Use Once, Then Destroy: Stories

The first collection of stories from acclaimed horror writer Conrad Williams.

In a Venice shackled by winter, a serial killer is removing victims' hands.

While on holiday in the Fens of East Anglia, a woman at the end of her tether finds a terrible release.

A man haunted by graffiti finds that the road to discovering the perpetrator leads to death...and worse.

A husband trying to comfort his terminally ill wife seeks help in a forbidden zone from his childhood, where blood is the price of perfection.

Use Once Then Destroy selects award-winning writer Conrad Williams’s finest short fiction published between 1993 and 2002, with an additional three stories original to this collection. Within these pages you will also find the International Horror Guild and British Fantasy Society award-nominated novella “Nearly People,” in which a woman’s search for food in a nightmarish city brings her attention from an enigmatic man known as The Dancer, and leads her to a host of terrible epiphanies.

This spellbinding compilation offers the kind of unsettling horrors that drift into your consciousness and envelop you in an ethereal atmosphere of unease. There are no easy answers to the questions raised in these stories, which explore the scarred outposts of desperation and desire, sickness and death, sex and decay. One thing is certain; Use Once Then Destroy will stay with you long after you’ve stopped reading.

Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.

Conrad Williams is the award-winning author of seven novels, four novellas, and two collections of short stories. He has won the British Fantasy, August Derleth, and International Horror Guild awards. Williams lives in Manchester with his wife and three sons.