Down and Out in Purgatory

Twenty tales of science fiction and fantasy from the two-time World Fantasy and Philip K. Dick Award winning author of The Anubis Gates and On Stranger Tides.

Twenty pulse-pounding, mind-bending tales of science fiction, twisted metaphysics, and supernatural wonder from the two-time World Fantasy and Philip K. Dick Award winning author of The Anubis Gates and On Stranger Tides.

A complete palette of story-telling colors from Powers, including acclaimed tale “The Bible Repairman,” where a psychic handyman who supernaturally eliminates troublesome passages of the Bible for paying clients finds the remains of his own broken soul on the line when tasked with rescuing the kidnapped ghost of a rich man’s daughter. Time travel takes a savage twist in “Salvage and Demolition,” where the chance discovery of a long-lost manuscript throws a down-and-out book collector back in time to 1950s San Francisco where he must prevent an ancient Sumeric inscription from dooming millions in the future. Humor and horror mix in “Sufficient unto the Day,” when a raucous Thanksgiving feast takes a dark turn as the invited ghosts of relatives past accidentally draw soul-stealing demons into the family television set. And obsession and vengeance survive on the other side of death in “Down and Out in Purgatory,” where the soul of a man lusting for revenge attempts to eternally eliminate the killer who murdered the love of his life. Wide-ranging, wonder-inducing, mind-bending—these and other tales make up the complete shorter works of a modern-day master of science fiction and fantasy.