2 books match the query 'Dark Fantasy'

Michael Holt
University of Alabama Press, 2027
Three Sams, one impossible building, and a mystery echoing across worlds, lifetimes, and dreams.
Brezhat is a thrilling, puzzle-like novella that unfolds across three overlapping worlds, all occurring within the same haunted building. In one timeline, the building is a school where children's dreams are recorded. In another, an orphanage tied to a glass factory. In the third, a postapocalyptic ruin inhabited by a community of eccentric survivors.
Within its shifting halls live three versions of the same person, all named Sam. Though separated by time and circumstance, the Sams share dreams, sensations, and fleeting encounters that bind their lives together in unsettling ways. As they wander through forgotten corridors and forbidden rooms, the Sams undertake tasks both ordinary and uncanny. They deliver life-saving serum, reassemble the body of a broken friend, talk with the dead, and bury dead mice. Along the way, they are guided, taught, and sometimes misled by an unforgettable cast of adults: teachers, nuns, scientists, artists, a librarian, and the inscrutable Mr. Jones, a janitor who seems to exist outside of time altogether. Threaded through each timeline is the shadow of a former friend whose acts of violence echo across worlds, causing old wounds to recur in new forms. Blending speculative fiction, psychological insight, and gothic atmosphere, Brezhat is a mesmerizing novella steeped in mystery, unraveling the stories we inherit, the selves we might have been, and the strange ways pain reverberates across a lifetime.
Josh Bell
University of Alabama Press, 2024
A witch, a ward, and a houseboat adrift in time—where beauty and terror share the helm.
The mysterious houseboat Veronica motors across a postapocalyptic freshwater lake, inhabited by a black-haired witch and her young male ward. They explore an unfolding world of shape-shifting moons, vampire moths, and submerged witch cemeteries—a world where voluntary imprisonment holds its own appeal and the heart yearns for the delicate dance between blood and power, beauty and terror.
Neither a pirate nor a mere witch, she is an artist, a master of water and time who shapes reality with her baffling powers. This lyrical and compelling novel beckons readers to explore the enigmatic depths of its prose, inviting them to traverse the waters of wonder and bewilderment. Embrace the bewitching allure of The Houseboat Veronica and lose yourself in its enchanting embrace.