Former US tunnel rat Richard Trenor - disfigured in the war, but left with strange gifts as a result - is summoned back to Vietnam by Thanh, the son of an old friend, to find the man who killed Thanh's eight-year-old sister. Trenor's quest for justice will not only cause him to cross paths with two other Americans - one a cold-blooded assassin, the other a bloodthirsty madman - but also a tormented ghost, and an infestation of living evil. Spanning fifty years, The American is a gritty crime thriller laced with the supernatural, set in a vividly rendered Vietnam. This bracing supernatural tale easily pulls readers into its dark, disturbing mystery. - Publishers Weekly The American rivals Ellis and Barker in terms of sheer darkness. Thomas combines horror and thriller to merciless effect. - Laird Barron, author of Swift to Chase With his unerring eye for the disturbing and horrific, Thomas sinks us into a Vietnam few have ever seen. A haunting page-turner about the power of friendship, debts owed, and the countless wounds of war. A brutal, riveting read. - Erica Ferencik, bestselling author of The River at Night and Into the Jungle Peter Straub's Koko meets Takashi Miike's Ichi the Killer in this relentless plunge into darkness from Bram Stoker Award finalist Jeffrey Thomas. Refreshingly ordinary, fallible heroes, wounded physically and spiritually, work to solve a heartbreaking mystery rooted deep in the harrowing and gruesome underworld of human trafficking. Aided by a skin-crawling manifestation of the supernatural, their efforts lead them toward a figure chillingly banal in his unrepentant cruelty, and a bittersweet ending you'll never see coming. - Mike Allen, World Fantasy Award-nominated author of Unseaming and Aftermath of an Industrial Accident The American is a deep, dark plunge into transglobal post-colonial Late Capitalism paranoia, juxtaposing moral horror with its supernatural effects in ways that crack the reader's third eye open - gradually, terribly, implacably. It's a ghost story about history, layers folding over layers of willing, knowing self-pollution, desire melding into hunger melding into horror; the slime we leave behind ourselves as we slug-trail around this awful world, finding the places where we can debase ourselves until we disappear. I started reading and couldn't stop, no matter how much I wanted to. - Gemma Files, author of Experimental Film An exquisitely-written, compulsively-readable dark thriller steeped in Vietnamese culture with eerie supernatural overtones. The characters- villains with a touch of humanity, heroes with more than a hint of darkness -are haunted by ghosts of the past, both literal and metaphorical. This is one of the best books I've read in years, and you'd be a fool to miss it. - Tim Waggoner, Bram Stoker Award-winning author Jeffrey Thomas is the creator of the dark science fiction setting Punktown, in which many of his stories take place. His short story collection The Unnamed Country is also inspired by his many visits to Vietnam. His novel Monstrocity was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award, and his novel Deadstock a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award. Thomas' stories have been selected for inclusion 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 (editor, Laird Barron).