Phantom Constellations

Phantom constellations are all around us. Our lives. Our loves. All our relationships... all are phantoms. All only as real as we make them. Are you seeing what you think you are seeing? Are the connections that we make, objectively true? Or are they products of our minds, assigning meaning and sense, where there is none? The stars in the sky exist, unaffected by how we how we choose to categorize them. The constellations are phantoms; the shapes we give them only as real as we make them. This is a book of stories of haunted people, ghosts, and the Phantom Constellations all around them, bravely--and sometimes blindly--traversing the phantasmagoric happenings and psychological challenges in situations full of danger, uncertainty, grief, and tragedy, alongside a sense of hope, longing, mystery, and wonder. Appearing for the first time here are four never before published stories written exclusively for the collection along with ten more of Braum's tales including from the Shivers anthology series and a wealth of hard-to-find publications from around the world. Like no other author of short fiction today, Daniel Braum communicates a sub-text in his writing that is as deeply emotionally affecting as it is disturbing. There is an ache hiding behind the words, revealing itself just enough to resonate with the reader before disappearing into the velocity of the story. PHANTOM CONSTELLATIONS is Daniel Braum's fifth full short story collection of dark, strange tales, exploring the metamorphic tension between the supernatural and the psychological. Each of these stories, set in locations around the corner and around the world, evokes the Twilight Zone sense of the unreal and that mysterious, unsettling ambiguity found in classic weird and literary fiction. Praise for Daniel Braum's Fiction: "One of the brightest young stars in the firmament of dark speculative fiction, Daniel Braum is among the best short story writers we've encountered." --This is Horror "Braum has a knack for describing the indescribable in extraordinarily accessible language." --Tor.com "From the jungles of South America to the mean streets of New York's suburbs, Braum's stories wind through territories that feel at once familiar and strange, exotic and dangerous... or maybe just dangerously personal." --David Wellington, Author of Monster Island "Not since Lucius Shepard has a North American fantasist written so deftly about Central America." --Brian Evenson, Author of Good Night Sleep Tight