Below this world lies another — a world from which all nightmares are born, and to which all our dreams are sacrificed for our very survival.

Collected here for the first time are a dozen tales culled from the surreal genius of Simon Strantzas. Tales of grief, of loneliness, of guilt. Tales of things that live beyond our understanding, that watch us with malignant indifference. Tales of the liminal places that separate our world from that other world, and where all barriers between the two have begun to fail…

There, can you feel it? That shiver down your back? Something horrible is rising from beneath the surface.

Beneath the Surface is the début collection of Mr. Strantzas’s work, and also features a witty, intelligent, and highly informative introduction from no less a literary talent and bon viveur than the very Mark Samuels.

Click here to read an extract

Mr. Strantzas's work has appeared in At Ease with the Dead and Strange Tales, Vol. II; and soon within the pages of Cemetery Dance magazine and the books Holy Horrors and Bound for Evil (where they will share space with stories from some of his literary idols).

His previous appearance under the Humdrumming banner was the story of urban horror “Pale Light in the Jungle”, which appeared in The First Humdrumming Book of Horror Stories.

Reviews:

…he explores, through surrealistic metaphor, the kind of existential angst so skilfully portrayed by Aickman… very moving, very disturbing and elegantly written.

— Peter Bell; author, critic, and reviewer

Scared the hell out of me… his deeply paranoid and slightly hallucinogenic prose provides a striking personal metaphor for loneliness and exclusion.

— Gary M^cMahon, author of the
Stoker Award listed story “Hum Drum”

Weirdly metaphorical, and genuinely strange

— Gary Fry, author of Sanity & Other Delusions