Lanterna Rally

Author: Jonathan Louis Duckworth

Publisher: JournalStone

Published: 2023-07-21

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 1685101054

“Duckworth is a magician of the macabre in these sixteen wonderfully inventive and wickedly unsettling tales of the inhuman ruin creeping just beneath the surface of the everyday. With an enviable deftness and wide-ranging imagination for the terrible in its many forms, Duckworth conjures up unforgettable new worlds of uneasy horror.” —Gordon B. White, author of As Summer’s Mask Slips and Other Disruptions A 5,000-year-old warlock gets fired from his side-hustle as a stage magician at a South Beach strip club—and takes it personally. Henry David Thoreau discovers a sinister humanoid fungus buried under his bean field. A well-meaning long-haul trucker picks up an underage drifter at a Texas diner, not realizing he’s the one in danger. After a world-ending plague, a survivor discovers a strangely well-maintained house populated by animate paper butterflies. In Miami, an out of work contractor and his girlfriend navigate an emergent apocalypse as something on the moon’s surface drives everyone on Earth who sees it insane. These and other stories form Jonathan Louis Duckworth’s debut story collection, Have You Seen the Moon Tonight? The collection is comprised of 16 supernatural short stories in a shared universe. Many of the stories explore a kaleidoscope of possible world ending scenarios: the moon becoming a vector for madness, a book that infects and corrupts any writing it touches, the forgotten inhabitants of the ocean rising up to drown humanity’s toxic empire, and language itself becoming a mind-blasting plague. These stories explore damaged and jaded people reconnecting with their lost humanity, or discovering the inhuman multitudes hiding beneath their skin. “Have You Seen the Moon Tonight? and Other Rumors is filled with worlds that seem at once familiar yet also entirely unexpected and even disturbing. These strange and haunting stories will stick with you long into the night. Make no mistake: Jonathan Louis Duckworth is an author to watch.” —Gwendolyn Kiste, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Rust Maidens and Reluctant Immortals