Thomas Phillips

And The Darkness Back Again Thomas Phillips

Like a gatefold album that reveals itself through striking images, text, screaming refrains, the stories of "And the Darkness Back Again"build and overlap. They strike a musical balance between chilling, phantasmagoric treatments of human relations and deadly foibles and the stark language of a 21st century nouveau roman. The collection is also a celebration of the genre that, for many, fascinates from a young age and never quite lets go. What Phillips has called elsewhere "critical horror" is displayed in these thirteen stories to affect tensely atmospheric, occasionally grisly paeans to the magical fears of childhood that become grim way stations in the adult's journey toward fulfillment and extinction.