No More New Years: Tales of Apocalypse

"I hope you have a great new year." It's a sentiment full of hope. It is built on a sense that things get better as time goes on. But what if there were no more New Years? That might mean the end of the human race, the beings who mark the passage of time with years. It might mean the end of the Earth itself. Either way, what if the hope and unfulfilled promise of a new year is not really around the corner? I had the idea of doing this book a couple years ago. Then the pandemic happened, and I dramatically cut the publishing schedule for a number of reasons. Thankfully, that wasn't a full world-ending scenario, but somehow it feels fitting for such a world-wide situation to cause a delay in the publishing of a book of tales about the end of the world. I suppose stories about the end of the world might be as old as humanity. There are plenty of them in a lot of religions. In terms of fiction, though, they still go back quite a way. That's represented here by poems from Lord Byron (from 1816), Thomas Hood (from 1823) and T. S. Eliot (from 1925), and also stories by Edgar Allan Poe (from 1850) and Frank L. Pollack (from 1906). In terms of modern fiction, I have two tales here, "The Debut Tour" and "The Stars," both of which have appeared in some of my other collecitons. Kevin Wood contributed "The Porch," and he's a return visitor to my collections. "Nuclear Winter" comes from Adam R. Crump, who previously had a diffrent story in one of the other collections I published. "The Battery Man" comes from Heath D. Alberts, a frequent contributor to my works. Finally, Dustin Urness' "The Destroyer of Worlds," which was previously in the book "Dark Dreams and Weird Worlds" that I published a few year ago, finishes out the book. I hope you enjoy this collection of bleak tales. I hope we have plenty of New Years to come, though. I guess we'll never know for sure until we get there.