Billed as “the finest in frightening tales,” DARKNESS: TWO DECADES OF MODERN HORROR is a potpourri of short horror stories published over the last twenty-five years. Horror authors include names that every horror fan will recognize: Stephen King, Peter Straub, Thomas Ligotti, Clive Barker and Poppy Z. Brite. In addition to these authors, you’ll find stories written by Neil Gaiman, George R.R. Martin, Gene Wolfe, Dan Simmons and several others hailing from the horror, science fiction and fantasy genres.

FlamesRising.com is pleased to present you with the complete introduction to this exciting horror anthology. Written by the award-winning editor Ellen Datlow, the introduction provides you with a behind-the-scenes look of the idea behind this stunning anthology.

The high concept of James Morrow’s novel Shambling Towards Hiroshima is, quite frankly, almost worth the price of admission by itself. Unbeknownst to most Americans, the Navy had a backup plan in case the Army’s A-Bomb didn’t work out in WWII — genetically engineer giant, fire-breathing lizards to devastate Japan. (But we were building the A-Bomb to devastate Germany, I hear you cry. Never you mind about that.) But unlike our secretive A-Bomb policy, we decided to demonstrate our monsters to the Japanese to give them a chance to surrender first. But (and here’s where it gets really good) we couldn’t devastate anywhere real for a mere demonstration, so the Navy hired the world’s greatest monster-actor, Syms Thorley, to get into a rubber monster suit and stomp around on a model of “Shirazuka” for the cameras. The plan was to show the film to the Japanese and horrify them into surrender.