From multi award-winning and New York Times bestselling writer Tim Lebbon comes this huge collection of the very best of his short fiction.

His first short fiction collection As the Sun Goes Down (Night Shade Book), attracted rave reviews. Now, Last Exit for the Lost collects the best of Lebbon’s output from 2000 to the present day. Weighing in at over 560 pages and containing 150,000 words of fiction, it also features two brand new, never-before-published stories.

Of course due to inevitable delays between contract signature and book announcement, it’s not actually the best of my short fiction right up to 2009 (there’s another announcement coming soon about another collection that will cover that later period … oh yes indeed), but this book is one I’ve been looking forward to mmore than any other I can remember.  It’s going to look lovely, for a start – what CD book doesn’t?  And with that gorgeous cover, and a great Intro from Joe R. Lansdale, what more could I ask for?

Hope you’ll pop along and place your order.

“Sunday,” Ray said.

I nodded. “Sunday. Day of rest.” From behind us, the regular crack of rifles.

He sighed. “I’m dead beat. Stiff as a bugger. Do you think there’s any hope?”

Without looking at him, I uttered something between a giggle and a sob. I’d been feeling pretty weird lately. “There’s always hope. So long as we have bullets, there’s always hope.” I drew a shape in the dew-speckled grass, but did not know what it was meant to be.

“Cliché King strikes again.”

We faced the house because it implied normality, a façade from the past. It stood alone on the plain, a supposed retreat from all that was happening. We had come here because we thought it would be safe. We though nobody else would know about it. Our complacency had marked us out.

Behind us, another cascade of rifle shots. Ammunition was running low. The snipers were using their rounds sparingly, trying to line up two or more to make the most of the shot. Each miss was another two steps closer to the end; each hit was merely one.

“I never thought it would end like this,” Ray said. “When we came here, I mean. I thought it would be safe. We can see for miles around. I thought it’d be safe.” He often used the word safe; as if repetition could imbue it with power over unrelenting reality.

I glanced at my watch, but did not know the time. The smashed face recorded forever the instant of my fleeing the city, where I had abandoned Gemma to her fate. She had been dead already, but I could have done so much more for her. I hated myself for that. I hoped she did not hate me too.

Sometimes I thought I saw her on the distant hillside, shuffling towards the house with interminable, relentless steps. I prayed every night that it would not be my shift when she arrived.

“Our shift,” I said. Ray and I stood, turned from the house – the mental placebo for our sickness – andfaced the real world.

I took a rifle from Dawn. I smiled encouragingly, but she had been at the barricade for two hours, and her face was moulded grim.

The gun was still hot. The rack of magazines was sadly depleted. I’d have to make every shot count. There must have been a million of them. They seemed to be coming here from all over the world. Dead but walking, all their stagnant attention was focussed on our house. We were the centre of the world, and it was hopeless. I wished they would all turn around and walk back the way they had come, but eventually, I knew, they would simply travel around the globe and reach us from the opposite direction. I took aim and fired. A head exploded into dry brains and shattered skull.

We were an island in a sea of moving dead. They walked over the pathetic corpses of those we had already shot. They came slowly, like a glacier of doom, guaranteed to sweep us away eventually but content in the knowledge that they need not rush things.

I took aim and fired. One went down with half a head, the bullet ricocheting and punching through the spine of another. A bullet well spent.

In the distance, flaming red hair. A smile borne of decomposition, not love. Gemma.

It would be another hour or so before she was near enough to be worth shooting. It was an hour I spent reliving our time together, like an extended flashback experienced by a drowning man. And I was drowning. Choking on the inevitability of things. Putting off the end, as mankind had for decades, the difference being that I had no faith in redemption. I was not waiting for God to intervene; I simply wanted a few more hours of life.

At the end of the hour, when she was close enough for me to see the empty sockets where once resided the eyes I loved, I took aim and pulled the trigger. But there were no more bullets left.

Availability:

• Limited Edition Hb, ISBN 1892389096 (sold out)
• Trade Hb, UK: 1892389088
• Trade Hb, USA: 1892389088

A hardback short story collection. Contains over 90,000 words of fiction, including a novella “The Unfortunate”. Also has an introduction by Ramsey Campbell and a cover by Alan M Clark.

I met Jason Williams at the 2000 World Horror Convention in Denver. We were soon onto the subject of collections and I came away pleased that Jason seemed quite interested in seeing some of my work. Five days later he rang me and insisted on seeing some, and that’s how this collection came about.

All but two of the stories were already written, although several of them were still originals. The novella in this collection, “The Unfortunate”, was written specially for this volume. It’s one of the darker pieces of writing I’ve ever attempted (and those who know my work will understand this to mean it’s as grim as Hell), but I also think it’s one of the best tales I’ve ever written. It’s nasty, but it’s my exploration of the idea that bad, bad things happen to essentially good people all the time.

READ THE EXTRACT

Reviews:

“…the darker moments of life are central to Lebbon’s work. Few writers can plumb the depths of these moments with his sensitivity and unflinching frankness.’ – Lisa DuMond: SF Site, MEviews.com