
Welcome!
Welcome to my website. Here you can read about my latest writings and activities, see some pictures, access my bibliography, contact me, or order books, ebooks, and audiobooks via the links provided on those pages. A link in the top menu takes you to a special section about Melanie Tem and her work. Click the magnifying glass in the upper right corner to search for anything on the web site. Be sure to take a look at my new Climate Change page. Also check out my Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest pages, as well as view some YouTube videos, by clicking these blue links, the buttons below, or the links in the right-hand vertical bar on interior pages.
You can now subscribe to the Steve Rasnic Tem YouTube Channel here.
For information about the Steve & Melanie Tem Collection at Texas A&M click here.
Biography
“His work…will haunt your imagination and your heart in equal measure, and it both expands and defines the genre. ” Adam Mills, Weird Fiction Review
Steve Rasnic Tem’s writing career spans over 40 years, including poetry, plays, short stories, and novels in the genres of fantasy, science fiction, horror, crime, regional fiction set in the Appalachian South, as well as a less-classifiable imaginative prose more than one critic has called “Temism.” His collaborative novella with his late wife Melanie Tem, The Man On The Ceiling, won the World Fantasy, Bram Stoker, and International Horror Guild awards in 2001. He has also won the Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, and British Fantasy Awards for his solo work. His recent novel UBO (Solaris, January 2017) is a dark science fictional tale about violence and its origins, featuring such historical viewpoint characters as Jack the Ripper, Stalin, and Heinrich Himmler. Steve’s southern gothic novel Blood Kin (Solaris, March 2014), won the 2014 Bram Stoker Award. His other novels are his YA The Mask Shop of Doctor Blaack (Hex, 2018), Deadfall Hotel (Solaris, 2012), The Man On The Ceiling (Wizards of the Coast Discoveries, 2008, written with Melanie Tem as an expansion of their novella), The Book of Days (Subterranean, 2002), Daughters (Grand Central, 2001, also written with Melanie Tem), and Excavation (Avon, 1987). A handbook on writing, Yours to Tell: Dialogues on the Art & Practice of Fiction, also written with Melanie, appeared in 2017 from Apex Books.
Steve has published over 450 short stories. His first collection of stories, Ombres sur la Route, was published by the French publisher Denoël in 1994. His first English language collection, City Fishing (Silver Salamander, 2000) won the International Horror Guild Award. His other story collections are The Far Side of the Lake (Ash Tree, 2001), In Concert (Centipede, 2010-collaborations with Melanie Tem), Ugly Behavior (New Pulp, 2012-noir fiction), Onion Songs (Chomu, 2013), Celestial Inventories (ChiZine, 2013), Twember (NewCon, 2013-science fiction), Here With The Shadows (Swan River Press, 2014), the giant 72-story treasury, Out of the Dark: A Storybook of Horrors, (Centipede Press), Figures Unseen: Selected Stories (Valancourt, 2018), The Harvest Child And Other Fantasies (Crossroads, 2018), the YA-oriented Everything Is Fine Now (Omnium Gatherum, 2019), and The Night Doctor and Other Tales (Centipede, 2019).
A transplanted Southerner from Lee County Virginia, Steve is a long-time resident of Colorado. He has a BA in English Education from VPI and a MA in Creative Writing from Colorado State, where he studied fiction under Warren Fine and poetry under Bill Tremblay.
Interviews
Reading & interview for Nebraska Wesleyan’s Nights of Horror: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3vyiPvOoG4
The second half of my interview with the This Is Horror podcast: https://www.thisishorror.co.uk/tih-261-steve-rasnic-tem-on-figures-unseen-the-art-and-practice-of-writing-and-the-man-on-the-ceiling/?fbclid=IwAR3hCcIB5xDnHyRh4pkmweQN6dAnRqgUB8L5SXhW8GBVU6WRR5niN4gexek
The first half of my interview with the This Is Horror podcast: https://www.thisishorror.co.uk/tih-260-steve-rasnic-tem-on-secret-realities-city-fishing-and-early-life-lessons/
Interview at the Darkness Dwells podcast concerning my new collection Everything Is Fine Now, existential dread, love and loss, and a few writing tips.
Interviewed by Scott Edelman on the Eating the Fantastic podcast.
New interview concerning Doctor
New interview up on Kendall Reviews concerning my writing in general as well as The Mask Shop of Doctor
New interview at Cat After Dark concerning my new middle-grade novel The Mask Shop of Doctor
Read the long interview with Steve in the upcoming second issue of Thinking Horror: A Journal of Horror Philosophy.
June 2018 Interview with Steve on
See a complete list of interviews on
Free Fiction
For a free Xmas story, “Smoke in a Bottle,” go to http://stevetem.com/free-fiction/
“Late Sleepers,” PseudoPod #733
“Forwarded,” The Dark Magazine, January 2020
“The Family Man,” Paper Butterfly Flash Fiction, October 2019
“For All His Eyes Can See,” The Dark, August 2018
“Miguel Prays While His Mother Cries,” Daily Science Fiction, 8/8/2019
“Night Vision,” Daily Science Fiction, 4/16/2019
“Red Rabbit,” Borderlands # 6 (reprinted in Figures Unseen)
“The Men and Women of Rivendale,” Nightmare #35.
“A Space of One’s Own,” Clarkesworld #141, June 2018.
“Cats, Dogs, & Other Creatures,” Talebones.
See a complete list of free fiction on the Free Fiction page.
Latest Books
FIGURES UNSEEN
Winner of the World Fantasy, British Fantasy
“It’s a masterful collection. Story after story grabs you from the first sentence or image, shoehorns you effortlessly into familiar places you’ve never been, allows you into another life as it’s coming apart or, perhaps, just coming to rest. These are sensuous tales, with gorgeously worked language and cadences. They breathe. Their hearts beat soundly beneath your own…The stories of Figures Unseen shimmer with beauty, with felt reality, and with the mysteries forever at the heart of all our lives.” – James Sallis, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
THE HARVEST CHILD AND OTHER FANTASIES
THE HARVEST CHILD And Other Fantasies is a massive collection of the wide range of Steve Rasnic Tem’s fantasy tales. These 39 stories include sword & sorcery sagas, chronicles of fairies, elves, witches, wizards, magical creatures, Robin Hood, funny fantasy, and a smattering of science fantasy, as well as some uncollected dark fantasy tales which emphasize the fantasy over the horror. None have appeared in his previous collections. These fictions originally appeared in both major markets and hard-to-find small magazines. Just a sampling of sources: After Hours, Paradox, Asimov’s, Dragon Magazine, Elsewhere, Infinite Loop, New Frontiers, Jabberwocky, Chrysalis, Grue, Mythellany, Fantasy Book,
Order the paperback from Amazon.
Order the ebook from Amazon.
Order from Smashwords.
Order from Barnes and Noble.
YOURS TO TELL:
Dialogues on the Art & Practice of Writing
(co-written with Melanie Tem)
Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem are no strangers to the writing business. Between the two of them, they have published more than 600 short stories, 20 novels, and 10 short story collections. Not to mention numerous articles, essays, poems, and plays. They’ve won the World Fantasy Award, British Fantasy Award, and Bram Stoker Award. In this
Order from Apex Book Company.
CELESTIAL INVENTORIES
The electronic version of my CZP collection CELESTIAL INVENTORIES has been removed from sale and there is now a new version from Crossroads Press for only $3.99. Celestial Inventories features twenty- two stories collected from rare chapbooks, anthologies, and obscure magazines, along with a new story written specifically for this volume. All represent the slipstream segment of Steve Rasnic Tem’s large body of work. Several have previously appeared in Best of the Year compilations and have been the recipients of major F & SF nominations and awards. Among the transforming events in these twenty-two genre-bending stories: an office worker and his wife fade into a literal invisibility; a photographer discovers the unexpected in the faces of dead children; a girl moves onto a strange street when she fails to return from trick-or-treating; an artist devotes his career to contracting diseases; a plague of head explosions becomes a new form of terrorism; a couple’s aging dismantles reality; and a seemingly pointless life finds final expression in bits of folded paper. “an impressive, confident collection.” (Andrew Wilmot, BrokenPencil)
From Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B082LQ6Q2J/
From Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/994962
From Barnes & Noble for the Nook: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/celestial-inventories-steve-rasnic-tem/1114298703?ean=2940163195312
THE YELLOW WOOD
Melanie’s final novel The Yellow Wood has a new electronic edition from Crossroads Press for only $3.99. Publisher’s Weekly: “beautifully exploits the fine line between merely weird and genuinely unnatural.” TOR.COM: “If The Yellow Wood is a tightly-written and morally complex novel, it is also unexpectedly suspenseful. The emotional tension is perfectly balanced; Tem has created a book that’s harder to set down than a thriller.” https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0829PYCFL/
And for the Nook: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-yellow-wood-melanie-tem/1013744973
A few of you may know that for many years my late wife Melanie was a social worker specializing in adoptions. She wrote and spoke passionately about the subject. At last these writings have been gathered into an e-book–THIS CHILD IS MINE: What It Means to Adopt a Child. “Essential reading for those currently adopting a child, thinking about adopting a child, or simply interested in the subjects of adoption and parenting older children, this concise handbook provides a unique perspective on the difficult and wonderful adventure of parenting older children.”
She offers a way of looking at the adoption and parenting processes that is both simple and radically different from the norm. Central to her writings is the act of claiming, the process by which a parent says, once and for all, “This is my child.”
(Writers will be particularly interested in the chapter on power and developmental stages and their effects on behavior.)
Order from Smashwords.
Order from Amazon.
HERE WITH THE SHADOWS
My 2014 ghostly collection HERE WITH THE SHADOWS is now available as an e-book. You can still get the beautiful hardcover from Swan River –http://swanriverpress.ie/shadows.html (or maybe you want both!). This is still a special book for me, inspired by those early 20th century British ghost story collections I love so much. It remains one of my most focused and coherent collections. Ordering links for the electronic edition in the comments.
“a volume of supernatural impressions and quiet vacancies, and in each story Tem reminds us that sometimes only a whisper separates us from the eternal.”
“The lyrical quality of Tem’s prose and his skill at finding the perfect metaphor for expressing the emotional states of his characters make these perfect gems of storytelling whose impact is like that of poetry.” -Stefan Dziemianowicz, Locus
“Taken together, these stories demonstrate why a neglected, uncommercial literary discipline is important. As many have observed, all novels are flawed to some extent, but it is possibly to produce a perfect short story. Some of those perfect stories are here.”-David Longhorn, Supernatural Tales
“Here with the Shadows, a collection of fifteen short stories, is a tour de force, not necessarily as a result of Tem’s singular writing style, but because the volume plays beautifully—and hauntingly—with the theme of the ghost through the tropes of memory, physical space, and, quite literally, shadow.”
-John Edgar Browning, Dead Reckonings
“This book is all good. But a number of stories are special, more than just good. Those stories as well as the whole book’s gestalt itself represent a matchless literary experience to cherish for watchers of man’s ‘endless fall’.”
-D.F. Lewis, Real-Time Reviews
Order from Smashwords.
Order from Amazon.
ONION SONGS
Steve’s 2013 collection ONION SONGS has a new e-book edition (the only one available): 42 short stories (5 previously unpublished) with an emphasis on the bizarre, the absurd, and the meditative, ranging from prose poetry vignettes to such unusual items as the text for his all-puppet theatrical, “The Mask Child.”
“Tem lets his characters, their situations, and their emotions creep up slowly on the reader. His style is thoughtful and poetic, and the tension he builds effectively sustains well-crafted plots. He has found a perfect balance between the bizarre and the straight-forward…” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Consistent in quality and diverse in content, as impressive as it is impressionistic… Onion Songs is the strongest collection of short stories that I’ve read in the last year. – Peter Tennant in Black Static
“The 42 stories in this collection showcase the often bizarre, always enlightening works of one of the most distinctive voices in imaginative literature. Tem’s prose paints vivid and compelling images. His stories feature people who contemplate death, sanity, love, loss, and other human issues from original points of view.” –Library Journal
Order from Amazon.
Order from Smashwords.
EVERYTHING IS FINE NOW
In this new collection award-winning horror author Steve Rasnic Tem showcases a variety of ghosts and other creatures aiming to keep you up all night with the lights on. Read about the two best friends chased by a strangely familiar figure. Or the teenager who woke up one morning with fur sprouting from every nook and cranny on his body. Or the fellow from a poor family who has to take care of both his little sister and his crazy mom whose magical powers only make things worse. Or an old man who finally tells his grandson the terrible thing that makes their crops grow. Or the mechanic who keeps his cars running on oil, gasoline, blood, and broken bones. The stories in Everything Is Fine Now range from subtle supernatural tales to the legends you might hear sitting by a campfire. For adults, teenagers, and mature middle-grade readers.
Order from Amazon.
For more new book information go to the Books page.
Des Lewis Reviews ‘Figures Unseen’
Des Lewis has completed a generous review of my collection FIGURES UNSEEN: Selected Stories. https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/.../figures-unseen.../
“Between the Pilings” on Nocturnal Transmissions
Episode 49 of the Nocturnal Transmissions short horror story podcast is now live, featuring a terrific performance of my story "Between the Pilings."https://www.nocturnaltransmissions.com.au/single-post/2019/05/07/NOCTURNAL-TRANSMISSIONS---Episode-49
“Night Vision” at Daily SF
I have a new piece of dark fiction, "Night Vision," up at Daily Science Fiction: https://dailysciencefiction.com/hither-and-yon/magic-realism/steve-rasnic-tem/night-vision
Des Lewis Reviews Everything Is Fine Now
Des Lewis has completed his real-time review of my latest collection Everything Is Fine Now. https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/03/19/everything-is-fine-now-steve-rasnic-tem/?fbclid=IwAR1hNSpRtUxcpzW_Q9Pc4_GRKnhijrHn7bQQvYoi4W19HUs3Bsh91et_fRg
Melanie Tem & Nancy Holder: Making Love
MAKING LOVE, the first novel collaboration between Melanie and Nancy Holder is now available as an ebook. Smashwords ordering link: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/930391 Amazon ordering link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Q227DPX/
Events
October Nights of Horror
A recording of my program is now available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3vyiPvOoG4
See a complete list of events on the Events page.