The Skinless Man Counts to Five

A collection by Paul Jessup.

For more than twenty years, Paul Jessup has been dreaming of people and places that shouldn't exist. From an infection that allows lost children to see beyond the pale in The Silence That Binds or the way the universe bends and gives birth when stars explode in Open Your Eyes or the tragic consequences of imbuing the inanimate with an all-too-human need to be loved in Glass House, his writing explodes with a surreal energy.

In his latest collection, The Skinless Man Counts to Five and other tales of the Macabre, there are ghosts and butterflies, serial killers and dying stars, mermaids and monsters. You will find death cults, sewer elves, the apocalypse of youthful fervor, card games that require blood sacrifices, and self-immolation as an expression of devotion. Paul Jessup's fiction eviscerates, shatters, and slurps the marrow from the bones of the world.

"[Paul Jessup] is willing to leap past genre boundaries and show us what's waiting in the great wide world beyond." —Strange Horizons

The full table of contents is as follows:

• Introduction: How the Heart Sings to Horror
• "The House at the End of the World"
• "Light Like Knives Dragged Across the Skin"
• "Apple Magick"
• "The Happiness of Pinned Wings"
• "Last Stand of the Antmaker"
• "Watch me Burn with the Light of Ghosts"
• "Fingerbones, Hung like Mobiles"
• "Glass Coffin Girls"
• "Red Hairs"
• "Stone Dogs"
• "Secret in the House of Smiles"
• "When Max was Hungry Again"
• "This Hunted World" *
• "Jars of Rain"
• "Wire Rabbit"
• "Fake Plastic Trees" *
• "A Gift of Teeth" *
• "Summer Cannibals"
• "It Tasted like the Sea"
• "Winterlight" *
• "Sunsorrow"
• "Ghost Technology from the Sun"
• "Postflesh"
• "The Skinless Man Counts to Five"

* These stories are exclusive to this collection.