Apex Book Company

Why are we obsessed with the end of the world? Actually, I’d presume it’s not such a difficult question to answer if you dig around. Mortality. Spiritualism. Morbidity. Especially morbidity (at least for me!).

Zombies, floods, aliens (my favorite), asteroids, black hole, Large Hadron Colliders, more zombies, nuclear war, chemical war, crazy North Korean dictators, so on and so forth have been conjectured as the cause of our demise.

And now it’s the Mayans. Or, more precisely, ‘presumed’ aspects of the Mayan belief system.

This is why I commissioned Dr. Amy H. Sturgis to write an essay to examine the various ways the Mayan 2012 calendar rollover are interpreted by the believers out there. Dr. Sturgis has a PH.D. in Intellectual History and is a history professor at Belmont University. She has also taught at a varied list of respected universities including Pitzer College, Bryn Mawr College, Princeton University, Brown University, Duke University, Chapman University, and UCLA.

Genevieve Valentine and James F. Reilly provide fictional glimpses into what might be our non-fictional futures. Both have appeared in a wide variety of professional-level publications. I hope you enjoy their dark imaginative stories as much as I did.

I welcome our new poetry editor Lester Smith to the team. I also welcome McKenzie Johnston, Martel Sardina, and Zakarya Anwar as our new submission editors.

As usual, I’m going to end my editorial by shilling some books.

First, I’d like to announce that our monumental (to me, at least) horror anthology, Dark Faith, is available for pre-orders. If you order through our store, you will also receive a limited edition accompanying chapbook titled Dark Faith: Last Rites. This one is edited by Maurice Broaddus and Jerry Gordon. All the stories are new and by such genre notables as Jay Lake, Brian Keene, Ekaterina Sedia, Catherynne M. Valente, Mary Robinette Kowal, Nick Mamatas, Tom Piccirilli, Gary A. Braunbeck, Wrath James White, Alethea Kontis, and others!

Second, I encourage you to buy a copy of Descended From Darkness: Apex Magazine Vol I. This anthology puts into print all the original content published digitally in Apex Magazine from June 2008-June 2009. All proceeds from Descended From Darkness goes toward the upkeep (namely, paying the magazine contributors!) of Apex Magazine. We have to have your support to keep alive the dream.