FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Flint Author Connor Coyne launches Unseelie Stories from a Living City, a new collection of dark fairy tales from the world of Urbantasm
Book launch event to be held Saturday, June 27, 2–4 PM, at Totem Books in Flint
FLINT, MICHIGAN. Gothic Funk Press will publish Unseelie Stories from a Living City, a new collection of forty-eight dark fairy tales, folktales, jokes, riddles, curses, and urban legends by Flint author Connor Coyne, on June 21, 2026.
Set in Akawe, Michigan – the haunted auto town at the heart of Coyne’s four-volume Urbantasm series – Unseelie Stories from a Living City can be read as either a stand-alone collection or as an appendix to the larger Urbantasm saga.
The book gathers curious tales from across the living city: a child rescues the fallen moon from a puddle, a demon banker forecloses on houses, and a failed landlord makes a bargain with a maggot who subcontracts for the devil.
Violent, tender, humorous, and strange, these stories reimagine fairy and folktale traditions through the landscape of a Rust Belt city: rail crossings, shuttered schools, vacant lots, struggling parishes, crumbling houses, factories, diners, creeks, expressways, and neighborhoods full of memory.
Coyne will celebrate the publication with a launch event at Totem Books, 620 W. Court St., Flint, MI, on Saturday, June 27, from 2–4 PM. The afternoon will include a reading, book signing, light refreshments, and a celebration of the folklore of Akawe.
Canadian-American poet Elisabeth Blair, celebrated author of because God loves the wasp, praises Unseelie Stories for a “macabre-yet-gentle, slapstick humour that renders these characters’ lives as if through a funhouse mirror – distorted, but reflecting something devastatingly real.”
Flint author, musician, and horror connoisseur Paul Counelis claims that Unseelie Stories “has a fantastic energy about it, veering from stylistic to realistic to playful to scary.”
“People tell stories about the things they care about,” Coyne explains. “These are the stories, some of them true, others a bit sideways to the facts, that animate the people of Akawe,” the fictitious setting of the Urbantasm saga.
Urbantasm has been described as a sprawling magical teen-noir saga inspired by Coyne’s experiences growing up in Flint.
Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, New York Times bestselling author of What the Eyes Don’t See, praised the series as “a magical epic.”
Urbantasm, published in four volumes between 2018 and 2022, won numerous awards including the 2019 Indie Book Awards for Young New Adult Fiction and the Kindle Book Awards for Young Adult Fiction in 2019, 2020, and 2022, and was a finalist of the Wishing Shelf Book Awards and the American Fiction Awards.
Readers do not need to have read Urbantasm to enjoy Unseelie Stories from a Living City, but returning readers will recognize Akawe speaking in a different voice: not as a novel of adolescence and mystery, but as a citywide archive of folklore, dreams, gossip, warnings, and ghostly transmission.
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
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 projects, 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 Excerpt
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.