One of the most subtle and powerful writers of dark fiction - a unique voice.

When a writer with a voice as good as Richard Christian Matheson's tells you something, you have no choice but to listen. In THE RITUAL OF ILLUSION the voices are legion, and the gaps between their testimonies drag us closer to understanding the darkly beating heart of all our, ephemeral, transfixing dreams. Dark, subtle, horrifically funny.

Love and death are very similar. They're the times in your life when you most want to believe in magic, when you yearn for some symbolic act or retrospective edit that can change the world you find yourself in.

You haven't seen untidiness until you've seen a room where gravity has failed twice in different directions.

Death is real. Death changes things. Everything else is filler, merely a message from our sponsor.

Everything you've done, everything you've seen, everything you've become, remains. You never can go back, only forward, and if you don't bring the whole of yourself with you, you'll never see the sun again.

It's simply the way things are when people come together out of hurt rather than happiness. When you try to use people as band-aids you merely reinfect the wound, and every moment you spend with them is like a speck of glass working itself deeper into your flesh.