The Skinless Face

Fourteen spine-tingling excursions into realms of nightmare in the tradition of H. P. Lovecraft, including two full-length novellas never before published, will leave you longing for refuge. Here hide horrors that burrow under the skin to lay eggs of anguish inside the brain. Waking them may mean never sleeping again ... or sleeping forever.

Thousands of years ago, a civilization that inhabited the Gobi Desert chiseled off the face of their stone god. Now modern technology will recreate the visage they destroyed.... Nova Scotian sailors have a charming custom of saluting an isolated rock formation that resembles a mother and child ... but it is an inhuman statue of something else entirely.... A dark lake hides more than a bereft father's grief....

A doomed beast learns what being a monster truly means.... The unguessable secrets behind the House of Usher are unveiled by an unwilling guest.... Witch-kin may be worse than no family at all for a lonely youth.... A nursing job at a care facility in Innsmouth-what could go wrong?

In league with the village church, a wealthy mine owner exploits orphans ... or serves a deity far more ominous than two young schoolteachers realize.... An archaeologist is fascinated by two lost civilizations-and their gods, whose enmity persists into the present day.... Holes form, sent from another world, that presage fearsome mental emissaries.... Buried on an impossibly distant island by none other than John Dee, the warnings against exhuming it should not have been ignored.... Some men want what they should not have, cannot refuse a terrible gift.... In a post-apocalyptic America, a hideous religion has a use for an untainted man.... A young lady sent to England to become a governess finds something worse than an entrepreneur's traveling menagerie aboard the doomed vessel on which she sails.

Other worlds exist that press against our own-and sometimes things pass through the edges where sanity has rubbed thin. From the fertile imagination of Donald Tyson, a reading experience that takes you down paths untrodden, through unmarked forests, with no signposts to lead you back home.