These stories represent decades of collaboration between author David Niall Wilson and a wide array of talented authors. All have been professionally published - some have been reprinted and collected. All are the result of two muses meeting on paper. Meet a modern day Don Quixote, fighting Y2K bug nightmares, and striving to save the woman of his dreams. Learn how Edgar Allen Poe might have found his tales. Face off on a lonely mountaintop with Lovecraftian nightmares. Join a young man in a ghostly race to save a relative from cancer. Follow a cross-wired detective in his hunt for a lycanthropic killer bent on ending every serial killer she encounters. See what might happen when two minds fall into 'balance'. What if Dr. Watson was the client … and someone who was dead – was not quite there? Visit a science fiction future where artists capture images in crystals. What if government control over sex and reproduction got out of control? Read along as a piano man drops back into the nightmares of his past. Finally – a sailor on his way home finds a place even farther away than he ever dreamed. These are the tales of Intermusings – previously published as "Joined at the Muse". This new edition includes links to the Kindle books of all the authors included, an Introduction by David Niall Wilson on the art of collaboration, and a sneak preview of the first chapter of the collaborative novel HALLOWED GROUND by Steven Savile & David Niall Wilson. Contents include: Introduction by David Niall Wilson A Poem of Adrian, Gray – With Brian A. Hopkins The Purloined Prose – With Patricia Lee Macomber A Wreath of Clouds – With Stephen Mark Rainey Moon Like a Gambler's Face – With Ricard Rowand La Belle Dame, Sans Merci – With Brian A. Hopkins La Belle Dame, Sans Regret – With Brian A. Hopkins Ribbons of Darkness Over Me – With Brett A. Savory Death Did Not Become Him – With Patricia Lee Macomber Within an Image, Dancing – With John B. Rosenman Virtue's Mask – With Brian A. Hopkins Sing a Song of Sixth Sense – With Patricia Lee Macomber Deliver Us From Meeble – With Brian Keene Special Sneak Peek at HALLOWED GROUND by Steven Savile & David Niall Wilson Find more collections and novels by a wide range of authors through Crossroad Press, including mysteries, horror, fantasy, westerns, biographies and much more from such authors as Irving Wallace, William Bayer, Tom Piccirilli, John Farris, Joe R. Lansdale, Bill Crider, Ronald Kelly, Bill Pronzini, Loren D. Estelman, and many, many more. Don't miss our original series O.C.L.T. or our Space Opera series Tales of the Scattered Earth. Just search CROSSROAD PRESS in the Kindle Store for more titles!

Thirteen tales of Elder Gods, Darkness, horror and Lovecraftian madness by Bram Stoker Award Winning author David Niall Wilson.  From crazed sculpting tenants, to giant wooden cockroaches, to Tarot cards and a creepy old barber shop, these stories lead through doorways and down corridors that are not of this world.  Published for the first time in this volume is the story Anomaly.  Contents Include: Author's IntroductionGlenn & The Tart of Mortar Psycho Maine TenantsThe Milk of ParadiseAre You Lookin' For Herb?Cockroach SuckersDarkness, and the LightDeath, and His Brother SleepDeath Did Not Become Him – with Patricia Lee MacomberFrom My Reflection, DarklyThe Lost Wisdom of InstinctRending the VeilThe Hall of Captured GodsAnomalyThe Call of Distant Shores

On the banks of Lake Drummond, on the edge of The Great Dismal Swamp, there is a tree in the shape of a woman. One dark, moonlit night, two artists met at The Lake Drummond Hotel, built directly on the borderline of North Carolina and Virginia. One was a young woman with the ability to see spirits trapped in trees and stone, anchored to the earth beyond their years. Her gift was to draw them, and then to set them free. The other was a dark man, haunted by dreams and visions that brought him stories of sadness and pain, and trapped in a life between the powers he sensed all around him, and a mundane existence attended by failure. They were Eleanore MacReady, Lenore, to her friends, and a young poet named Edgar Allan Poe, who traveled with a crow that was his secret, and almost constant companion, a bird named Grimm for the talented brothers of fairy-tale fame. Their meeting drew them together in vision, and legend, and pitted their strange powers and quick minds against the depths of the Dismal Swamp itself, ancient legends, and time. Once, upon a shoreline dreary, there was a tree. This is her story.

When The Deacon set up camp outside Rookwood, a murder of crows took to unnatural, moonlit flight. Things were already strange in that God-forsaken town, but no one could have predicted the forces and fates about to meet in a dust-bowl clearing in the desert. A bargain with the darkness was signed in blood, such deals are only made and broken...on Hallowed Ground...

Father Darren Prescott is a seeker of truth. He works for The Vatican, but his real work is within his own mind and heart; Father Prescott hunts miracles. Father Thomas is a young priest with a quiet congregation that worships at San Marcos by the Sea, a small cathedral outside San Valencez, California. One Easter Father Thomas’ Mass is interrupted by something he cannot explain – something powerful that shakes his world, and that of his congregation. Father Thomas experiences the Stigmata. On The Third Day is the story of Father Thomas and his search for answers. He turns to the church, and his immediate superior, Bishop Michaels, for support and assistance and is shocked to find that not all priests seek miracles. Some are comfortable with the status quo and vicious in their defense of it. Bishop Michaels is battling his own demons, not the least of which is a barely controlled love of alcohol. Despite the distaste it engenders, Bishop Michaels attends Easter Mass the year after the first “incident.” He comes armed with an attitude of furious disbelief, and a video camera. When Father Thomas not only repeats the previous year’s experience, but with much greater intensity, collapsing across the altar and causing a near riot, the Bishop escapes with his camera, and his sanity, and makes calls of his own. He still does not believe, but now he feels he needs a greater power than his own to prove his disbelief, even to himself. At the request of Bishop Michaels’ superior, and his own mentor, Cardinal O’Brien, Father Prescott arrives and begins his investigation with a third Easter Mass looming. The Bishop is determined that Father Thomas be proven a charlatan and a fraud. Father Thomas is frightened for his life, and for his faith, and only wants answers. Father Prescott? He wants the miracle he’s waited his entire life to overcome, to make up for what he considers past failings of his own. What all three men find is the powerful, thrilling conclusion to On The Third Day, an experience that draws them together and pushes them apart in ways they never could have imagined. The answers are there, but some answers are too difficult to bear.

"Crossroads or crosshairs, it's all the same. There's only one way through the pain and that's through the music." - Old Wally Brandt is a down-and-out guitarist and vocalist who believes his life has hit rock bottom. He can't make the rent on his apartment, he drinks so much he can barely make it to the crappy gig that keeps his band afloat, let alone play when he gets there, and his world - such as it is - is steadily crumbling around him. When he leaves the bar one dark night with a bottle of Jose Cuervo in one hand and his guitar case in the other, he finds he's locked out of his apartment with nowhere to go. As he stands alone in the dark and feeling sorry for himself, he hears a lone harmonica being played in the distance. The sound is deep and powerful, and something in the music draws him away from his doorway and into an old alley where the homeless gather around garbage-can fires. What he finds there is the harmonica player - an old black man who can play the blues like Brandt dreams of doing himself. When he begs the old man to teach him, Brandt finds that he has been both gifted and cursed.  Slowly drawing the members of his band into the madness, he begins a journey into the mountains, and the pain of the past to confront an evil older and darker than any he's known.

FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE DECHANCE CHRONICLES This brand new collection by Bram Stoker Award-Winning author and poet David Niall Wilson brings together fourteen tales of madness, horror, fantasy, zombies, and dark magic, as well as fourteen original poems.  Spanning more than two decades of his career, the stories offer a wide range of glimpses into the creative process that has formed his career.Contents include the short stories: Through an Eyeglass, Darkly, Fear of Flying, Moving On, One off from Prime, Headlines, Wayne's World, Redemption, Swarm, The Purloined Prose (With Patricia Lee Macomber), Shift, Pretty Boys in Blue and Long Hair Dangling, To Strike a Timeless Chord, Etched Deep, and Unique.  Also included are the poems: End of Days, The Acropolis, Clamdigger, Cuttlefish Squeezings, Thanatology, A Poem of Adrian, Gray, The Fishmonger, Revelation, Loch Ness, Mirrored Hearts, Dark Man, Banished, End of Days, & Longhaired Puppies. David Niall Wilson is a former president of the Horror Writer's Association, as well as CEO of Crossroad Press, a cutting edge digital publishing company.  David's recent works include "My Soul to Keep," the Origin of Donovan DeChance, "The Parting," a novel of the O.C.L.T., "The Second Veil," part of the series Tales of the Scattered Earth," and and the novella "The Temple of Camazotz," also part of the O.C.L.T. series.  There is a free excerpt from "My Soul to Keep" at the end of this collection. Don't Miss these other collections by David Niall Wilson, also available from Crossroad Press:  The Call of Distant Shores / Defining Moments / The Whirling Man & Other Tales of Blood, Pain, and Madness, A Taste of Blood & Roses, and The Fall of the House of Escher & Other Illusion. PRAISE FOR DAVID NIALL WILSON'S WORK: For the novel DEEP BLUE:  "In this engrossing, poetic novel of spiritual evil and the possibility of salvation from Wilson (This Is My Blood), a burned-out musician, Brandt, is playing in an obscure band when he hears a homeless black man, Wally, play the purest blues on the harmonica he has ever heard, music that encapsulates all the pain of the world..." – Publisher's Weekly For  THE NOT QUITE RIGHT REVEREND CLETUS J. DIGGS & THE CURRENTLY ACCEPTED HABITS OF NATURE – "This story is just pure fun, from start to finish. It is a bizarre sort of mystery full of colorful characters and wacky situations. This sort of thing is actually hard to pull off, lesser writers could have it devolve into silliness that doesn't have you laughing so much as groaning. Wilson, however, always keeps the reader interested and entertains the hell out of you." – Mark Gunnels For THIS IS MY BLOOD:  "Wilson's prose is smooth and powerful, carrying its allegorical weight with grace. His first novel is one of the most unique vampire stories to appear in recent years, balancing themes of damnation and prophesy against those of faith and redemption." – Publisher's Weekly