Entropy in Bloom: Stories

Description

Available in hardcover for the first time, a collection of cult sensation Jeremy Robert Johnson's best and most bizarre short fiction, including a brand-new, never-before-published novella. For more than a decade, Jeremy Robert Johnson has been bubbling under the surface of both literary and genre fiction. His short stories present a brilliantly dark and audaciously weird realm where cosmic nightmares collide with all-too-human characters and apocalypses of all shapes and sizes loom ominously. In "Persistence Hunting," a lonely distance runner is seduced into a brutal life of crime with an ever-narrowing path for escape. In "When Susurrus Stirs," an unlucky pacifist must stop a horrifying parasite from turning his body into a sentient hive. Running through all of Johnson's work is a hallucinatory vision and deeply-felt empathy, earning the author a reputation as one of today's most daring and thrilling writers. Featuring the best of his independently-published short fiction, as well as an exclusive, never-before-published novella "The Sleep of Judges"--where a father's fight against the denizens of a drug den becomes a mind-bending suburban nightmare--Entropy in Bloom is a perfect compendium for avid fans and an ideal entry point for adventurous readers seeking the humor, heartbreak, and terror of JRJ's strange new worlds. Table of Contents: An Introduction by Brian Evenson The League of Zeroes Persistence Hunting The Oarsman The Gravity of Benham Falls Dissociative Skills Snowfall When Susurrus Stirs Luminary Trigger Variation Cathedral Mother Swimming in the House of the Sea Saturn's Game The Sharp Dressed Man at the End of the Line A Flood of Harriers States of Glass The Sleep of Judges

Jeremy Robert Johnson is the author of the critically-acclaimed cult novel Skullcrack City. His fiction has been praised by the Washington Post and authors like Chuck Palahniuk and David Wong, and has appeared internationally in numerous anthologies and magazines.

Praise for Entropy in Bloom and Jeremy Robert Johnson: "These stories can be uncomfortable, difficult, unflinching, but they're also always entertaining. Johnson writes with an energy that propels you through some very dark spaces indeed and into something profoundly unsettling but nonetheless human." --Brian Evenson, author of A Collapse of Horses and Last Days "Jeremy Robert Johnson's stories are, simply put, unlike any others you've ever read. It's as if an alien life form picked up a pen and wrote its thoughts in a language comprehensible to humans--reading Johnson, you feel you are in the grip of an immensely powerful, possibly malevolent, but fiercely intelligent mind. Beware! (But enjoy--and trust me, you will.)" --Nick Cutter, author of Little Heaven and The Troop "I've seen the future and it's bizarre, it's beautifully berserk, it's Jeremy Robert Johnson." --Stephen Graham Jones, author of Mongrels "A dazzling writer. Seriously amazing short stories. While I read them, they made time stand still." --New York Times bestselling author Chuck Palahniuk "One of the most exciting voices in contemporary fiction. Jeremy Robert Johnson's work has always tested the limits of both genre and literary fiction." --Bookslut "Jeremy Robert Johnson is dancing to a way different drummer. He loves language, he loves the edge, and he loves us people. This is entertainment...and literature." --Jack Ketchum, author of The Girl Next Door and Off Season "I'm a longtime fan of Johnson. A master of derangement, he's been bringing it for years." --Laird Barron, author of The Beautiful Thing that Awaits Us All "The people populating these stories are real and vital and you WILL care, deeply, about what becomes of them...and in JRJ's harsh universe, baaaaad things happen. Often. Prepare thyself." --Craig Davidson, author of Rust and Bone and The Fighter "What makes JRJ's work stand out from his contemporaries' is the strange sense of empathy--in that regard he is not unlike David Foster Wallace's wicked and perhaps deranged younger brother. Sometimes the horror is so understated that it's deadly. JRJ has the ability to balance sheer humanity with sheer grotesquerie." --21C Magazine "The guy's a genius. Reminds me of William Gibson--the dark interest in altered states of consciousness, the unrelentingly furious forward movement, and the same kind of unlimited imagination." --Ben Loory, author of Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day "Jeremy Robert Johnson performs stand-up comedy for the gods. And their laughter is a marvelous, terrible thing. He's the kind of post-Lovecraftian genius berserker who makes the Great Old Ones new again. As with Clive Barker, there is no glorious mutational eruption that Johnson can't nail directly through your gawping mind's eye." --John Skipp, New York Times bestselling author of Spore (with Cody Goodfellow) and The Bridge (with Craig Spector) "In its most twisted moments, Johnson's writing is too gleeful to pigeon-hole as strictly horror, and when he steps outside the gross-out game he transcends most other straight literary writers." --Verbicide "Johnson weaves vivid and fascinatingly grotesque tales." --Bookgasm "I don't know if Mr. Johnson sold his soul to the devil to give him this gift for nightmare imagery, but by god, this guy can write. Johnson excels at pathology and perversity. A confirmed weirdo and authentic writer of uncommon emotional depth who deserves to be watched." --Cemetery Dance "Johnson is probably a few books away from doing for horror what Jonathan Lethem did for science fiction. Plain and simple? Forget horror; this is good fiction." --Girl on Demand "Johnson can write horror, science fiction, crime, and Bizarro. Sometimes he does all of the above within the same story. He's at once brutal and elegant, innovative and an immediate classic, ridiculously talented and an obvious perfectionist." --Horror Talk