Shadow and Silence: Hazeland Collected 1

Collecting the first three Hazeland novels by Matt Maxwell.

Fantastic horror and weird crimes on the streets of eighties Los Angeles, rendered in a smoky and textured voice. Hijacking detective fiction and routing it down much stranger boulevards and back alleys, the Hazeland books offer a vision of an already unique city made more dazzling and unsettling.

A book forger creates a new occult tome, only to find that there are parties asking for them by name for purposes unspoken and better left unlearned. Musicians and lovers find success bestowed nod by producers or impresarios, but by magical queens and clouds of hovering eyes. A shattered woman is asked to solve an impossible mystery, finding that it leads to a presence that rests and waits and hungers in all the waters of the world. A world-weary veteran returns to his old hometown only to find it flattened, reduced to a single house that needs his help. A destitute PI gets involved in a real-estate scam being perpetrated by a developer and an army of papercraft servants. A girl tries to find love across two worlds at the end of a string of legendary block parties. Paranormal documentarians down to their last dime seek the Bigfoot of the Southland and find something far more terrifying. A singer running away from her old home finds a new one, and that she is haunted by the identity she’s unwillingly assumed. Luckless strongarm men try and rob a sorceress only to find themselves the featured entertainment. A book forger, one you’ll know by now, attends an eerie auction where her work is one of the lots and finds herself bidding alongside an actual goddess.

Equal parts horror and fantasy and crime, these books will take the reader through the familiar made beautifully strange. Cityscapes merge with lost plateaus, squiggles of neon become unspeakable language, and the dance of a hundred hungry kids tries to draw down something bigger than them all. Carcosa by way of the 405, where the newest of us are made of light, and even the oldest are too.

“This dark, subversive ride produces profound longing for an LA you’ve never experienced but wish you had. Maxwell has the rare ability to craft stories that leave you saturated with horror and awe in equal measure. I absolutely loved this book.”
– Corinna Bechko on The Queen of No Tomorrows

“Maxwell’s prose is austere and stinging. A character remarks that ghosts are ‘wounds in time’ and that perfectly encapsulates the magical and mournful tenor. This is strong work. It will linger with you.”
– Laird Barron on All Waters Are Graves

“The weird tales contained in Fake believe offer hypnotic excursions throughout he 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 that they may eventually regret. More please.”
– Jamie Delano on Fake Believe