THE CUTTING ROOM FLOOR CUTS BACK Welcome to a macabre cinema for the imagination, to screenings of twisted tales projected not on a movie screen but on the page. In Reel Dark you'll find stories and poems by authors ranging from new voices to bestsellers to Bram Stoker Award finalists. From the battle for recognition between a child actress and a vengeful, long-forgotten film star in "Whatever Happened to Peggy...Who?" to a madman controlling a student a la The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in "Caligarisme," to a hapless Dreamist, whose talent propels him into a nightmare of jealousy and revenge in "The Dreamist," the authors have created worlds filled with madness, twisted desires, and broken dreams. The genres inside include suspense, horror, science fiction, and fantasy. You'll meet a lone deputy whose pursuit of justice harkens back to the wild West (complete with a gunfight), a director who literally puts himself into his film, a young woman haunted by a mysterious stranger who warns her of her impending demise, and an aging actress who may have been a little too good at playing her roles. In a world where the lines between reality and fantasy blur, where film frames flicker at 24 frames per second, we catch a glimpse of strangers' dreams and nightmares. As David Lynch puts it, "This whole world is wild at heart and weird on top." As Karen Head writes in her poem responding to Lynch, "In the movies / everything is illusion." But in a world with cameras everywhere, how do you know whether you're in a movie?"

本作は、映画というメディアが持つ虚構と現実を融解させる魔力を、鋭利な筆致で解剖した傑作です。秒間24コマの残像に潜む狂気や銀幕への執念が、読者の脳内に冷徹な映像を投影します。言葉によって構築された視覚を超えた恐怖の質感が、あなたの想像力を静かに侵食していくでしょう。 リンチ的な不条理が交差する物語群は、カメラに囲まれた現代を生きる我々に、自己の存在の危うさを突きつけます。日常を一枚の脆いフィルムへと変貌させる本作は、読む者に「自分も誰かの悪夢を演じているのではないか」という戦慄を刻み込み、本を閉じた後の景色を一変させるはずです。