Beyond this rock we call home, horror awaits. Meteors slash through the sky, illuminating terrors beyond our wildest imagination. In the furthest reaches of the coldest cosmic expanse, there are things waiting, whose very existence our minds are not equipped to comprehend.
Can you survive the final frontier?
Featuring 14 stories from some of the best up-and-coming talents in the genre, The Darkness Beyond The Stars is an anthology of space-themed horror that seeks to twist humanity's greatest aspirations into our greatest fears. This intergalactic collection of terror includes: alien flora threatening homesteaders, survivors of a psychic war facing a reckoning aboard a ship escaping Venus, a traitorous scientist is launched from an airlock but doesn't die, a woman waking from hypersleep with no memory—but a very real sense of looming danger, and more.
Editor and author P.L. McMillan invites you to blast off with a collection of short stories that'll teach you to fear the carnage of the cosmos.
Praise for The Darkness Beyond The Stars
"The old tagline claims that in space, no one can hear you scream. The stories here offer plenty of far-flung screams in a chorus of voices and cadences. Exploration, the future, the stars, the cold of the cosmos — these are all lonely concepts that are wide open to the power of horror, and this selection of familiar indie horror names and new favorites sets the coordinates of the genre to new frontiers."
- Michael Wehunt, author of Greener Pastures and The Inconsolables
"The Darkness Beyond The Stars forces us to confront the lull of the unknown, emphasizing both its dangers and allure—of wanting to know yet being afraid to know. The stories are at times claustrophobic and suffocating, yet they can also bring comfort through unease in the unfamiliar. The anthology holds tales of isolation that fester darkness within the mind and take you on journeys of which you are unsure if you might return—if you even desire return upon its conclusion."
- Ai Jiang, Nebula finalist and author of LINGHUN and I AM AI
"Horror stories set in space possess a special sense of claustrophobic dread and desperation—help is not on the way, or not soon. The Darkness Beyond The Stars offers fifteen tales of horror—cosmic, botanical, body horror, and more—all set in the darkest reaches of the cosmos. You will be disturbed."
- Christi Nogle, author of the Bram Stoker Award® winning first novel, Beulah
"The void beckons and these authors have answered forcefully, their volatile transmissions filtered through the cold unknown, burning right through the page before impact."
- Andrew F. Sullivan, author of The Marigold and The Handyman Method
"Killer aliens, strange frequencies, and murderous space plants, oh my! This anthology is packed with unique, skin-crawly horror that'll make you yearn for solid ground and open air. The Darkness Beyond The Stars is a brilliant rendering of the lonely unknown waiting in the black vacuum outside our world. But it's also an exploration inward, toward the even colder, darker unknown waiting in all of our hearts. Don't miss it! It's out of this world (sorry not sorry)."
- Sam Rebelein, author of Edenville