This is not a review. Ian Rogers’s SUPERNOIRTURAL TALES (Burning Effigy, 2012) showcases Rogers’s supernatural sleuth, Felix Renn, as he investigates the crossroads between our reality and the Black Lands, a dark reality adjacent, from where all sorts of nightmares, imagined and unimagined, creep. Rogers’s blend of supernatural and noir (note the book’s title) easily recalls such smooth narrative voices as Elmore Leonard and Raymond Chandler, yet delivers them with the sort of dark thrills one might get from the best of the California circle like Bradbury or Matheson. Take for instance the gruesome victims in “Black-Eyed Kids”—or the villains of the piece, for that matter—and compare it to the wit and wile of Renn navigating his predicament in “Temporary Monsters”. And of course the short novel that rounds out the collection and serves as its showcase piece, “The Brick”, which begins with the familiar trappings of a haunted house and ends in the most unexpected places. This sort of thing isn’t easy to do well, which is why I think it’s safe to say that everyone who has encountered Rogers’s Renn stories agrees that he has a winning concept on his hands. Now if only that full-length novel would surface so we could all watch him finally take his deserved place on the best-seller shelves.