In the depths of winter, in the shadows of memory, in the aftermath of transcendence--darkness takes many forms. A father confronts a creature born from buried guilt in the Ontario wilderness. A teenager stands at the water's edge, hearing a boy's voice call from the bridge above. A coastal town unravels after tasting something too beautiful to survive without. An elderly woman sits through a power outage beside the husband she never left, watching their marriage by firelight. These eight stories from Canadian writers explore the landscapes we inhabit when light fails--both the darkness we endure and the darkness we create. From dystopian horrors to quiet domestic reckonings, from folk parables to urgent contemporary drama, The Long Dark maps the territories of grief, obsession, guilt, and the stubborn human insistence on continuing even when we're not sure why. Some darknesses last a single night.

Others stretch across decades. All of them demand we find our way through.