The Idol by Jeffrey Thomas

The Signed and lettered deluxe hardcover edition with slipcase is up for preorder!

Sigrid Kant is a beautiful monster.

A young social media influencer—whose widowed mother was recently murdered under mysterious circumstances—Sigrid has been scouted out by an entrepreneur named Teddy Zeist and invited to an unnamed Southeast Asian country to model for a local beer brand’s advertising campaign. Zeist recognizes that Sigrid is a rare type of individual in possession of a powerful, uncanny charisma, and feels it will translate into photos for the campaign.

However, while some people are not affected by Sigrid’s magnetism, those who are most strongly bewitched experience the strange compulsion to sacrifice their lives to her, in order to prove their devotion.

And sometimes, Sigrid puts this phenomenon to use for very personal reasons...

Included in this special edition of The Idol is the new short story "Unbalanced Eyes"—another tale of beauty and terror set in the mysterious Unnamed Country.

EDITIONS

Deluxe Signed & Lettered Hardcover Edition with slipcase

• Signed by Jeffrey Thomas
  
• Hand-Lettered A to Z
  
• Color Dust Jacket
  
• Front Cover and Spine Stampings
  
• Housed in a Slipcase
  
• Limited to 26 Lettered

PRAISE FOR JEFFREY THOMAS'S SUNNAMED COUNTRY STORIES

“If you know something about Jeffrey Thomas’s fiction, you’ll know that when he’s not writing Weird SF stories set in the infamous and crime-ridden Punktown he sometimes explores “the unnamed country.” This country resembles the Viet Nam that Thomas has frequently visited, but…Viet Nam as seen through a lens slightly distorted by, or perhaps slightly sharpened by, imagination.”
— Brian Evenson, author of the Good Night, Sleep Tight

“Jeffrey Thomas’s unique flair for the unspeakable never shines brighter than when he visits the Southeast Asia of his dreams.”
— Cody Goodfellow, author of Vertical

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JEFFREY THOMAS is the author of the dark science fiction series Punktown, which was introduced with the collection Punktown (Ministry of Whimsy Press, 2000) and includes the novels Monstrocity (Prime Books, 2003; Bram Stoker Award finalist), Deadstock (Solaris Books, 2007; John W. Campbell Award finalist), Blue War (Solaris Books, 2008), and The New God (Weird House Press, 2024). His other books include the short story collection The Unnamed Country (Word Horde, 2019), the novel The Exploded Soul (Weird House Press, 2024), and the Hades Trilogy (Weird House Press, 2024). His stories have been reprinted in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII (editor, Karl Edward Wagner), The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror #14 (editors, Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling), and Year’s Best Weird Fiction #1 (editors, Laird Barron and Michael Kelly). Thomas lives in Massachusetts.