In the last few years, John Langan has rightly earned the position of one of the most prominent voices in contemporary horror literature, whose short story cannot be missing in any genre anthology.

He became known to Czech readers primarily with his novel The Fisherman, for which he won the Bram Stoker Award in 2008. The shorter space of the short stories and novellas, however, makes the different positions of his bizarre imagination stand out even better, capable of inducing chilling horror and a dark atmosphere in just a few sentences, or shocking with an unexpected twist and an abundance of blood.

In them, Langan pays homage to classics of horror, such as Edgar Alan Poe with his famous Mask of the Red Death (short story "Technicolor") or H. P. Lovecraft and his cult of Cthulhu ("The Shallows"). It also serves an original plot combining the traumatic experiences of war veterans from the American engagement in Iraq with the eternal image of the vampire present in almost all cultures. He does it with the mastery of an experienced author who loves horror and storytelling that will give readers and listeners chills for a long time to come.