One Bad Night & Other Stories

Aardvark Book Club launched in October 2022, and since then we’ve been cultivating a healthy obsession with all things horror. We’re celebrating our three-year anniversary with this original horror anthology featuring past 8 Aardvark authors.

In “Two Observers of the Slaughter Rites on Gannet Island” (Kay Chronister, author of Desert Creatures), an anthropologist and his wife travel to the remote Gannet Island to observe a mysterious yearly ritual. A rivalry brews as each attempts to figure out the ritual’s purpose, though it soon becomes clear that the truth is far more sinister than either could have imagined.

In “My Lithopedia” (Del Sandeen, author of This Cursed House), a woman learns that she had an unborn twin sister, extracted as a stone baby during her late mother’s autopsy. She decides to keep her twin, but begins to suspect that the stone baby is angry about the life she never got to live—and that she’s growing stronger.

In “Lady Jawbone” (Kylie Lee Baker, author of Bat Eater and Other Names For Cora Zeng), Lilou is trapped inside a phosphorous match factory, where she spends day after monotonous day working the ovens in near-darkness. Following a coworker’s gruesome death, a strange new woman starts working alongside her, offering Lilou a possible way out—but at what cost?

In “A Necromancer’s Guide to Reconnecting with Your Ex” (Rachel Harrison, author of Black Sheep and So Thirsty), Roxanne has a secret: despite her seemingly conventional life, she can talk to the dead. But when the ghost of her rock-and-roll ex asks her to resurrect him, she’s forced to grapple with what it means to truly let go.

In “Red Tide” (CJ Leede, author of American Rapture), a woman running from her past finds work at a small-town aquarium, where she learns about the “spectre fish,” a carnivorous mer-creature of local lore. As mishaps and tragedies pile up around her, she starts to wonder whether the mythical fish might actually be real—and whether it’s going to consume her, too.

In “47 Pineview Way” (Jennifer Thorne, author of Diavola), a contemporary twist on the Erl-King legend, an anxious mother drops off her son at his first sleepover, only to find the next morning that the house where she left him has disappeared. As the other parents lose their memories—first of the sleepover, then of their own children—she fights to hold on, determined to find out what happened to her son.

In “A Meditation on the Existence of Certain Cutlery (There is No Spoon)” (S.A. Barnes, author of Ghost Station), Commander Janna Field is on a covert mission to the lunar south pole—or so she thinks. Toggling between two realities, Janna must determine whether she’s trapped on the moon’s surface, struggling to breathe in a damaged space suit, or whether she’s actually the victim of an immersive training simulation gone wrong.

In “One Bad Night” (Stephen Graham Jones, author of I Was A Teenage Slasher and The Buffalo Hunter Hunter), Steck, an aging, lonely man becomes fixated on a sinister green parrot after it predicts the death of his beloved dog. Torn between his dying father and dog, Steck is confronted with an impossible choice.