Everything That's Underneath, Kristi DeMeester's debut powerful horror collection, is full of weird, unsettling tales that recall the styles of such accomplished storytellers as Laird Barron and Tom Piccirilli.
Crawl across the earth and dig in the dirt. Feel it. Tearing at your nails, gritty between your teeth, filling your nostrils. Consume it until it has consumed you. For there you will find the voices that have called from the shadows, the ones that promise to cherish you only to rip your body to shreds.
In Everything That's Underneath, Kristi DeMeester explores the dark places most people avoid. A hole in an abandoned lot, an illness twisting your loved one into someone you don't recognize, lust that pushes you further and further until no one can hear your cry for help. In these 18 stories the characters cannot escape the evil that is haunting them. They must make a choice: accept it and become part of what terrifies them the most or allow it to consume them and live in fear forever.
"Kristi DeMeester's wonderfully disturbing Everything That's Underneath features a cast of characters who are as emotionally raw and authentic as they are haunted. DeMeester's mothers and daughters, struggling at the edges of a society/economy as cold and uncaring as the universe, succumb in the face of horrors made even more terrifying by their nagging sense of familiarity. A dark, intelligent, relentless collection."
- Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and Disappearance at Devil's Rock
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Everything That's Underneath
The Wicked Shall Come Upon Him
To Sleep Long, To Sleep Deep
The Fleshtival
The Beautiful Nature of Venom
Like Feather, Like Bone Worship
Only What She Bleeds (short story original to collection)
The Tying of Tongues
The Marking
The Long Road
The Lightning Bird (short story original to collection)
The Dream Eater
Daughters of Hecate
Birthright (novelette original to collection)
All That Is Refracted, Broken
December Skin
Split Tongues
To Sleep in the Dust of the Earth