What if every night you went to bed, there were thousands of spiders at the foot of your bed, and there was nothing you could do about it? Or if you moved into a sentient house that had dementia? Maybe there’s a special hospital that can remove your religion as an outpatient surgery, a Christmas tree in a darkened corner of the orphanage that no child wants to crawl under to get their present, or perhaps there’s a scarecrow that bends the boundaries of reality to its will.

In his first horror anthology, Shawn Bailey blends short, horror stories with dark poetry to leave you asking, like the paralyzed victims of the Dancing Scarecrow, what can and cannot be within our fragile realities. The closer you get to the end, the darker it gets.