Short Story Collections

From a writer whose novels have been acclaimed for their unflinching exploration of evil comes a brilliant collection of short stories—some never before published—that distill dread back down to its essence—and inject it straight into the reader's back brain. Andrew Vachss might have scissored his characters from today's headlines: a stalker prowling around an anonymous high-rise; a serial killer whose transgressions reflect a childhood of hideous abuse; an inner-city gunman who is willing to take out a blockful of victims in order to win a moment of acceptance. Tautly written and endowed with murderous ironic spin, Born Bad plunges us into the hell that lies just outside our bedroom windows.

When Another Chance to Get it Right debuted on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" in 1993, Dark Horse was deluged with phone calls as people clamored to buy the book. Now, nearly a decade later, Dark Horse is proud to offer an updated edition of the acclaimed collection of short stories, poetry, and allegory. This new edition boasts an all-new, never before published Vachss-penned prose story called "La Corazon del Ninos," along with illustrations and a magnificent new cover by Geof Darrow ("The Matrix I," "The Matrix Reloaded," and "The Matrix Revolutions"). The beautiful drawings add a different dimension to this celebration of the potential of parenting, a dimension that's rarely seen in the genre, making it as much inspirational as it is instructional.

A hit man defies the confines of a life sentence to avenge his sister's batterer.  An immaculately dressed man hires a street gang to extract his daughter from a Central American prison, for reasons as mysterious as they are deadly.  A two-bit graffiti artist with a taste for Nazi-ganda finds himself face-to-face with three punks out to make a mark of their own—literally—with a tattoo needle. From neo-noir master Andrew Vachss comes Everybody Pays , 38 white-knuckle rides into a netherworld of pederasts and prostitutes, stick-up kids and fall guys—where private codes of crime and punishment pulsate beneath a surface system of law and order, and our moral  compass spins frighteningly out of control. Here is the street-grit prose that has earned Vachss comparisons to Chandler, Cain, and Hammett--and the ingenious plot twists that transform the double-cross into an expression of retribution, the dark deed into a thing of beauty. Electrifying and enigmatic, Everybody Pays is a sojourn into the nature of evil itself—a trip made all the more frightening by its proximity to our front doorstep.