersh's literary style, some of these stories would probably work better being savoured on the page than read aloud but narrator Matt Godfrey provides the usual high quality delivery that I've come to expect from him.

Highbrow weird fiction for lovers of the bizarre

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