Phantom Constellations, by Daniel Braum NEW
- Author: Daniel Braum
- Artist: Dan Sauer
- Pub. Date: November 2025
- ISBN: 978-1-964780-44-3
- Status: In-Stock
Phantom constellations are all around us. Our lives. Our loves. All our relationships... all are phantoms. All only as real as we make them.Are you seeing what you think you are seeing?Are the connections that we make, objectively true? Or are they products of our minds, assigning meaning and sense, where there is none?The stars in the sky exist, unaffected by how we how we choose to categorize them. The constellations are phantoms; the shapes we give them only as real as we make them.This is a book of stories of haunted people, ghosts, and the Phantom Constellations all around them, bravely--and sometimes blindly--traversing the phantasmagoric happenings and psychological challenges in situations full of danger, uncertainty, grief, and tragedy, alongside a sense of hope, longing, mystery, and wonder.Appearing for the first time here are four never before published stories written exclusively for the collection along with ten more of Braum’s tales including from the Shivers anthology series and a wealth of hard-to-find publications from around the world.
“In his latest collection, Daniel Braum
resurrects phantoms that challenge the objectivity of lived memory, personal
narrative, and the hardwiring of our identities. With postmodern starkness
and Aickman-esque unease, Braum explores the validity of the emotional threads
woven into his characters’ individual experiential tapestries - where beauty
and hope intersect with grief, sorrow, loss, and despondency in the search of
meaning. The ghosts in Phantom Constellations look at you and
you can’t look away. Another triumph from one of our most important writers of
the strange.”
--Joshua Rex, author and historian
“Daniel Braum’s Phantom Constellations is
a masterclass of quiet strangeness as he explores the liminal spaces and
liminal periods of our lives. A distinct unease runs through these uncanny
tales, which probe the tender spaces of loneliness and the desire for
connection, the way people drift apart as they grow older, and the persistent
tension between hope and regret. This collection solidifies that every reader
of the weird should be reading Braum.”
--Jo Kaplan, Shirley-Jackson Award nominated author
“Daniel Braum has access to the weird like no other
writer, but he never loses sight of the human core at the center of his work.
The stories in Phantom Constellations create a deep, strange, and often
frightening journey through grief, regret, desire, and love. This is a truly
phenomenal collection.”
--Scotty Milder, author, filmmaker, and podcaster
“Phantom Constellations explores both the horrors of the objective world and those that haunt us within. The prose is terrific. Braum is not a writer afraid to take his time to creep you out."
--Jeffrey Ford, author of Big Dark Hole
"Daniel Braum excels as an accursed travel agent of speculative fiction, sending his troubled characters to visit exotic locals or unusual states of mind, fanning hopes that their lives will improve. They do not. Phantom Constellations continues this trend with beautifully written, unforgettable stories that change how we perceive the night sky and our uneasy place beneath it."
--Norman Prentiss, Bram Stoker award winning author
"One of the brightest young stars in the firmament of dark speculative fiction, Daniel Braum is among the best short story writers we've encountered."
