About the Stories | About the Author

COLLECTED HERE ARE T.E.D. KLEIN’S RARE AND OBSCURE
SHORT STORIES, HARD TO FIND EVEN FOR DEDICATED FANS.

Creatures sinister but unseen. Madmen who may not be so mad. Realities that twist into astonishing patterns. Insidious new technologies beyond our understanding or control. Welcome to the existential weird fiction of master storyteller T.E.D. KLEIN, the acclaimed editor of Twilight Zone magazine and author of the bestselling novel The Ceremonies and the award-winning four-novella collection Dark Gods.

More than a decade ago, Klein’s shorter stories were collected in Reassuring Tales in an edition limited to 600 copies. It quickly sold out and is today expensive and hard to find even for dedicated fans. This new expanded edition reprints the earlier book’s contents, along with two previously uncollected stories, three poems, an essay, new illustrations, and an interview with the author.

Be advised: the tales found here are anything but reassuring…

THE STORIES

• Camera Shy
A proud father gets his daughter’s wedding photos developed… but something’s wrong. The groom isn’t appearing in any of the pictures. Is he just camera shy? Or is there some other reason—something darker?

• Curtains for Nat Crumley
An old man steps out of his bathroom and into a house that isn’t his… or is it?

• Growing Things
A retired couple buy a new home in the country… but what happened to the previous owners?

• Imagining Things
When a teenager’s little brother starts seeing things that aren’t there, he’s sent to a psychiatric hospital where he’s diagnosed with schizophrenia… but then other people start seeing things, too…

• Ladder
An old man looks back on his life only to realize God’s plan for him isn’t what he thought it was.

• Magic Carpet
On a plane flight, a businessman tries to explain to the child in the next seat how airplanes fly, but discovers he can’t. Not in any way that makes sense, at least…

• One Size Eats All
A child gets a sleeping bag for Christmas with a label reading “One Size Eats All”. But the sleeping bag doesn’t really eat people… right?

• Renaissance Man
A team of engineers contact a scientist from the future so he can explain to them how advanced futuristic technology works—but things don’t go as planned.

• S.F.
A great-grandmother writes a letter to her great-grandson warning him against a innocent-seeming new technology that can erase bad memories.

• The Events at Poroth Farm
In this novella, a college student rents a room for the summer from an couple in an Amish-like religious community. But then strange things begin to happen, like the couple’s cat appearing to come back from the dead… and that’s just the beginning…

• They Don’t Write ’em Like This Anymore
One day, an old man’s mailbox unexpectedly contains a new issue of a pulp magazine he subscribed to as a child, one that’s been out of print for decades. But when he tries to track down the company resurrecting the old pulp, things begin to get increasingly strange.

• Well-Connected
A couple on vacation meet a friendly stranger who invites them to a mansion for dinner. But they gradually realize nothing is quite what it seems.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A lifelong New Yorker, T.E.D. Klein was the founding editor of Twilight Zone magazine from 1981 to 1985. His first (and so far only) novel, The Ceremonies, was a New York Times bestseller and won the 1984 British Fantasy Society award. In 1985 he published Dark Gods, a collection of four novellas, one of which, “Nadelman’s God,” won the 1986 World Fantasy Award; another, “Children of the Kingdom,” was cited by Victor LaValle in the New York Times as “the greatest New York City horror story of all time.” He later edited the true-crime magazine CrimeBeat and wrote the screenplay for Dario Argento’s thriller Trauma. His nonfiction writing has been collected in Providence After Dark. In 2012, the World Horror Convention bestowed on him its Grand Master award. ”In close to 25 years of writing,” says literary critic S. T. Joshi, “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.”

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Ashley Cser is a digital artist with dozens of ebook cover designs under her belt, known for her ability to imitate a variety of artistic styles. You can check out more of her artwork at her website, mllebienvenu.weebly.com.