Michael Rowe

Queer Fear II builds on the successes of its predecessor, Queer Fear , the groundbreaking gay-themed horror anthology that Gothic.net called "the best horror anthology of [the year]," which won the Queer Horror Award, and was a finalist for a Spectrum Award and two Lambda Literary Awards. This second volume includes among its stories new work by some stars of the previous volume—International Horror Guild Award winners Gemma Files and Michael Marano, Bram Stoker Award winners David Nickle and Edo van Belkom, and screenwriter Ron Oliver. Science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer, winner of the Aurora and Nebula Awards, crosses genres to appear alongside newer writers like Bram Stoker Award winner Brett Savory, novelist Sephera Giron, and classic British ghost story author Steve Duffy. And if that’s not enough, Queer Fear II will also feature a new, unpublished story by internationally acclaimed horror writer Poppy Z. Brite. The dark pleasures and anxieties of the Queer Fear books have their roots in the nightmarish, viral machinations of AIDS and homophobia, as well as the ghoulish, old-fashioned thrills of confronting things that go bump in the night. Queer Fear II will keep you up long past the witching hour. Michael Rowe is co-editor of Sons of Darkness and Brothers of the Night , and author of the essay collections Writing Below the Belt and Looking for Brothers . A journalist and essayist whose work has appeared in The Advocate and The Globe & Mail , he lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Welcome to Parr's Landing, Population 1,528... and shrinking. The year is 1972. Widowed Christina Parr, her daughter Morgan, and her brother-in-law Jeremy have returned to the remote northern Ontario mining town of Parr's Landing, the place from which Christina fled before Morgan was born, seeking refuge. Dr. Billy Lightning has also returned in search of answers to the mystery of his father's brutal murder. All will find some version of what they seek - and more. Built on the site of a decimated 17th-century Jesuit mission to the Ojibwa, Parr's Landing is a town with secrets of its own buried in the caves around Bradley Lake. A three-hundred-year-old vampire is slumbering there, calling out to the insane and the murderous for centuries, begging for release - an invitation that has finally been answered. One man is following that voice, cutting a murderous swath across the country, bent on a terrible resurrection of the ancient horror... plunging the town and all its people into an endless night.

"Michael Rowe is one of those writers who can swing from the eloquent prose of a Peter Straub to the brutality of a Richard Laymon." ―Monster Librarian The the waning years of the 1990s at the dawn of the millennium. The an isolated rural town called Auburn, which could be anywhere at all―a town where everyone knows everyone else―where dark secrets run through its veins like blood. Everyone knows that sixteen-year old Mikey Childress is “different.” A target for bullies since he was a small boy, everything Mikey does attracts the way he walks, the way he talks, the way he looks. Everyone knows he’s not like the other boys in Auburn―the boys who play hockey, who fight, the boys who pursue girls. Only his friend Wroxy, a girl almost as isolated as he is, can even guess at the edges of his pain, or the depths of his yearning for love. But even the people who hate Mikey couldn’t dream of how many secrets he has, or how badly he could hurt them if he wanted to. Until the night Mikey is pushed beyond endurance by his abusers. The night he makes a pact with dark forces older than time to visit a terrible vengeance on his enemies. The night he inadvertently opens a doorway that should never, ever have been opened, and unleashes something into the world that should have remained damned.