Melanie’s increasingly disturbing journal entries have to be delusional ravings—if they’re not, there’s something terrible out there, snatching runaways in the night and spiriting them off to somewhere unspeakable...

In his debut collection of horror stories, leading Kiwi short fiction writer Michael Botur takes us to the dark extremes of human behaviour through twelve terrifying tales.
• Two high school introverts bond as an ordinary morning of skipping school descends into something awful.
• A powerful, paranoid publisher makes a young man’s magazine internship a nightmare.
• And a woman trapped in a coal cellar finds she must die a little to live.

Botur’s mesmerising stories lead us through bad dreams invading a man’s office job, a young couple searching for atonement in Germany’s Black Forest, the saga of a teen prankster whose vicious joke against her computing tutor is going to earn her a very decisive reprisal, and many more…

• First horror short story collection by award-winning NZ author Michael Botur
• Launching in time for Halloween 2022
• Winner of the Australasian Horror Writers Association Robert N Stephenson Short Story Award for ‘Test of Death.’

“Botur has claimed for himself a piece of literary territory occupied by the desperate, downtrodden and damned.” – Paul Little

“One of the most original story writers of his generation in NZ.” – takahē 86

“Botur’s work grabs you by the throat and won’t let you go.” - NZ Listener