Fake Believe

“Welcome (back) to Hazeland. Matt Maxwell weaves a sun-soaked, star-choked spell in this haunting (and haunted) collection. Slide into a gritty and glittering alternate-LA, where dreams (and nightmares) are just beyond the next horizon.”
- Emma Gibbon, author of Dark Blood Comes from the Feet

“The weird tales contained in Fake Believe offer hypnotic excursions through the interstitial psychic environs of a timeless LA populated by an interacting demimonde of rich freaks, bemused lowlifes, and players on the cusp of an awareness they may eventually regret. More please.”
- Jamie Delano, writer of Hellblazer and the Leepus books

Seven all-new stories from the streets of Hazeland. Stories that resist easy categories, falling between fantastic horror and weird fantasy and strange crimes.

A weary and ragged veteran returns to his childhood neighborhood finding it gone but for one house and the ghosts within it need his help.

A private detective digs at the secret behind gentrification in downtown and the fabricated and inhuman residents who’ved moved in.

A girl at a mysterious block party confronts her past and future and a finds herself in a place that might not ever exist.

A ragtag crew of filmmakers chases down the Bigfoot of the Southland and instead finds something terrible that wants to be set free.

An industrial/goth singer flees to LA and finds that someone just like her already blazed the career she’s seeking, haunting her assumed identity.

Two luckless strongarm men try to rob the wrong bar on the wrong night, finding not easy money but a witch who is painfully bored.

A book forger attends an auction where her former career is one of the featured lots, yet that is not the strangest thing for sale that night.