Sefira and Other Betrayals

by John Langan, Paul Tremblay (Introduction)

Overview

2019 THIS IS HORROR AWARDS WINNER: Short Story Collection of the Year

2019 BRAM STOKER AWARD(R) NOMINEE: Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection

"This book is a treasure trove for lovers of literary horror fiction."--Publishers Weekly Starred Review

From the award-winning writer of The Fisherman comes a new collection of stories. A pair of disgraced soldiers seek revenge on the man who taught them how to torture. A young lawyer learns the history of the secret that warped her parents' marriage. A writer arrives at a mansion overlooking the Hudson River to write about the strange paper balloons floating through its grounds. A couple walks a path that shows them their past, present, and terrible future. A woman and her husband discover a cooler on the side of the road whose contents are decidedly unearthly. A man driving cross country has a late-night encounter with a figure claiming to be the Devil. And in the short novel that gives the collection its title, a woman chases a monster in a race against time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781614981923
Publisher:	Hippocampus Press
Publication date:	04/20/2019
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	367,041
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.73(d)

Editorial Reviews

★ 03/18/2019

The horrors elaborated in the eight stories in Langan’s exceptional third collection (after 2013’s The Wide, Carnivorous Sky) all arise from intensely intimate instances of personal betrayal and the emotional unmooring it causes, their vast cosmic scope notwithstanding. In the title tale, a woman tracks the femme fatale who has seduced her husband across the country, gradually acquiescing to the realization that her rival is a formidable succubus from time immemorial. “In Paris, in the Mouth of Kronos” is a slice of supernatural noir whose characters are trapped in a web of double-crosses and deceptions designed to propitiate the dark forces controlling their fates. “At Home in the House of the Devil” features an appearance by Old Scratch himself as the personal tormentor of a man who abandoned his drug-addicted lover in her hour of need. Langan laces his tales with allusions to the work of Henry James and other heavyweight writers, but the horrors he evokes are unique to their stories, as in “Bor Urus,” in which the reality-bending storms its narrator chases seem an externalized expression of his own troubled psyche, and “The Third Always Beside You,” in which “the other woman” feeds vampirically off a marital relationship. This book is a treasure trove for lovers of literary horror fiction. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"John Langan's Sefira and Other Betrayals (Hippocampus), an outstanding collection of horror stories by a literary writer whose work will unnerve you as deeply as Shirley Jackson's."--Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

"John Langan is a beast of a contemporary horror writer. Sefira and Other Betrayals would be career-defining for some authors. In Langan's case, this is merely his best work this decade."--Laird Barron, author of Black Mountain

"John Langan is a Leviathan of modern weird fiction."--Paul St. John Mackintosh, L. A. Review of Books

"John Langan is one of the few great wizards who not only understands but as mastered the magic of the darkly weird. His prose is both beautiful, fantastical dream and terrifying nightmare, subtle in its delivery and staggering in its implication. In Sefira and Other Betrayals, readers stand on the shore of a strange sea full of monsters, with its tide of secrets and emotions tugging the ground out slowly from underneath. Undoubtedly, readers can't help but be drawn in by its surreal and inexorable undertow."--Mary SanGiovanni, author of Behind the Door and host of Cosmic Shenanigans podcast

"With Sefira and Other Betrayals John Langan cements the fact that he is one of the strongest voices in literary horror. His willingness to tell a story that pulls no punches is refreshing. The fact that his prose is so richly textured is beautiful. It's a divine combination that is resent in all of works and I love and envy the man's talent."--James A. Moore, author of Boomtown and the Seven Forges fantasy series.

"Langan is a master of the short-story form, and his trade in the terrifying and supernatural should not take away from the literary nature of these layered tales full of thought-provoking dread and relentless monsters, and the lyrical beauty of the words that tie it all together."--Becky Spratford, Booklist Online

From the Publisher