The Map of Lost Places

A travel guide to hauntings and the haunted, to lands with their own power, and to the communities that spring from these strange realms.

In your hands is a travel guide to the strange and surreal. From arcades along a boardwalk and jetties at the edges of tourist towns, to a rural village in Pakistan and hollows hidden deep within a forest in Pennsylvania, strange things can happen no matter where you are. You can become lost in a city crowded with people, haunted within your own home, and slip from one reality into another in the space of a step.

With twenty-two stories by authors such as Brian Keene, Maurice Broaddus, Ai Jiang, Samit Basu, and KS Walker, editors Sheree Renée Thomas and Lesley Conner take readers on a tour of places where weird things happen. Places where ghosts are real, old gods are hungry, and towns are not as idyllic as they appear to be.

Welcome to The Map of Lost Places. Enter at your own risk.

Sheree Renée Thomas is an award-winning fiction writer, poet, and editor. Her work is inspired by myth and folklore, natural science and Mississippi Delta conjure. Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future (Third Man Books) is her first all prose collection. She is the author of the Marvel novel adaptation of the legendary comics, Black Panther: Panther's Rage (Titan Books). She edited the World Fantasy-winning groundbreaking black speculative fiction anthologies, Dark Matter (2000 and 2004) and is the first to introduce W.E.B. Du Bois’s science fiction short stories. She is the Associate Editor of the historic Black arts literary journal, Obsidian: Literature & the Arts in the African Diaspora and is the Editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. She is a Marvel writer and contributor to the groundbreaking anthology, Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda edited by Jesse J. Holland. She lives in her hometown, Memphis, Tennessee near a mighty river and a pyramid.

Lesley Conner is the Editor of Apex Magazine and has co-edited several anthologies with Jason Sizemore, including Do Not Go Quietly, Robotic Ambitions, and Apex Magazine: 2021. She lives in Maryland with her family, including two adorable dogs named Oz and Pax. You can follow her online via X (formerly Twitter) @lesleyconner.