While the sun blisters a dying world, a mutant spider battles a squad of toy soldiers and a plastic cowboy on his last ride...

A gangster, a sheriff, and a mysterious traveler face an army of mechanical vampires burrowing up from hell itself during a wild Montana storm...

In a desert poisoned by atomic radiation, an abused boy stands between a rampaging giant and the hunter who would make him a grisly trophy...

Beneath a full Arizona moon, a drifter faces a pack of merciless human animals and the werewolf who butchered his sister...

In the American West, a legendary gunslinger delivers a cursed bounty to the one-horse town where his partner's ghost awaits.

Tales of hardboiled horror and Twilight Zone noir. Cross-genre blowtorches with bad guys and worse guys. Love stories both dark and bittersweet. A brand new novella and extensive story notes. You'll find this and more in the fifth collection from three-time Bram Stoker award-winner Norman Partridge, an author Locus calls "one of the most dependable, exciting, and entertaining practitioners of dark suspense and dark fantasy... emphasis on the dark."

In Lesser Demons , Partridge explores the kind of fiction that made him both a horror fan and a writer. Using the shotgun prose of a crime novel, the title story draws a deadly bead on H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. "The Iron Dead" introduces Chaney, a monster-hunting pulp hero with a mechanical hand built in hell. "Carrion" cuts a mean swath through Robert E. Howard territory, while 'The Big Man' explores dark shadows of American life never imagined in the atom-age horror movies of the fifties.

Part celebration, part reinvention, Lesser Demons only serves to underscore RevolutionSF s verdict: "Norman Partridge is the finest writer of short horror fiction going."