Spontaneous Human Combustion

The fourth collection by Richard Thomas is a curated list of his best work from the last five years. It is a mix of immersive speculative fiction—fantasy, science fiction, and horror—that addresses transgressive themes while still leaving room for hope.

Several of these stories have been long-listed for The Best Horror of the Year anthology. Known for being a maximalist, these stories strive to pull you into the shadows, showing you the uncanny, the unsettling, allowing you to put on the skin suit of the protagonist, and walk around these dark realities. What kind of stories can you expect? A bad man asks himself if he can still be a good father and husband, making the ultimate sacrifice to save his son. A clown takes off his make-up in a gloomy basement to reveal something more horrifying under the white, tacky skin. A man suffers repeated punishments in a shack by the side of the road, the deeper meaning to his purgatory only revealed at the very end. Paranoid that he has done something terrible, a man tries to confess, but nobody will believe him, and no evidence can be found, until the veil finally drops, revealing the truth. In a post-apocalyptic setting one man walks across the country seeking answers, only to repeat the same mistakes, hoping that this last journey will finally change his fate, and reveal something new. A fantasy world is filled with one man's desire to feel whole again, finally finding love, only to have the shocking truth of his life exposed in a shocking ending. A poker game yields a strange prize, that haunts one man, his game of chance now turned into a life and death coin flip, will a rippling effect on his life, and those around him. A set of twins finds they have mysterious new powers when an asteroid crashes in a field near their house, and the decisions they make create an uneasy balance, one last choice either saving or condemning them. A father and son work slave labor in a brave new world run by aliens, mounting a rebellion that may end up freeing them all. A man lives his life as a clown, with severe consequences, his story told in four acts, one tapping into the watchful eye of an alien presence, the ending offering multiple truths for the reader to decipher. In an epistolary story filled with a Lovecraftian vibe, you the reader are pulled into a surreal existence, asked to repeat a certain phrase, in order to be your true self. Stuck in a dreary job, the world moved on, dystopian in nature, one man enjoys his virtual reality so much he may just end up staying there forever. A story told in one, long, anxious sentence, follows a man and woman as they flee from a pursuing horror, his job to birth into this wasteland a new hope, but is this new creature enough to save them all? And the final story, a novelette, addresses some painful subjects, as one man tries to harvest rare materials in an isolated arctic setting, visited by one woman, his evolution a slow burn, while disembodied entities watch, the fate and future of this world centered around hope and change.