Check out Sweet Darkness, the disturbing new collection from veteran horror writer Rich Logsdon. From the introduction by T. D. Eliopulos:

Sweet Darkness, a collection of fifteen short stories for the very mature reader, is an exploration of the world of the lost and the damned. In fact, in one of the collection’s sharpest pieces, “In Hell,” the narrator describes the work’s hero, Sandra, and the antagonist, Father Harold Blackstone, as individuals “absorbing each other’s darkness.” And in many respects that is exactly what each of the characters who inhabit these stories does. They are people, who are caught up, some by choice and others by circumstance, in the brutality of devil worship, pornography, sexual obsession, and sacrifice.

After reading the collection in its entirety, the reader does not know whom to call first, a psychiatrist, a spiritual advisor, or a bartender. Logsdon seems to relish sending his reader into such a creepy tailspin of emotions. But the careful reader will recover from and see beyond the stories’ shock. At first glance, these characters and their worlds are void of all hope, compassion, redemption, or empathy. Or are they? The author skillfully brings the lives of these characters, and for that matter the lives of the reader, to the table. Think, he whispers as we cringe or dare to look away from the page. Many of the settings and occupations of these stories are quite real, quite identifiable: the small towns of the Northwest, the Las Vegas strip, the museums of Florence, the never-ending two-lane highways of the West; the strippers, the college professors, the lonely teenager, the Bible-preaching Pentecostals. Can these easily recognized people and places be that screwed up? Yes, these works scream. But why? they also ask.

And with this question lies the psychological intrigue of Logsdon’s writing. Because of Logsdon’s adept use of point of view, the reader is constantly questioning the characters’ sense of reality, often as the characters question the same. This mind game creates a very uncomfortable yet engaging tension between characters and reader. In addition to the already mentioned “In Hell,” the collections’ strongest pieces—“Blood Flowing Backwards,” “A Place Without Angels,” “Freak World,” and “Dreaming of Botticelli”—explore the individual’s quest to manage his or her sense of reality. The characters’ realities knot into confusion as a result of their failure or unwillingness to define their existence, to claim their own souls. Ironically, at the end of each work the reader is not entirely certain if the characters have won or lost the battle. That’s part of the charm—and I use this word cautiously here—of the universe of these characters.