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This novelette originally appeared in Lightspeed, April 2018. It is included in the collection Night Beast and Other Stories (2018).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Bestselling author John Connolly's first collection of short fiction, Nocturnes, now features five additional stories -- never-before published for an American audience -- in a dark, daring, utterly haunting anthology of lost lovers and missing children, predatory demons, and vengeful ghosts. In "The New Daughter," a father comes to suspect that a burial mound on his land hides something very ancient, and very much alive; in "The Underbury Witches," two London detectives find themselves battling a particularly female evil in a town culled of its menfolk. And finally, private detective Charlie Parker returns in the long novella "The Reflecting Eye," in which the photograph of an unknown girl turns up in the mailbox of an abandoned house once occupied by an infamous killer. This discovery forces Parker to confront the possibility that the house is not as empty as it appears, and that something has been waiting in the darkness for its chance to kill again.

Contents:

• 1 - The Cancer Cowboy Rides - novella
• 75 - Mr Pettinger's Dæmon - shortstory
• 91 - The Erkling - shortstory
• 103 - The New Daughter - shortstory
• 119 - The Ritual of the Bones - shortstory
• 135 - The Furnace Room - shortstory
• 149 - The Underbury Witches - novella
• 191 - The Inkpot Monkey - shortstory
• 205 - The Shifting of the Sands - shortstory
• 221 - Some Children Wander by Mistake - shortstory
• 233 - Deep Dark Green - shortstory
• 245 - Miss Froom, Vampire - shortstory
• 259 - Nocturne - shortstory
• 273 - The Wakeford Abyss - shortstory
• 289 - The Reflecting Eye: A Charlie Parker Novella - novella

John Connolly gives us a second volume of tales of the supernatural. From stories of the monstrous for dark winter nights to fables of fantastic libraries and haunted books, from a tender account of love after death to a frank, personal, and revealing account of the author's affection for myths of ghosts and demons, this is a collection that will surprise, delight--and terrify.

Contents:

• The Hollow King - [The Book of Lost Things] - shortfiction
• The Caxton Private Lending Library and Book Depository - novella
• The Fractured Atlas - novella

Filled with eerie surprises and dark delights, Night & Day takes us from the dusty shelves of an uncanny library filled with fictional characters to a bunker deep beneath the earth where scientists seek revenge on old Nazis; from an English marsh haunted by a mother and her son to a country house where a grieving widower finds comfort from a most unlikely source.

Concluding with the author's account of how an obscure horror film brought him closer to his lost father, and how nostalgia can help to keep us sane, this is a collection that will move, entertain, and keep you reading late into the night.

New York Times best-selling author Neil Gaiman's transcendent series SANDMAN is often hailed as the definitive Vertigo title and one of the finest achievements in graphic storytelling. Gaiman created an unforgettable tale of the forces that exist beyond life and death by weaving ancient mythology, folklore and fairy tales with his own distinct narrative vision.

In PRELUDES & NOCTURNES, an occultist attempting to capture Death to bargain for eternal life traps her younger brother Dream instead. After his 70 year imprisonment and eventual escape, Dream, also known as Morpheus, goes on a quest for his lost objects of power. On his arduous journey Morpheus encounters Lucifer, John Constantine, and an all-powerful madman.