Burnt Black Suns

“Burnt Black Suns demonstrates Strantzas’s absolute willingness to hurl himself into the darkest ranges of his excellent imagination.”
— Peter Straub

bbs

“Strantzas nimbly balances sympathetic characters humanized by their flaws with horrors on a cosmic scale so vast that they mock the very notion of human significance.”
Publishers Weekly

“Burnt Black Suns shows us an author who takes classic themes and frissons reminiscent of Lovecraft and Aickman and brings them squalling and kicking into the twenty-first century.”
Asimov’s Science Fiction

“Despite the many problems in their lives that feel overwhelming, those who struggle in Simon Strantzas’s worlds will happen across, or even evoke, the inexplicable and the strange. But in no time at all, the preoccupations of humanity and our place amongst the stars seem negligible. Strantzas always writes hard and well to make his horror matter. And in Burnt Black Suns Strantzas casts far into time and space to find the alien, and what comes back wriggling inside his net is ghastly.”
— Adam Nevill

“The stories of Simon Strantzas in Burnt Black Suns exemplify a style of horror that might be compared to the novellas of T. E. D. Klein, which is to say that they connect the external adventures of their characters with some inner trauma they suffer. Only in the best sense may they be deemed yarns. Whereas the derivation of the word ‘yarn’ takes us back to lexical meanings such as gut, intestine, entrails, these visceral parts are not so much the meat of Simon Strantzas’s tales as where they are designed to touch their readers.”
— Thomas Ligotti

“I gather Thomas Ligotti finds similarities in Simon Strantzas’s style and my own. I don’t really see it myself—but considering the source, and considering Strantzas’s beautifully crafted stories, I must say I consider it a compliment.”
— T. E. D. Klein

“Simon Strantzas is perhaps the most extreme of the brilliant new Canadian writers of horror fiction who are enlivening and deepening our genre, and Burnt Black Suns demonstrates his remarkable narrative skills, his unerring, feverish sense of pace, and his absolute willingness to hurl himself into the darkest ranges of his excellent imagination. Here is a writer unafraid to evoke and make his own the achievements of Lovecraft, Machen, Blackwood, and Edward Lucas White, and to push at the boundaries that contained them.”
— Peter Straub

Dark Regions Press, 2018 (out of print) — “Dig My Grave” by Laird Barron; On Ice; Dwelling on the Past; Strong as a Rock; By Invisible Hands; One Last Bloom; Thistle’s Find; Beyond the Banks of the River Seine; Emotional Dues; Burnt Black Suns; Afterword: The Lies I Tell

Hippocampus Press, 2014“Dig My Grave” by Laird Barron; On Ice; Dwelling on the Past; Strong as a Rock; By Invisible Hands; One Last Bloom; Thistle’s Find; Beyond the Banks of the River Seine; Emotional Dues; Burnt Black Suns