“Distorted, but reflecting something devastatingly real.”
— Elisabeth Blair, author of because God loves the wasp
AVAILABLE JUNE 21, 2026 AT YOUR LOCAL INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE, AMAZON.COM, OR BARNESANDNOBLE.COM.
Please support independent booksellers whenever possible! Independent booksellers that stock Urbantasm include:
Totem Books (Flint, MI)
Eventually, everything comes to an end.
Even endings.
A child rescues a fallen moon and restores it to the sky.
A shapeshifting demon banker is almost as passionate about murdering children as about foreclosing on houses.
An impoverished young woman undertakes an epic quest beyond the moon and through the center of the sun.
This collection of forty-eight tales – violent, tender, humorous, and strange – sings the mythology of the living city of Akawe, Michigan.
Even today, Akawe, the setting of Urbantasm, a sprawling magical teen-noir series praised as “a magical epic” by New York Times bestselling author Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, is lush with stories to tell.
Whether you’re visiting Akawe for the first time, or looking to return after finishing Urbantasm, these unseelie stories greet you with a cup of strong coffee, a trace of soot in the air, and the wail of trains bringing in the parts for cars.
Welcome to Akawe.
Book Details
Title: Unseelie Stories from a Living City
Subtitle/Series Positioning: An Urbantasm Appendix
Author: Connor Coyne
Publisher: Gothic Funk Press
Publication Date: June 21, 2026
Genre: Literary Speculative Fiction / Dark Fantasy / Dark Fairy Tales / Rust Belt Gothic
Format: Trade Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-956722-17-8
Price: $16 US
Website: urbantasm.com / connorcoyne.com
Praise
“These casually dark, wantonly epic stories are shifty: Plots pivot from inevitable to avoidable. Exile shifts characters’ perspectives. Consequence, luck, or mundanity interrupt paths of terrible potential. A bit of magic or a slippery phrase collapses the straightforward into an unresolved mystery. And these shifts often repeat, generating intricate chains of unstable consequence that no one — not the devil, nor the many good and flawed heroes, nor even entropy or time itself — truly controls. Holding the collection together is a macabre-yet-gentle, slapstick humour that renders these characters’ lives as if through a funhouse mirror—distorted, but reflecting something devastatingly real.”
— Elisabeth Blair, author of because God loves the wasp
“Someone once told me that Flint was guilty of ‘too much reality.’ The realism of the place can be overwhelming. So it makes sense to capture the essence of the Vehicle City in a counterintuitive way. That’s just what Connor Coyne skillfully does with this collection of engaging, compelling, cutting-edge fairy tales that tell the story of a place where things happen that can be hard to believe.”
— Gordon Young, author of Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City
“This book has a fantastic energy about it, veering from stylistic to realistic to playful to scary. You never know what you’re going to get in the next shard of creativity as one vignette shifts to the next. Extremely ambitious and uniquely realized. I really dig this! A flea and a fly concocting ‘shine and miscreants with ill intent chasing a girl’s boyfriend co-exist in the same pages with equal ease … that is something I could never have predicted.”
— Paul Counelis, author of 11:59 and Counting: Horror Hosting in the 21st Century
Launch Event
What: Book launch for Unseelie Stories from a Living City
Who: Connor Coyne / Gothic Funk Press
When: Saturday, June 27, 2026, 2-4 PM
Where: Totem Books, 620 W. Court St., Flint, MI
Details: Reading, signing, books for sale, light refreshments, and celebration of dark fairy tales from Akawe, Michigan. Free and open to the public.
About the Author
Connor Coyne (he/him) is a writer living and working in Flint, Michigan.
His published work includes the award-winning serial novel Urbantasm, the novella Hollywood (Lethe Press, 2024), the novels Shattering Glass and Hungry Rats, the Impure Lichigan sword-and-sorcery serials, and Atlas, a collection of short stories. His work has also been featured in Vox.com, Belt Magazine, and elsewhere.
Coyne is the director of the Flint-based Gothic Funk Press and teaches writing to youth and adults at the Gloria Coles Flint Public Library and the Flint Institute of Arts. Coyne is a graduate of the University of Chicago and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the New School. Today, he lives with his wife and two daughters in Flint’s College Cultural Neighborhood, less than a mile from the house where he grew up.
About Gothic Funk Press
Gothic Funk Press is a Flint-based small press dedicated to strange, ambitious, locally-rooted, and genre-crossing literature. Through fiction, workshops, events, and community engagement, Gothic Funk Press explores the intersections of Gothic imagination, urban life, speculative fiction, folklore, music, memory, and the creative energies of Flint and the American Midwest.
Sample
EVERYONE LOVES THE MOON
One day, a young boy was walking through his neighborhood in the city after a heavy rain.
It was a heavy-lidded twilight on a fine night in May, when all the grass and leaves are fresh-sprung and velvet soft, and the purple dusk comes on thick and slow. Although it had been raining all day, the clouds had now cleared and the stars slowly faded in overhead.
The boy, striding down the sidewalk, came to a spot where a massive and deep puddle lay. Looking into the black mirror surface, he made out the reflection of the moon, crescent and hungry.
Oh no! the boy thought in terror. The moon has fallen out of the sky and landed in this puddle. It is so sad, so sad… because everyone loves the moon!
Then a spirit of resolve filled him. He ran home as quickly as he could and fetched a yellow plastic bucket. He ran back to the huge puddle and scooped up as much water as the bucket would hold. Holding the bucket tightly, he flung the water into the air. It hung there for the sliver of a second, then crashed down upon his head, soaking him from top to toes in inky, muddy water.
But the boy smiled as he looked up into the sky, for he saw that he had restored the moon to its proper place in the heavens. Now it would be safe for eons into the future.
That boy grew up and learned more about the moon, as well as the main sequence and Type I supernovas and standard candles and the cosmological constant and eventually he went to work at Suarez Planetarium in Akawe.