Crypt Orchids

Cimarron Street Books is pleased to bring you an all-new, revised edition of CRYPT ORCHIDS — the fourth collection of short stories by award-winning author David J. Schow, a gathering of foreboding fiction that grabs the cutting edge barehanded, damns the spray of blood, and stays right in your face “until you want to go down on your knees and mumble for mercy,” according to best-selling author John Farris. Crime. Psychos. Trashed relationships. Tainted love. Murder. Sinister plots. Evil connivance. Men in Suits with a Plan. Bizarre cover copy. Not to mention hustlers, losers, cutthroats, gun fetishists, homicidal hitchhikers, demented road-hogs, serial killer impersonators, government torturers, and a Ripper named Jack. And most unnerving of all . . . vaudevillians (shudder). Welcome to CRYPT ORCHIDS, where you’ll also meet a most murderous collector, a horror movie host who deals in the real thing, an innocent victim of a TV test screening, persnickety aliens with testicle-heads, a werewolf with a hook in place of a paw, a Mikey who does, in fact, hate everything, a hit man named Mister Bart, and a temperamental geezer with a lot to say about the environment and skinning people alive. As Robert Bloch once said . . . it takes balls to make CRYPT ORCHIDS. Enter and be enthralled. The Management assumes no responsibility for parts of you left scattered about. Here's what folks are saying about CRYPT ORCHIDS: Schow is so fine a writer, so imaginative a storyteller, that he deserves a place in all contemporary fiction collections.― Library Journal A polished, clever, witty, unflinching writer who combines horror and dark humor as well as anyone since the late, great Robert Bloch. Schow is one of the few writers of his generation who can actually makes psychos interesting.― Weird Tales CRYPT ORCHIDS definitely meets the high standards established by Schow’s previous story collections, such as BLACK LEATHER REQUIRED. Versatile, charming, and fiercely independent, Schow is a master of the contemporary horror story.― Fiona Webster - Amazon (CRYPT ORCHIDS) shows an eager propensity to ricochet between the virtuosic and the crass, often within the same paragraph, sometimes the same sentence. It’s a fine line to tread, but Schow has rarely shown even a wobble’s worth of misstep in developing a style that’s as inimitable as it is distinctive, and pulling it off because each artistic “either/or” is the clear choice of an intellect as sharp as a leather awl.― Brian Hodge - Hellnotes On a purely linguistic level, Schow’s style is as carefully crafted as Lovecraft’s, Robert Aickman’s, or Thomas Ligotti’s, (wielding) a surprising variety of tone and mood . . . his tales themselves range from the brooding to the comical to the poignant.― S.T. Joshi - Studies in Weird Fiction Bleak and savage stuff, as good as it gets. ― Scott Winnett - Locus