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

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.