We Are Where the Nightmares Go and Other Stories

From the critically acclaimed author of Sea of Rust and Queen of the Dark Things comes a hair-raising collection of short fiction that illuminates the strange, humorous, fantastical, and downright diabolical that tantalize and terrorize us: demons, monsters, zombie dinosaurs, and Death itself.

In the novella "The Soul Thief’s Son" C. Robert Cargill returns to the terrain of the Queen of the Dark Things to continue the story of Colby Stevens . . .

A Triceratops and an Ankylosaurus join forces to survive a zombie apocalypse that may spell extinction for their kind in "Hell Creek" . . .

In a grand old building atop a crack in the world, an Iraq War veteran must serve a one-year term as a punisher of the damned condemned to consume the sins of others in the hope that one day he may find peace in "In a Clean, White Room" (co-authored with Scott Derrickson) . . .

In "The Town That Wasn’t Anymore," the village of Pine Hill Bluff loses its inhabitants one at a time as the angry dead return when night falls to steal the souls of the living . . .

And in the title story, "We Are Where the Nightmares Go," a little girl crawls through a glowing door beneath her bed and finds herself trapped in a nightmarish wonderland—a crucible of the fragments of children’s bad dreams.

These tales and four more are assembled here as testament to Cargill’s mastery of the phantasmagoric, making We Are Where the Nightmares Go and Other Stories a collection of unnerving horror and fantasy will keep you up all night and haunt your waking dreams.

Wander through a darkly wondrous landscape . . .

In this hair-raising collection of short fiction, C. Robert Cargill, the critically acclaimed author of Sea of Rust and Queen of the Dark Things, conjures ten shimmering tales of dark imagination that probe the deep fears dwelling beneath the surface of our quotidian lives. Angels and demons, predators and prey, the mundane and the macabre, the living and the dead—all are the stuff of these enticing and surreal tales.

Cargill transports us deep into a vivid dreamscape of imagination, guiding us from an eerie wonderland filled with lost children to a once-grand building atop a crack in the world; from a dying Appalachian village back to a prehistoric earth. He also returns to the terrain of Queen of the Dark Things to continue the story of the cursed wizard and spirit tracker Colby Stevens.

A testament to Cargill’s mastery of the phantasmagoric, the wondrous, and the frightening, We Are Where the Nightmares Go and Other Stories is a collection of horror and fantasy that will unnerve you and haunt your waking dreams.

“[T]his is a fantasy about mythmaking, learning the uses of power, and living with the consequences of one’s behavior. Recommended for readers of Lev Grossman’s Magicians series and Neil Gaiman’s adult contemporary fantasies.” - Library Journal on Queen of the Dark Things

Praise for C. Robert Cargill:

“For a book with absolutely no human or organic characters, Sea of Rust will truly make you question your humanity, your mortality and your consciousness while following around a wisecracking scavenger robot. Brittle, a caregiver bot-turned-soldier tells her story of survival from the first-person perspective, letting readers learn how human an AI consciousness can be—despite her constant reassurance she is very inorganic. Cargill’s worldbuilding immerses readers in an Earth where only robots roam, giving a balanced amount of philosophy, action, melancholy and humor that makes Sea of Rust an essential for any sci-fi fan.”

“Cargill has a gift for haunting imagery as well as exuberant gore, and most of his horror has a beating heart, albeit a bloody one. His fans will be thrilled by this strong collection.” - Publishers Weekly

“Dark, comedic, and unsettling, Dreams and Shadows is everything an urban fantasy sets out to be.” - Tor.com on Dreams and Shadows