Last Loves

This hardcover omnibus from the creator of 2025’s World Within the World showcases Gfrörer’s inimitable mastery of gothic horror. In Black Is the Color, a wicked mermaid lures a sailor to his doom. A 17th-century sailor abandoned at sea by his shipmates, resigned to his lingering death sentence succumbs to the advances of a cruel and amorous mermaid.

In Laid Waste, a supernaturally strong medieval widow must decide how to use her powers. In a plague-ravaged medieval city, survival is a harsher fate than death. As corpses accumulate around her, Agnes, a young widow possessed of supernatural strength, must weigh her obligations to the dead and dying against her desire to protect what little remains. Will love and kindness persevere amongst the vermin in the putrid miasma at the end of the world?

Vision tells the story of a spinster who escapes the demands of life through a sexual relationship with a haunted mirror. Lust, grief, and the human need for connection are the through lines in this story of a 19th-century woman and her haunted mirror that offers an escape from her frustrated life.

In each of these three stories, Last Loves showcases Gfrörer's thin, careworn lines, and the debased and unnerving depictions of her achingly vulnerable characters, exposing the emotions that boil beneath the surface of everyday life through stories tinged with gothic romance, horror, and the supernatural.