First Pre-Pub Review of “City of Dark Dreams” is a Rave!

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On top of the pub date announcement and cover reveal of M. G. Turner’s City of Dark Dreams: Tales from Another New York we shared a few days ago (see post below this one), the story collection just got its first advance review, from Publishers Weekly’s Booklife section, and they loved it!

“’The mystery is far more beautiful than any neatly presented fact that can be easily confirmed or denied,’ declares the narrator of the first tale in this marvelously unsettling collection of supernatural tales. That love of the mystery itself powers Turner’s interconnected stories set in an uncanny New York City’s Upper West Side. Turner’s people find themselves drawn into strange and unexplainable encounters, haunted by dreams and the dead, consumed by grief, loneliness, ambition, and the desire to understand what lies beyond the limits of human knowledge. The author’s nom de plume brings to mind M.R. James, that turn-of-the-20th-century master of the ghost story, and the storytelling here echoes both James’s work and the literary traditions from which it emerged. One tale, ‘The Witching Hour,” opens as if it has been crafted to read aloud around the hearth: “Believe me when I say the following passages are not for the faint of heart, but rather for those whose nerves can handle an elaborate examination of psychically damaging phenomena.”

Despite some brilliantly realized old-school prose stylings, Turner’s stories move briskly and prove too spiky, surprising, and ambiguous—and even contemporary in their concerns—to be treated as plummy throwbacks. Here, all-too-relatable characters create the conditions for their hauntings through their deepest desires, and death looms over every entry. “The Botanist” follows a mother seeking contact with her dead daughter through a Spirit Flower, “The Second Wife” finds a scientist possibly recreating his dead wife, and “Stage Fright” concerns an actor who sees his own dead father while playing Hamlet.

Turner also uses uncertainty to deepen that sense of mystery. We never really find out whether the Minotaur actually exists, the stone eagle truly moves, or the lost manuscript possesses a will of its own; unlike much 21st century genre-fiction, that welcome ambiguity denies readers the false comfort of the unknown being made explicable. Turner’s cast proves deeply, revealingly human as they yearn to understand, control, and escape what ultimately lies beyond our control—and perhaps it is the mystery itself that gives life meaning.

Takeaway: Unsettling stories of an uncanny New York and its haunted inhabitants.
Great for fans of: Robert Aickman, Ramsey Campbell.

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M. G. Turner’s “City of Dark Dreams: Tales from Another New York” to be published Jan 12, 2027

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As mentioned on this site last year, Philip Turner Book Productions sold City of Dark Dreams: Tales from Another New York by M. G. Turner, with a Foreword by David Updike, to DarkWinter Press of Ontario, Canada. The collection of twenty-five short stories (245 pages, quality paperback, $18.99, ISBN: 978-1-998441-42-6) will be the first commercially published book by Turner, my adult son and partner in our editing and agency business. As per DarkWinter Press’s new catalog, it will be published on January 12, 2027.

As described in the catalog, the stories incorporate elements of mystery and shades of the macabre, examine themes of life and death, ponder whether mortality can be circumvented, imagine dreams impinging on reality, and find the uncanny in the everyday. Melding the tales into a unified whole is the setting, the Upper West Side of Manhattan, as well as a fictional college, Hudson University, which features in many of the tales and introduces a dark academia motif. A host of intriguing characters populate this world, intersecting and influencing each other’s lives, in a manner akin to the storytelling in David Lynch’s classic TV series, “Twin Peaks.”

In his Foreword David Updike writes,

“Mr. Turner describes his genre as ‘literary gothic,’ in the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe, and in the unhurried prose of another era, his tales unfold in mysterious, and sometimes malevolent ways. They take place in the pleasant west side neighborhoods along Riverside Drive, where Turner grew up, not far from Columbia and Barnard, and in the shadow of Riverside Church. Even the narration and dialogue seem tinged with the somewhat formal tones of an earlier era: it is a world where the classical references are still alive, but where unusual, paranormal events occur: a woman converses with her late husband through the medium of a ‘seeing stone’; in a nearby museum the statues of antiquity—Hera, Sapho, and Venus—come alive at night to converse and debate their shared pasts and conflicts, and then go silent again when the guards come in.”

Readers will relish experiencing Turner’s alternate Manhattan, a locale replete with mad scientists, bizarre specters, demonic figures, and familiar horror elements he makes his own. These are stories that comment on our times while also bringing a flair of magical realism to the genre, which will induce frights without slasher gore on the page.

We are also excited to announce that in July 2027 Baxter House Editions, an imprint of DarkWinter Press devoted to republishing contemporary classics, will publish a second M. G. Turner book, Dreams and Visions: Three Story Cycles, with a Foreword by James Fisher, editor of The Seaboard Review of Books. The book will be drawn from three chapbooks Turner published privately in 2025, comprised of Dreams of the Romantics, a story cycle inspired by Lord Byron and Mary and Percy Shelley, when in 1816 the literary friends gathered at a villa on Lake Geneva during the fateful “Year without a Summer;” Roman Visions, a story cycle inspired by Virgil and a final missing chapter from The Aeneid, as well as The Museum of Mind and Matter, an experiment in what Turner describes as “emotional archeology.”

M. G. Turner writes under a rubric he terms “literary gothic,” with tales that hearken back to the past and look to the future for answers to modern readers’ most pressing questions, be they environmental, spiritual, or existential. Creative touchstones for Turner include Edgar Allan Poe, who once lived in the neighborhood he writes about, the Upper West Side of Manhattan; Algernon Blackwood, one of the inventors of “weird” fiction; and Jorge Louis Borges. Turner dubs his oeuvre The Neighborhood Legendarium, an inter-related series of works that takes in City of Dark Dreams and the aforementioned chapbooks. Turner is also a poet and is working on compiling three volumes of poetry related to his stories and the city.

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Sold: Four American History Classics by Ken Ackerman Coming Back into Print

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In the early to mid-2000s, while an editorial executive with Carroll & Graf Publishers, one of my chief enjoyments was editing and publishing four stellar books of American history by Kenneth D. Ackerman. I found him to be a terrific researcher, and more adept than any writer I’d ever worked with at utilizing the text from carefully cited original sources, which he then paired with his own prose, often in the same sentence or paragraph.

The books we did then included a biography, Boss Tweed: The Corrupt Pol Who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York, which Pete Hamill reviewed on the cover of the NY Times Book Review, and Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of President James A. Garfield, on the tragically abbreviated presidency that contributed to the premature end of Reconstruction. The others were The Gold Ring, on Jay Gould and the financial scandal of 1869, and Young J. Edgar, on the early rise of the all-powerful FBI director.

I’m delighted to now have Ken as an agency client of Philip Turner Book Productions. Under that rubric, I’m excited to announce that we’ve licensed his backlist titles to Open Road Media for their Re-Discovery Lit program. It’s great to be working with Ken again!

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