“I’m already dead, and I’m a dead man speaking, and that’s why they can’t hear.” – Joseph Roth
Sunsets in a London suburb, and a transformation into an Earthly paradise; paths winding through a Transylvanian palace gardens, and an obsessed journey towards a Mediterranean dream; a city so ancient that even its total disappearance has been forgotten, and an island of shifting sands that can never be truly mapped . . .
The vivid and diverse settings of these stories are façades obscuring reality for the exiles and outcasts who find their way into them. Seemingly born out of time and place, they seek the right routes to bring them to where they want to be, but there are many diversions on the way. In these stories of haunted landscapes and intimidating cities many possibilities confront the unwary, but there is usually only one choice to be made.
Cover art by Eoin Llewellyn
ISBN: 978-0-95665-878-4 (hbk)
Contents
“Where Once I Did My Love Beguile”
“Westenstrand”
“Silver on Green”
“Winter’s Traces”
“Out to Sea”
“Time and the City”
“The Way of the Sun”
“The High Places”
“Wandering Paths”
“A Gift for the Emperor”
“Into an Empire”
“Acknowledgments”
“Howard’s work is both delicate and powerful. He creates worlds from the personal to the political to the fantastic that are so immediate you just experience them and only in the aftermath realize just how pervasive they are.” – The Agony Column
“If there is a unifying theme here it is the transience of existence, from the individual to the social and even the geographical . . . most [stories] are not only well-written but also offer remarkable ideas.” – Supernatural Tales
“Most of these tales are so subtle as to defy any category of the strange at all, but reward re-reading and are all the greater for it.” – The Pan Review
“Howard demonstrates quite well that you don’t need conventional ghouls and ghosties to tell a mysterious tale. Written by Daylight will reward both the initial reading and re-readings. I hope to see more from John Howard in the future.” – Esoteric Order of Dagon
“John Howard’s Written by Daylight casts its net a little wider, stories of an unabashedly genre provenance [rub] elbows with work that is slightly more experimental in nature, tales in which a sense of existential dislocation stands in lieu of more obvious supernatural mechanisms.” – Black Static