Prolific Canadian author Alexander Zelenyj returns with another massive collection of horror, speculative, and slipstream short fiction! Songs For The Lost is published by UK-based Eibonvale Press and contains 34 short stories running the literary gamut from horror to speculative to noir to magical realism to science fiction to Bizarro to pulp to fabulism to literary to slipstream. Available through booksellers everywhere, or directly from Eibonvale Press.
What people are saying about Songs For The Lost:
“Dipping into the bizarro universe woven by Zelenyj’s inebriating narratives is like peering beneath the cracked and peeling veneer of reality. Zelenyj is a mad yet marvellous seeker, an eccentric impresario, a conductor of dreams as charming and hypnotic as Rod Serling himself. Follow him and you will find yourself among lost souls touring abandoned hopes and forbidden dreams at the edge of an impossible paradise. Each story concludes with a wink signalling that he knows what you have always felt, deep down – that there is more to this life than meets the eye.
And therein lies the power of Alexander Zelenyj. We fill up our lives with the familiar, with mundane routines and ridiculous consumer products, laments and trifles and limitations. Through it all there is an ache deep inside of us. It is the ache of an unspoken truth, the key to surviving the destruction wrought by reality. Stories such as these share that truth, the promise that keeps us going. Life in this universe is more strange and dangerous and wonderful than you have ever been led to believe.”
– from the Foreword, by Brian A. Dixon, Editor, Fourth Horseman Press
“As you read these stories you will find them unexpectedly profound, challenging, harsh, painful, and thought-provoking. Indeed, more than once you might find yourself shaken to the core – summoned to think and feel, or deal with events on levels that are rare for this or any kind of writing. ”
– from “Three Billion And Six: An Introduction” by David Rix, Editor, Eibonvale Press, Author of Feather and What The Giants Were Saying
“Zelenyj is an absolute master of emotional horror, melancholy, passion, and the delicate art of drawing on classic pop-culture and genre forms to create something highly complex, challenging, and quite visionary.”
– Dick Hildebrand, Windsor Life Magazine
From the press release for Songs For The Lost:
The lonely and the regretful and the downtrodden, the furious and the woeful and the damaged; all facing the futility of living in a world of malice, loss and loneliness; all desperately seeking salvation while forging through the miles of pain marking every step of the path to Paradise . . .
A farmer sings a nightly funeral dirge, summoning something from far across the fields
A cavalry troop finds Heaven or Hell in the hills
A reporter witnesses the final inexplicable moments of a saucer suicide cult
A boy and his grandfather hear a message from an un-guessed world beneath their feet
A boxer faces his greatest nemesis during the strangest of storms
A platoon is faced with a terrible choice in the jungle.
A garage band and their loyal fans disappear as part of the fulfillment of a prophecy.
An outpost of Roman Legionnaires is terrorized by an ancient evil.
Two alien children forge a unique pact with two Earth children.
A strange door opens in the middle of a burning summer day.
A seasoned detective interrogates a vengeful angel responsible for the haunting of an entire city.
A bounty hunter accepts a mission to hunt another man’s demon.
A husband and wife receive a long-awaited message from the sky.
A broken girl is bestowed a gift from the moon.
A group of troubled misfits search for Heaven in a violent future.
A brother and sister await the greatest fire the world will ever see…
All these Songs For The Lost, and other ghosts, too…
Songs For The Lost – Table Of Contents
Three Billion And Six – An Introduction By David Rix
Foreword by Brian A. Dixon
The Fire That We Deserve
Your Bone Spider Will Find You
Dying Days Of Treasure Spiders Everywhere
Maria, Here Come The Death Angels!
Always An Angelwitch Over Suicide Hill
Or The Loneliness Of Another Million Years
Forevermore Yours, The Hatred Chord
A Roman Plague
A Valley For Dorothy
Through Fogs Deep And Fires Long
God-Eater
Thank You, Baby-Stabber
Chux And Bux And The Quest For Brussels Sprouts
On Tour With The Deathray Bradburys
Elopers To Sirius
Tiny Bugles In A Dream Of Giants
But One Day All Of This Will Be Gone
May We Again Live Without Walls
If I Had Wings, Mister Moon
Squeeze The Sun: Storm Days Brew
Love Me, Too, Black Flower
Song Of The Dream Cats
Roaring Dream Of The Weeping Spider-Men
An Angela Named Vengeance
Two Blue Eggs In A Silver Dream
Far Beneath Incomplete Constellations
Motherlight Go To Sleep
Proteus In The Mountain
Disciples Of The Fire God
Come On, Night!
Black Lash Of Lucifer
Heaven A Million Hexes Away
Garden The Sky, Jimmy
Songs For The Lost
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Also available from Eibonvale Press is Alexander Zelenyj’s companion volume to Songs For The Lost, the poetry, essay and photography collection, Ballads To The Burning Twins: The Complete Song Lyrics Of The Deathray Bradburys. This 72-page volume, printed on premium-quality paper and featuring photographs by Elizabeth Walker, tells the meta-fictional tale of the infamous punk rock band/cult known as the Deathray Bradburys.
From the press release for Ballads To The Burning Twins: The Complete Song Lyrics Of The Deathray Bradburys:
Their identities remain unknown. Their whereabouts, as well as that of their 225 followers who disappeared alongside them, remain unknown.
Their songs – of suicide and transcendence, pain and hope, myth and religion,
violence and peace, innocence and evil, death and rebirth – will live forever.
They are the most infamous cult band in the history of rock and roll, and they may be much more than merely this: the legendary underground punk group the Deathray Bradburys who, along with 225 of their fanatical followers, disappeared from the face of the Earth as part of the fulfillment of a self-prescribed cosmic prophecy.
A companion volume to Songs For The Lost, Ballads To The Burning Twins follows the meta-fictional story of the Deathray Bradburys. These are their collected lyrics, their message of peace and their promise to the damaged and heartbroken, of escape from a dark and threatening world.
“There is a place
Far beyond all of this despair
We promise you, friends:
There is a place for us all.”
☼
Alexander Zelenyj is the author of the books Songs For The Lost, Ballads To The Burning Twins: The Complete Song Lyrics Of The Deathray Bradburys, Experiments At 3 Billion A.M., and Black Sunshine. He lives in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, and is an Active Member of the Horror Writers Association and SF Canada. Visit him at www.alexanderzelenyj.com.
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