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In this debut crime-horror story collection, David Simmons drags you into a phantasmagoric Baltimore where the dead refuse to stay dead and the living claw for meaning.
Hallucinatory and darkly comic love stories are set against the gritty backdrop of the city, where guns and drugs collide with tales of paranoia, pursuit, and revenge. Here, a middle school biology class spirals into a surreal vivisection. A man returns home each night to chew the freshly grown fingers off a corpse to avoid going into withdrawal. A monster in an upstairs apartment kills people, records songs about it, and retweets his victims postmortem.
In these stories, love arrives wearing the mask of addiction and absurdity. If Brian Evenson and Ottessa Moshfegh wrote for The Wire you'd get the unique style of David Simmons. Fans of body horror, transgressive fiction, and literary surrealism will find themselves unable to look away as Simmons explores the intersections of violence and dark humor with a razor-sharp voice.
A Best New Horror Book of 2026! (New York Public Library)
“David Simmons revives Baltimore’s hallowed horror genre—with a twist” —Baltimore Magazine
"These 21 gritty stories from Simmons abound with edgy characters whose desperate circumstances lead inevitably to dark and dismal fates. Simmons leavens the grimness with liberal doses of graveyard humor that give even the tersest entries an oddball appeal. The result is sure to be a hit with fans of short, sharp shockers." —Publishers Weekly
"Simmons’s writing is witty and sardonic, and utterly insane without losing lucidity." —FanFiAddict
"David Simmons is the gunpowder priest of wild shit. Smart, fun, and dangerous, his stories are like if Galaxy Gas and Borges cowrote a novel in neon lights. Fetty on the Switches sizzles and awes." —Brian Allen Carr, author of Opioid, Indiana and Bad Foundations
"Simmons's debut collection is a song of poisoned bodies, laser-focused on those who’ve been irreversibly contaminated by their environments, their peers, their selves. It’s vicious, whip smart, fucking hilarious, and just might break your heart. Not to put too fine a point on it: Simmons is one of the most exciting authors working today, genre or otherwise. Don’t sleep." —B.R. Yeager, author of Negative Space