Burned Man at Night

A really unusual and impressive collection-harrowing but frequently quite touching. I very much admire the elegance, the old-fashioned elegance of the writing. McFarland has a talent for finding something touching on the other side of horror. My admiration for McFarland's work is sincere. -T.E.D. Klein, author of The Ceremonies and Dark Gods

McFarland tempers his frights with the mercy of familial love and sympathy for outsiders and victims. Horror readers will be riveted. -Publishers Weekly

McFarland is adept at creating unsettling scenarios within very human, everyday contexts. The horrors that plague his characters feel like something that could happen to anyone at any time, which is a great way to creep under a reader's skin and stay there a while. -Philip Fracassi, author of Behold the Void and Boys in the Valley

John S. McFarland's new horror collection, Burned Man at Night, continues the cursed history of the forgotten village of Ste. Odile. Damned from its very inception on the banks of the Mississippi in 1699, the town's demons, ghosts, and lost misfits are the collateral damage of the intrusion of the dark forces enslaving and terrorizing its inhabitants for generations. In the tale Oriax of Hell, a seriously injured man is rebuilt as a horrific experiment and chooses a path of evil after saving a child. In The Origin of the World, a psychopath is made supervisor of an orphanage. In Burned Man at Night, a folk demon known to central European villagers is summoned to avenge immigrant families against some murderous natives of Ste. Odile.

Authentically unnerving. An uneasy pleasure to read. -Ramsey Campbell, author of The Influence and The Doll Who Ate His Mother