Feature Fiction || Ape in the Ring by Douglas Ford

From the author of The Reattachment comes a frightening and twisted collection of stories that demonstrates Douglas Ford’s imagination at its best.

In these stories, a woman uncovers the buried memory of how she once disappeared inside the house of a murderer; a father waits and waits for his son to come out of a playground structure, unprepared for what finally does emerge; a group of foster children play an unconventional form of divination while protecting a secret together; the closet of a hotel room hides an unspeakable voyeur; and in the title story, a carnival offers ritualized combat with something that may or not be an ape.

 

Douglas Ford wields language like a sinister surgeon with a night-black scalpel. These stories cut down to the bone, exposing the darkness that lies just beneath the surface of our everyday world. This collection is a midnight carnival of dark wonders, terrifying and fascinating in equal measure. –Bram Stoker Award-Winning Author, Tim Waggoner

Ape in the Ring and Other Tales of the Macabre and Uncanny is a must have collection for every horror library. Douglas Ford crafts stories that are disturbing, dripping with atmosphere, and claustrophobically frightening. You will be thinking about this book long after you have set it down. -Bram Stoker Award-Winning Author, Owl Goingback

Douglas Ford lives and works on the west coast of Florida, just off an exit made famous by a Jack Ketchum short story. He is the author of the upcoming collection of weird fiction, Ape in the Ring and Other Tales of the Macabre and Uncanny. His work has appeared in Dark Moon Digest, Infernal Ink, Weird City, along with The Best Hardcore Horror, Volumes Three and Four. His Stoker-recommended novella, The Reattachment, appeared in 2019 courtesy of Madness Heart Press. In the harsh light of day, he sprinkles a little darkness into the lives of his students at the State College of Florida, and he lives with a Hovawart (that's a kind of dog) who fiercely protects him from the unseen creatures living in the wooded area next to his house. His three cats merely tolerate him, but his wife is decidedly fond of him, as he is of her.     

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