Search Worlds Without End

Maggie and Alex have their problems. their old, drafty house, for one thing. Their stressed-out marriage, for another.

Then one day, uncovering and cleaning the house's original fireplace, they discover a dead blackbird...and an old handwritten diary full of herbal lore.

Maggie takes an interest in the diary. Soon, with the help of her friends Ash, and herbalist,and Old Liz, and old woman with a deep knowledge of ancient ways, Maggie tried to find her way in a world of power and magic. But Maggie's searching has awakened her Dark Sister, a malevolent force that threatens her hold on her family and her sanity.

Fourteen-year-old Caz and her friend Lucy do the Creepy Thing. It's a bizarre version of 'chicken'. They break into houses while folk are asleep, challenging each other to 'do a creepy'. To 'do a creepy' you approach a sleeping person in the dark, in the dead of night, putting your nose one inch away from the sleeper's face for a count of fifteen seconds.

One night, Caz breaks into the house of Sara Metherall, a lonely old woman shunned by the community. Lucy challenges Caz to do the Creepy Thing. Caz rises to the challenge. She creeps, she counts. But just before she completes the count of fifteen the old woman opens her eyes and clamps Caz's wrist with a cold silver bracelet. The next morning the bracelet has disappeared, but left in its place a tattoo. A tattoo that holds a curse. While her life disintegrates around her, Caz has to find a way of lifting that curse. Or returning it to the place it came from...

Tiptree nominated short story first published in Interzone #86, August 1994 and later anthologized in Flying Cups and Saucers: Gender Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy (1998).

It is a color the human eye cannot truly see, a slice of the spectrum imbued with the promise of invisibility. But for Jack Chambers, the son of a scientist renowned as both a genius and a madman, it will lead to places of unknown treachery. As executor of his estranged-father's will, Jack is appointed two ominous tasks: publish Timothy Chambers' bizarre manuscript Invisibility: A Manual of Light, and track down an unknown woman who stands to inherit the substantial estate. Jack's mission leads him to reunite with his half-sister, Louise, now grown into a stunning woman. Bound by a tense attraction, Jack and Louise head to Rome, where a cultlike group pursues the intoxicating secrets of the elusive indigo -- and where Jack perceives its horrid danger only when it's too late.

William is a dissolute book-forger. A talented writer in his own right he would rather scribble poems anonymously for an asian friend (who is becoming increasingly successful as a result), and create forgeries of Jane Austen first editions to sell to gullible collectors. He's not all bad. The money from the forgeries goes straight to a homeless hostel and William's crimes don't really hurt anyone.

And there are reasons William hasn't amounted to more. He did something he was ashamed of when he was a student, he drinks far too much and he can't commit to any relationships. Oh and he sees demons. Shadowy figures at the shoulder of everyone around him (except the woman who runs the hostel, she remains untouched), waiting for a moment's weakness. Or is it just that William can see the suffering of the world?

And then an extraordinary woman, who may just be able to save him from the world's suffering, walks into his life. This is William's own story. But who can believe a master forger?

Willian Heaney is a pseudonym for author Graham Joyce. Memoirs of a Master Forger was also published under Joyce's name as How to Make Friends with Demons.

The stories and novellas gathered here range from wartime England to Leningrad under the siege, from the coal mines of Coventry to the hallucinatory beauty of the Greek islands. Some of the stories ("Gap Sickness," "The Careperson") utilize overtly science fictional premises. Some ("Under the Pylon," "Black Dust") recall the overall ambience of The Tooth Fairy, Graham's unforgettable portrait of adolescent rites of passage. Others, such as "Candia" and "Xenos Beach," are accounts of magical, erotic, and dangerous encounters in exotic ports of call. And some of the stories transcend all traditional categories. One of these is the unforgettable novella, "Leningrad Nights," a story of suffering and survival in a frozen, surreal city ruled by "the blind justice of the Whistling Shell."

Partial Eclipse is a book of dark, disturbing, sometimes beautiful dreams. It is also, as the extraordinary title story tells us, a book about the primal importance of dreaming. For admirers of Graham Joyce's novels, this is an indispensable volume. For those who have yet to discover his work, it is a varied, elegant introduction to one of the singular dreamers of our time.

Table of Contents:

• 7 - Introduction (Partial Eclipse and Other Stories) - essay by Bill Sheehan
• 13 - Partial Eclipse - (2000) - short story
• 29 - Black Dust - (2001) - short story
• 45 - The Apprentice - (1993) - novelette
• 79 - Candia - (2000) - short story
• 95 - The Careperson - (1992) - novelette
• 119 - Gap-Sickness - (1993) - short story
• 131 - Xenos Beach - (2000) - short story
• 149 - Pinkland - (1998) - short story
• 163 - Leningrad Nights - (1999) - novella
• 213 - Under the Pylon - (1992) - short story

Tiptree nominated short story first published in Lisa Tuttle's Crossing the Border: Tales of Erotic Ambiguity (1998). Later collected in Partial Eclipse and Other Stories (2003)

SACRED MYSTERIES

Following the death of his wife, Tom Webster travels to Jerusalem in search of a friend from his college days. But the haunted city, divided by warring religious groups, offers him no refuge from guilt and grief.

As he wanders through the streets and the archaeological sites, a mysterious old woman appears to him, delivering messages that seem beyond comprehension. Then a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls, kept hidden by an elderly innkeeper, appears to offer the key to understanding the woman's pronouncements.

Perhaps the spirit of Mary Magdelene is trying to reveal to Tom the hidden history of the Resurrection. And perhaps the truth is even stranger....

Graham Joyce travels to an enthralling, suspense-charged landscape in this hallucinatory novel of a father's quest to save his daughter -- without destroying himself.

Dan Innes has received shattering news from the British Embassy in Bangkok: his daughter, Charlie, whom he hasn't seen or spoken to in two years, has been imprisoned in a Thai jail for drug smuggling. Angry, terrified, seething with reprimands and questions, Dan leaves for Thailand. But the jail at Chiang Mai marks the beginning of his search rather than the end. Following the faintest of trails up into the lawless, dangerous mountain region near Myanmar, where opium grows abundantly, Dan must retrace Charlie's steps -- and brave the same traps that have swallowed her...on a terrifying mission of self-discovery, blind faith, and salvation.

For twenty years after Tara Martin disappeared from her small English town, her parents and her brother, Peter, have lived in denial of the grim fact that she was gone for good. And then suddenly, on Christmas Day, the doorbell rings at her parents' home and there, disheveled and slightly peculiar looking, Tara stands. It's a miracle, but alarm bells are ringing for Peter. Tara's story just does not add up. And, incredibly, she barely looks a day older than when she vanished.

Winner of the 2003 World Fantasy Award Graham Joyce chronicles a haunting, war-torn terrain in this heartrending novel of one family's quest to begin again -- without forgetting the lives they left behind.

The Facts of Life

Set in Coventry, England, during and immediately after World War II, The Facts of Life revolves around the early years of Frank Arthur Vine, the illegitimate son of young, free-spirited Cassie and an American GI. Because Cassie is too unreliable and unstable to act as his proper guardian -- and is prone to "blue" periods in which she wanders off without warning or recollection -- Frank is brought up in the care of his strong-willed, stout-drinking grandmother, Martha Vine, who has, among other homemaking talents, the untoward ability to communicate with the dead.

So begins the first decade of Frank's life, one in which ghosts have a place at the table and divine order dictates the outcome of his days. Along the way there are brief stays with each of his six eccentric aunts, visits to the local mortuary, and voices inside of his own head that suggest that he, too, has the gift of supernatural intuition. An affecting tale of family and history, war and peace, love and madness, The Facts of Life will leave readers spellbound with its resounding expression of magic realism.

England, 1966: Everything Fern Cullen knows she's learned from Mammy -- and none of it's conventional. Taught midwifery at an early age, Fern becomes Mammy's trusted assistant in a quaint rural village and learns through experience that secrets are precious, passion is dangerous, and people should mind their own business.

But when one of Mammy's patients allegedly dies from an induced abortion, the town rallies against her. As Fern struggles to save Mammy's good name, she finds communion with a bunch of hippies living at a nearby estate...where she uncovers a legacy spotted with magic -- one that transforms her forever.

Award-winning novelist and cult favorite Graham Joyce transports readers to a mysterious world of isolation and fear with a hypnotically dark story about a young couple trapped by an avalanche in the remote French Pyrenees... a daring and powerful novel about love, loss, and rebirth.

In the French Pyrenees, a young married couple is buried under a flash avalanche while skiing. Miraculously, Jake and Zoe dig their way out from under the snow-only to discover the world they knew has been overtaken by an eerie and absolute silence. Their hotel is devoid of another living soul. Cell phones and land lines are cut off. An evacuation as sudden and thorough as this leaves Jake and Zoe to face a terrifying situation alone. They are trapped by the storm, completely isolated, with another catastrophic avalanche threatening to bury them alive... again. And as the couple begin to witness unsettling events neither one can ignore, they are forced to confront a frightening truth about the silent land they now inhabit.

Award-winning author Graham Joyce has written a mysterious masterpiece, a tour de force that will thrill fans of Peter Straub and the hit television show Lost.

Of those writers who stoically refuse to trudge along horror fiction's well-worn path, Joyce, with British Fantasy Awards to his credit for Requiem and The Tooth Fairy, has perhaps had the most success. And now we can add to that list The Stormwatcher... For this remarkable, fine and almost unclassifiable book is a complete breath of fresh air, even considering his past achievements.

The story is simply (!) the interaction of a group of somewhat dysfunctional friends during a two-week holiday in a lonely cottage in the Dordogne region of France. The group comprises James and his French wife, Sabine, and their two young daughters - Beth and the confused Jessie -plus James's one-time colleague Matt and his wife, Chrissie ... and, just to make things interesting, the sultry Rachel, another work-chum of James and one with whom he has shared considerably more than the occasional business meeting. As the story progresses we discover that one of the party - an unnamed instructor whose identity is kept hidden until the end of the book - is engaged in secret lessons with the impressionable Jessie, for reasons not immediately clear. Meanwhile, courtesy of a nicely-realized series of tense-changed flashbacks, we learn more of the instructor's background and an almost symbiotic relationship in which both she and her lover speak only lies to each other.

All the time, Jessie grows more intense and confused while, around her, other members of the party grow, by turn, increasingly belligerent or subservient, manipulative or malleable, paranoid or confident. And underpinning the sequence of events is an intense feeling of primal sensuality evoked both by the environment and an approaching storm (its progress cleverly interjected into the proceedings by a series of half-page chapters explaining meteorological behaviour) and by the behaviour of the adults as their feelings for each other - and their protectiveness and confusion at the antics of and comments from young Jessie - swirl and eddy.

Sam and his friends are like any normal gang of normal young boys. Roaming wild around the outskirts of their car-factory town. Daring adults to challenge their freedom.

Until the day Sam wakes to find the Tooth Fairy sitting on the edge of his bed. Not the benign figure of childhood myth, but an enigmatic presence that both torments and seduces him, changing his life forever.

David, a college student, takes a summer job at a run-down family resort in a dying English resort town. This is against the wishes of his family... because it was at this resort where David's biological father disappeared fifteen years earlier. But something undeniable has called David there.

A deeper otherworldliness lies beneath the surface of what we see. The characters have a suspicious edge to them... David is haunted by eerie visions of a mysterious man carrying a rope, walking hand-in-hand with a small child... and the resort is under siege by a plague of ladybugs. Something different is happening in this town.

When David gets embroiled in a fiercely torrid love triangle, the stakes turn more and more menacing. And through it all, David feels as though he is getting closer to the secrets of his own past.