Book excerpt: “Bleak, melancholy, and intelligent like the best by Thomas Ligotti and Jon Padgett, these tales unmistakably come from a deep, personal place and will best resonate with searchers after metaphysical horrors.” —Dejan Ognjanović, RUE MORGUE The Puppet King and Other Atonements conjures a horrific universe of puppets, labyrinths, and liminal spaces. Over the span of fourteen Borgesian terrors, Justin A. Burnett inhabits the strange borderlands between intimacy and isolation, fiction and philosophy, reality and nightmare. Sprouting from the blackened landscape of weird writers such as Thomas Ligotti, Jon Padgett, and Brian Evenson, this collection is a bleak, unflinching gaze into the vertiginous depths of the nonhuman. “A collection brimming with sublime torments. Burnett masterfully grasps the transcendent grotesque, weaving tales charged with cosmic danger. A refreshing and powerful new voice in contemporary dread.” —Rebecca Gransden, author of SEA OF GLASS “Burnett takes you through a journey of contrasts. At once delicate and painfully intimate, yet vast, reverberant and strange, The Puppet King and Other Atonements draws the reader deep into the primordial to the very edge of the stars. Highly recommended.” —Emma J. Gibbon, author of DARK BLOOD COMES FROM THE FEET