A teenage girl realizes her lifelong best friends are being seduced by a supernatural force, and must choose between being alone and being ensnared together. A young woman in a troubled relationship finds herself caught between two versions of the same boyfriend—one volatile, and one too good to be true. A lonely mother fears her young child’s best friend is a witch. And, in the titular novella, a new widow must decide how far she’s willing to go to steal her husband back from the dead.
From Stephanie:
I started writing short stories after I moved back to my hometown—or rather, to the suburbs outside my hometown of Philadelphia. I felt strange and out of place after a lifetime of living in cities, and embarking on a new stage of life. Part of my acclimation process was looking for the strange, the weird, the haunted in this lovely little town, and the region beyond. And of course, you can find weird stuff everywhere, if you have the right eye: power struggles among small children, stairs leading to roads that no longer exist, nearly forgotten histories of ghosts and hermits. I wrote about more familiar legends, too, like creatures stalking the New Jersey Pine Barrens and Pennsylvania’s own miniature hominid trickster, the albatwitch. Through all these stories crept women who can’t quite figure out how to be friends, girlfriends, wives, mothers—who know something is wrong, but can only sometimes explain what it is. I’m so excited that Artemis Swenson, the artist for The Night Parade and Other Stories, captured the atmosphere and mystery of these stories, and created this procession of strange figures, a nod to the destructive ghostly parade of the new title novella. Part of me wants to run from them, but part of me wants to join them. Which I think is what the best scary stories are all about.
In The Night Parade and Other Stories, Stephanie Feldman revisits the mid-Atlantic’s eerie legends and settings to epxplore complicated friendships, romantic entanglements, motherhood, and grief with a deft hand, a piercing eye, and a feminist twist.
“The Night Parade explores the horror and magic to be found in the mundane and the everyday, inviting readers to look deeper at their own world and discover the wonder and terror it holds. A wonderful and effortless blend of genres, strange, haunting and lovely – this is a collection that will stick with you long after you’re done reading.”
— AC Wise, author of Wendy, Darling and Ballad of the Bone Road
“Stephanie Feldman is a weird fiction wizard. This is a perfect collection of tales that burn right to the cold heart of our doomed relationships, our secret fears, our terrible lonelinesses. How do we sink into or run from the mundane terrors of our everyday lives? Join The Night Parade, and Stephanie will show you.”
— Sam Rebelein, Stoker-nominated author of Galloway’s Gospel
“Eerie, beautiful, fierce, and elegant, The Night Parade and Other Stories haunts. Steeped in folklore, urban legend, old magic, and horror, Feldman’s incisive prose grapples with grief, power, and womanhood in all its forms. From the Pine Barrens and the Jersey Devil to strange creatures in the woods, Stephanie Feldman is an important voice for the weirdness of the Mid-Atlantic, and this is the rare collection that demands to be read and reread immediately.”
— Erika Swyler, National Bestselling author of The Book of Speculation
Stephanie Feldman is the author of the novels Saturnalia, a Locus Award finalist, and The Angel of Losses, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, Crawford Fantasy Award winner, and Mythopoeic Award finalist. She is co-editor of the multi-genre anthology Who Will Speak for America? and her stories and essays have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Catapult Magazine, Electric Literature, Flash Fiction Online, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Rumpus, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Weird Horror, and more. She lives outside Philadelphia with her family.
