The Nine Thoughts

Winner of the 2024 Broken Tribe Novella Award This deceptively 'small volume' is a propulsive missing-persons mystery that deepens into an existential psychodrama as resonant as E.T.A. Hoffmann's "The Sandman" or a season of True Detective. Like the mute ferryman it draws you toward its dread unveiling; like a siren pitched just beyond range, singing the hidden harmony behind all things. —Derek Nikitas, author of Pyres and The Long Division Book after book, Stefan Kiesbye has been building a stimulating darkness shot through with the razor-sharp brilliance of his prose, which once it gets hold of your mind never ceases to dazzle you. This kind of radiant darkness reaches a higher level of unsettling excellence in The Nine Thoughts, a work of literary art so charged with mounting metaphysical dread that it poses new challenges for contemporary weird fiction. From Santa Rosa to London, from Florida to Waldron Island, Kiesbye devises a journey in search for answers to three mysterious and apparently ritualistic murders, and in the process turns the classic investigation story on its head in order to create an eerie, transformative voyage into the heart of loss, grief, death, and the presence of other personas among our everyday identity. Beware all ye who enter The Nine Thoughts, since once you finish this compelling page-turner you won't be able to look at the world around you in the same way again. Beware and rejoice—Northern California noir has found its new true master. —Mauricio Montiel Figueiras, author of The Funeral and co-author of Proper Imposters