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Like an elegantly chilling postscript to The Metamorphosis, this classic of postwar Japanese literature describes a bizarre physical transformation that exposes the duplicities of an entire world. The narrator is a scientist hideously deformed in a laboratory accident–a man who has lost his face and, with it, his connection to other people. Even his wife is now repulsed by him.

His only entry back into the world is to create a mask so perfect as to be undetectable. But soon he finds that such a mask is more than a disguise: it is an alternate self–a self that is capable of anything. A remorseless meditation on nature, identity and the social contract, The Face of Another is an intellectual horror story of the highest order.

The Kappa is a creature from Japanese folklore described as a scaly, child-sized being with a face like a tiger and a sharp, pointed beak. In the hands of Ryunosuke Akutagawa, one man's journey to Kappaland becomes the vehicle for a critique of Japanese life and customs in the tradition of Swift and Kafka. A perfectly formed gem from the pen of one of Japan's most important modern writers, this tale is at once a fable, a comedy, and a brilliant satire.

Amado's tale is of a woman's unlikely path to happiness. It is a vast panorama of life in the town of Salvador, Bahia. The novel opens with the sudden death of Dona Flor's husband, Vadinho, who collapses in the midst of Carnival celebrations. He is dancing a samba in the streets when his heart gives out, a surprise to all as Vadinho had spent his entire life gambling, partying and drinking with no hint of problems. His nights on the town and his two-timing had been supported by sponging off Dona Flor, the owner of a successful cooking school and his demands for money had been a constant worry and cause of sleepless nights for her. The women of the town thought she was well rid of him. But after Vadinho's death, he remained the love of her life and she missed his seductiveness. He was irresistible, and his absence was, for Dona Flor, worse than the long nights when she waited for him to come home.

After a period of mourning, Dona Flor attracts another admirer, a local pharmacist, Teodoro. Unlike Vadinho he is a pillar of respectability, kind and considerate. Dona Flor accepts his proposal. While her new husband lacks the passionate sensuality of Vadinho, he compensates by providing a life free of worry. But, on the first anniversary of her marriage, Vadinho returns. He is now a ghost, but has lost none of his old ways. His activities create commotion everywhere, from Dona Flor's marriage bed to the local nightspots. She is torn between her attraction to the ghost and her desire to continue as the faithful wife of Teodoro, who has no idea what is going on.

Cybelle teaches English in a small city in Japan. Her contract is up for renewal, her mother is begging her to come back to Canada, and she is not sure where she belongs anymore. She faces ostracism and fear daily, but she loves her job, despite its increasing difficulties. She vows to do her best - even when her sleep, appetite, and life in general start to get weird, and conforming to the rules that once helped her becomes a struggle.

Meanwhile, yokai feast and cavort around Osaka and Kyoto as the barrier between their world and the human world thins. Zaniel spends his nights walking the dream world and serving his demon "bodyguard," Akki. But there is a new yokai on the scene, and it has gotten on Akki's bad side. When Cybelle gets caught up in the supernatural clash, she has to figure out what is real and, more importantly, what she really wants... before her life spirals out of control altogether.

A fifteen-year-old teenager is the backbone of her small Midwestern family, budgeting the household finances and raising her younger brother while her mom, a talented artist, weaves beautiful tapestries. For six years, it's been just the three of them--her mom has brought home guests at times, but none have ever stayed.

Yet when her mom brings home a six-foot tall crane with a menacing air, the girl is powerless to prevent her mom letting the intruder into her heart, and her children's lives. Utterly enchanted and numb to his sharp edges, her mom abandons the world around her to weave the masterpiece the crane demands.

The year is 1919.

The McNaughton Corporation is the pinnacle of American industry. They built the guns that won the Great War before it even began. They built the airships that tie the world together. And, above all, they built Evesden-a shining metropolis, the best that the world has to offer.

But something is rotten at the heart of the city. Deep underground, a trolley car pulls into a station with eleven dead bodies inside. Four minutes before, the victims were seen boarding at the previous station. Eleven men butchered by hand in the blink of an eye. All are dead. And all are union.

Now, one man, Cyril Hayes, must fix this. There is a dark secret behind the inventions of McNaughton and with a war brewing between the executives and the workers, the truth must be discovered before the whole city burns. Caught between the union and the company, between the police and the victims, Hayes must uncover the mystery before it kills him.

Duellists in a decadent urban dream. Lost creatures in a bizarre post-apocalypse. Fables lingering into almost-modern worlds. From hallucinatory surrealism to human dramas at the fuzzy edges of reality, these stories and poems by the author of The Etched City are by turns exuberant, poignant, darkly funny and delightfully deranged, all showcasing the inventive magic of an acclaimed literary fantasist. Includes Aurealis Award winner The Heart of a Mouse and two stories in the world of The Etched City, one previously unpublished.

Gwynn and Raule are rebels on the run, with little in common except being on the losing side of a hard-fought war. Gwynn is a gunslinger from the north, a loner, a survivor... a killer. Raule is a wandering surgeon, a healer who still believes in just - and lost - causes. Bound by a desire to escape the ghosts of the past, together they flee to the teeming city of Ashamoil, where Raule plies her trade among the desperate and destitute, and Gwynn becomes bodyguard and assassin for the household of a corrupt magnate. There, in the saving and taking of lives, they find themselves immersed in a world where art infects life, dream and waking fuse, and splendid and frightening miracles begin to bloom...

When Sam Gregory wakes up to find he has turned into a big cockroach, he is understandably dismayed. Luckily, the condition appears to be a little contagious.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Jorge Luis Borges has been called the greatest Spanish-language writer of our century. Now for the first time in English, all of Borges' dazzling fictions are gathered into a single volume, brilliantly translated by Andrew Hurley. From his 1935 debut with The Universal History of Iniquity, through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, these enigmatic, elaborate, imaginative inventions display Borges' talent for turning fiction on its head by playing with form and genre and toying with language. Together these incomparable works comprise the perfect one-volume compendium for all those who have long loved Borges, and a superb introduction to the master's work for those who have yet to discover this singular genius.

Table of Contents:

• A Universal History of Iniquity - (1972) - collection by Jorge Luís Borges (trans. of Historia universal de la infamia 1935)
• Fictions - (1962) - collection by Jorge Luís Borges (trans. of Ficciones 1944)
• The Aleph and Other Stories, 1933-1969 - (1970) - collection by Jorge Luís Borges (trans. of El Aleph 1949)
• The Maker - (1998) - collection by Jorge Luís Borges (trans. of El Hacedor 1960)
• In Praise of Darkness - (1974) - collection by Jorge Luís Borges (trans. of Elogio de la Sombra 1969)
• Brodie's Report - (1971) - collection by Jorge Luís Borges (trans. of El informe de Brodie 1970)
• The Book of Sand - (1977) - collection by Jorge Luís Borges (trans. of El libro de arena 1975)
• Shakespeare's Memory - (1983) - collection by Jorge Luís Borges (trans. of Veinticinco de Agosto de 1983 y otros cuentos)

Award-winning author Kevin Brockmeier delivers a spellbinding, supernatural tale of love, memories, and human connection. All residents of the City have recently died, and they will remain in the City only as long as someone still living on Earth remembers them. On Earth, however, the population has been devastated by a terrible pandemic. Laura Byrd, isolated at an Antarctic research station, may be the only person to have survived the pandemic. But she's running out of time and supplies, and her memories are fading.

Perhaps no writer of the early 20th century had a better knowledge of London than Thomas Burke (1886-1945), and his collection Night-Pieces (1935) contains eighteen of his most haunting tales of that immense city's dark back alleys, shadowy courts, and mysterious houses. In Burke's London, anything might happen. You might turn round a corner and find yourself back in your childhood. A casual drink with a stranger might end with you - quite literally - losing your head. That pale, slightly sinister-looking man sitting across the restaurant might be a murdered corpse, returned from the dead. And those footsteps you hear following you as you walk along a foggy street, faintly lit by gaslight... well, let's just say you had better not look behind you...

A groundbreaking and undeservedly neglected volume, Night-Pieces contains a wide variety of weird and outré tales, ranging from stories of crime and murder to tales of ghosts, zombies, and the supernatural.

Contents:

• Events at Wayless-Wagtail - (1935) - shortfiction
• Father and Son - (1935) - shortfiction
• Funspot - (1935) - shortfiction
• Jack Wapping - (1935) - shortfiction
• Johnson Looked Back - (1935) - short story
• Miracle in Suburbia - (1935) - shortfiction
• Murder Under the Crooked Spire - (1935) - shortfiction
• One Hundred Pounds - (1935) - shortfiction
• The Black Courtyard - (1935) - short story
• The Gracious Ghosts - (1935) - shortfiction
• The Hollow Man - (1933) - short story
• The Horrible God - (1934) - short story
• The Lonely Inn - (1935) - short story
• The Man Who Lost His Head - (1935) - short story
• The Watcher - (1935) - shortfiction
• Two Gentlemen - (1935) - shortfiction
• Uncle Exekiel's Long Sight - (1935) - shortfiction
• Yesterday Street - (1935) - short story

Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), the distinguished British-born Surrealist painter who made her home in Mexico City, was also a writer of extraordinary imagination and charm, and The Hearing Trumpet is perhaps her best loved book. It tells the story of 92-year-old Marian Leatherby, who is given the gift of a hearing trumpet only to discover that her family has been plotting to have her committed to an institution. But this is an institution where the buildings are shaped like birthday cakes and igloos, where the Winking Abbess and the Queen Bee reign, and where the gateway to the underworld is wide open. It is also the scene of a mysterious murder. Occult twin to Alice in Wonderland, The Hearing Trumpet is a classic of fantastic literature that has been translated and celebrated throughout the world.

Have you ever loved a magical book above all others? Have you ever wished the magic were real? Welcome to The Land of Laughs. A novel about how terrifying that would be.

Schoolteacher Thomas Abbey, unsure son of a film star, doesn't know who he is or what he wants--in life, in love, or in his relationship with the strange and intense Saxony Gardner. What he knows is that in his whole life nothing has touched him so deeply as the novels of Marshall France, a reclusive author of fabulous children's tales who died at forty-four.

Now Thomas and Saxony have come to France's hometown, the dreamy Midwestern town of Galen, Missouri, to write France's biography. Warned in advance that France's family may oppose them, they're surprised to find France's daughter warmly welcoming instead. But slowly they begin to see that something fantastic and horrible is happening. The magic of Marshall France has extended far beyond the printed page... leaving them with a terrifying task to undertake.

Fetter was raised to kill, honed as a knife to cut down his sainted father. This gave him plenty to talk about in therapy.

He walked among invisible powers: devils and anti-gods that mock the mortal form. He learned a lethal catechism, lost his shadow, and gained a habit for secrecy. After a blood-soaked childhood, Fetter escaped his rural hometown for the big city, and fell into a broader world where divine destinies are a dime a dozen.

Everything in Luriat is more than it seems. Group therapy is recruitment for a revolutionary cadre. Junk email hints at the arrival of a god. Every door is laden with potential, and once closed may never open again. The city is scattered with Bright Doors, looming portals through which a cold wind blows. In this unknowable metropolis, Fetter will discover what kind of man he is, and his discovery will rewrite the world.

A living form of money results in the unraveling of the world.

"The bank is there to save and lend."
"Workers work and customers spend."

Piranesi's house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house.

There is one other person in the house-a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.

John Collier's edgy, sardonic tales are works of rare wit, curious insight, and scary implication. They stand out as one of the pinnacles in the critically neglected but perennially popular tradition of weird writing that includes E.T.A. Hoffmann and Charles Dickens as well as more recent masters like Jorge Luis Borges and Roald Dahl. With a cast of characters that ranges from man-eating flora to disgruntled devils and suburban salarymen (not that it's always easy to tell one from another), Collier's dazzling stories explore the implacable logic of lunacy, revealing a surreal landscape whose unstable surface is depth-charged with surprise.

Dadaoism is the first anthology from Chômu Press. Editors Justin Isis and Quentin S. Crisp have selected twenty-six novellas, short stories and poems setting out an aesthetic manifesto of rich and stimulating prose style, explosively unhindered imagination and anarchic experimentation.

In their submissions guidelines, they challenged would-be contributors as follows: "We aspire to edit and compile an anthology that will be the literary and psychic equivalent of a tour around the edges of a dying galaxy in a spectacularly malfunctioning space vehicle." Please "take your protein pills and put your helmet on"; this is not easy reading. Expect views of some fantastic literary nebulae, and encounters with word-form singularities.

From Reggie Oliver's 'Portrait of a Chair', in which consciousness is explored from the point of view of furniture, to John Cairns' 'Instance', a nano-second by nano-second account of a high-speed telepathic conversation, to Julie Sokolow's 'The Lobster Kaleidoscope' in which naïve wordplay acts as a foundation for existentialist philosophy in a story of inter-species love; from those such as Michael Cisco, with growing followings, to unexpected new voices such as Katherine Khorey, Dadaoism presents a mystery tour of the literary imagination to demonstrate that outside of exhausted mainstream realism and uninspired genre tropes, contemporary English-language writing is thriving and creatively vital.

Contents:

• 1 'Portrait of a Chair', by Reggie Oliver
• 2 'Autumn Jewel', by Katherine Khorey
• 3 'Visiting Maze', by Michael Cisco
• 4 'The Houses Among the Trees', by Colin Insole
• 5 'Affection 45′, by Brendan Connell
• 6 'M-Funk Vs. Tha Futuregions of Inverse Funkativity', by Justin Isis
• 7 'Spirit and Corpus', by Yarrow Paisley
• 8 'Timelines', by Nina Allan
• 9 'Jimmy Breaks up with His Imaginary Girlfriend', by Jimmy Grist
• 10 'Body Poem', by Peter Gilbert
• 11 'Testing Spark', by Daniel Mills
• 12 'Noises', by Joe Simpson Walker
• 13 'Romance, with Mice', by Sonia Orin Lyris
• 14 'Grief (The Autobiography of a Tarantula)', by Jesse Kennedy
• 15 'Orange Cuts', by Paul Jessup
• 16 'Instance', by John Cairns
• 17 'Kago Ai', by Ralph Doege
• 18 'Fighting Back', by Rhys Hughes
• 19 'Nowhere Room', by Kristine Ong Muslim
• 20 'Koda Kumi', a Justin Isis re-mix of 'Italiannetto' by Quentin S. Crisp
• 21 'The Lobster Kaleidoscope', by Julie Sokolow
• 22 'The Eaten Boy', by Nick Jackson
• 23 'Poppies', by Megan Lee Beals
• 24 'Abra Raven', by D.F. Lewis
• 25 'Pissing in Barbican Lake', by Jeremy Reed
• 26 'Rock 'n' Roll Suicides', by Jeremy Reed

In the fictional Chinese town of Yong'an, human beings live alongside spirits and monsters, some of which are almost indistinguishable from people. Told in the form of a bestiary, each chapter of Strange Beasts introduces us to a new creature - from the Sacrificial Beasts, who can't seem to stop dying, to the Besotted Beasts, an artificial breed engineered by scientists to be as loveable as possible. The narrator, an amateur cryptozoologist, is on a mission to track down each breed in turn, but in the process discovers that she might not be as human as she thought.

This novel is a revised edition of A Glass of Darkness (1956). It originally appeared in Satellite Science Fiction, December 1956. It was included in Ace Double D-249 (1957).

Yielding to a compulsion he can't explain, Ted Barton interrupts his vacation in order to visit the town of his birth, Millgate, Virginia. But upon entering the sleepy, isolated little hamlet, Ted is distraught to find that the place bears no resemblance to the one he left behind-and never did. He also discovers that in this Millgate Ted Barton died of scarlet fever when he was nine years old. Perhaps even more troubling is the fact that it is literally impossible to escape. Unable to leave, Ted struggles to find the reason for such disturbing incongruities, but before long, he finds himself in the midst of a struggle between good and evil that stretches far beyond the confines of the valley.

Winner of both the Hugo and John W. Campbell awards for best novel, widely regarded as the premiere science fiction writer of his day, and the object of cult-like adoration from his legions of fans, Philip K. Dick has come to be seen in a literary light that defies classification in much the same way as Borges and Calvino. With breathtaking insight, he utilizes vividly unfamiliar worlds to evoke the hauntingly and hilariously familiar in our society and ourselves.

When Liz Drake's best friend vanishes, nothing can stop her nightmares. Driven by the certainty he needs her help, she crosses a continent to search for him. She finds Blake comatose in a Vancouver hospital, victim of a mysterious accident that claimed his lover's life - in her dreams he drowns.

Blake's new circle of artists and mystics draws her in, but all of them are lying or keeping dangerous secrets. Soon nightmare creatures stalk the waking city, and Liz can't fight a dream from the daylight world: to rescue Blake she must brave the darkest depths of the Dreamlands.

Even the attempt could kill her, or leave her mind trapped or broken. And if she succeeds, she must face the monstrous Yellow King, whose slave Blake is on the verge of becoming forever.

"Julia Elliott's magical debut collection, The Wilds, brings together some of the most original, hilarious, and mind-bending stories written in the last two decades. She journeys deep into mythic terrains with an explorer's courage and a savant's wit, and the reports she sends back from imagination's hinterlands are charged with a vernacular that crackles with insight. Angela Carter, Kelly Link, and Karen Russell are similar visionaries in the short story form, but Elliott is very much her own irrepressible voice — and it's one well worth heeding. The Wilds is simply a milestone achievement."

— Bradford Morrow, author of The Uninnocent

Our Ecstatic Days begins as the memoir of a young mother desperate to forget a single act, committed out of love and fear, that has changed forever the world around her.

In the waning days of summer, a lake appears, almost overnight, in the middle of Los Angeles. In an instant of either madness or revelation, convinced that the lake means to take her small son from her, Kristin becomes determined to stop it. Three thousand miles away, on the eve of a momentous event, another young woman - with a bond to Kristin that she can't even know - meets a mysterious figure who announces in the dark, "The Age of Chaos is here."

Against a forbidden landscape that shimmers with destiny and yearning, Our Ecstatic Days finally takes place on the terrain of a defiant heart. Human connections multiply into astonishing twists of fate - by which the wrongs of an obsolete century may be set right - and parallel lives spin faster toward the possibility that they will once again unite, electrifying a vision of the century to come.

In the final seconds of the old millennium, 1,999 women and children march off the edge of a cliff in Northern California, urged on by a cult of silent men in white robes. Kristin was meant to be the two-thousandth to fall. But when at the last moment she flees, she exchanges one dark destiny for a future that will unravel the present.

Answering a cryptic personals ad for a woman "at the end of her rope," Kristin finds temporary haven in the Hollywood Hills with an older, unnamed man as obsessed as he is spiritually ravaged. In a locked room at the bottom of his house, he labors over his life's work: a massive blue calendar the size of a tsunami that measures modern time by the events of chaos and pinpoints the true beginning of the new millenium as not midnight December 31, 1999, but the early hours of one May morning in 1968. This calendar is shot through with the threads of other lives-those searching for a small measure of redemption and an answer to the question, "What's missing from the world?"

From a ritual sacrifice in the name of salvation to a ritual sacrifice in the name of pleasure, from an ancient haunted Celtic tower in Brittany to the revolving memory hotels of Tokyo, from a cinematic hoax in Manhattan that costs five women their lives to a mysterious bloodstained set of coordinates tacked to the wall of an abandoned San Francisco penthouse, The Sea Came at Midnight is a breathtaking literary dance of fate and coincidence. And, unknown even to her, at the center of that dance is the seventeen-year-old.

Jasper Fforde's first stand-alone novel - full of the imagination, wit and intelligence that has made Fforde a number one best seller.

Every Winter, the human population hibernates.

During those bitterly cold four months, the nation is a snow-draped landscape of desolate loneliness and devoid of human activity.

Well, not quite.

Your name is Charlie Worthing, and it's your first season with the Winter Consuls, the committed but mildly unhinged group of misfits who are responsible for ensuring the hibernatory safe passage of the sleeping masses.

You are investigating an outbreak of viral dreams which you dismiss as nonsense - nothing more than a quirky artefact born of the sleeping mind.

When the dreams start to kill people, it's unsettling.

When you get the dreams too, it's weird.

When they start to come true, you begin to doubt your sanity.

But teasing truth from Winter is never easy: You have to avoid the Villains and their penchant for murder, kidnapping and stamp collecting, ensure you aren't eaten by Nightwalkers, whose thirst for human flesh can be satisfied only by comfort food, and sidestep the increasingly less-than-mythical WinterVolk.

But so long as you remember to wrap up warmly, you'll be fine.

England, 2022. There are 1.2 million human-size rabbits living in the UK. They can walk, talk, drive cars, and they like to read Voltaire, the result of an Inexplicable Anthropomorphizing Event fifty-five years before.

A family of rabbits is about to move into Much Hemlock, a cozy little village in Middle England where life revolves around summer fetes, jam making, gossipy corner stores, and the oh-so-important Best Kept Village awards.

No sooner have the rabbits arrived than the villagers decide they must depart, citing their propensity to burrow and breed, and their shameless levels of veganism. But Mrs Constance Rabbit is made of sterner stuff, and her and her family decide they are to stay. Unusually, their neighbors--longtime resident Peter Knox and his daughter, Pippa--decide to stand with them... and soon discover that you can be a friend to rabbits or humans, but not both.

With a blossoming romance, acute cultural differences, enforced rehoming to a MegaWarren in Wales, and the full power of the ruling United Kingdom Anti-Rabbit Party against them, Peter and Pippa are about to question everything they had ever thought about their friends, their nation, and their species.

World Fantasy Award-winning Collection

Emily Dickinson takes a carriage ride with Death. A couple are invited over to a neighbor's daughter's exorcism. A country witch with a sea-captain's head in a glass globe intercedes on behalf of abused and abandoned children. In July of 1915, in Hardin County, Ohio, a boy sees ghosts. Explore contemporary natural history in a baker's dozen of exhilarating visions.

Table of Contents:

• The Blameless
• Word Doll
• The Angel Seems
• Mount Chary Galore
• A Natural History of Autumn
• The Fairy Enterprise
• The Thyme Fiend
• The Last Triangle
• Hibbler's Minions
• Rocket Ship to Hell
• The Prelate's Commission
• A Terror
• Blood Drive

There is a town that brews a strange intoxicant from a rare fruit called the deathberry--and once a year a handful of citizens are selected to drink it....

There is a life lived beneath the water--among rotted buildings and bloated corpses--by those so overburdened by the world's demands that they simply give up and go under....

In this mesmerizing blend of the familiar and the fantastic, multiple award-winning New York Times notable author Jeffrey Ford creates true wonders and infuses the mundane with magic. In tales marked by his distinctive, dark imagery and fluid, exhilarating prose, he conjures up an annual gale that transforms the real into the impossible, invents a strange scribble that secretly unites a significant portion of society, and spins the myriad dreams of a restless astronaut and his alien lover. Bizarre, beautiful, unsettling, and sublime, The Drowned Life showcases the exceptional talents of one of contemporary fiction's most original artists.

Table of Contents:

• The Drowned Life - (2007) - novelette
• Ariadne's Mother - (2007) - short story
• The Night Whiskey - (2006) - novelette
• A Few Things About Ants - (2006) - short story
• Under the Bottom of the Lake - (2007) - short story
• Present from the Past - (2003) - novelette
• The Manticore Spell - (2007) - short story
• The Fat One - (2008) - short story
• The Dismantled Invention of Fate - (2008) - novelette
• What's Sure to Come - (2002) - short story
• The Way He Does It - (2006) - short story
• The Scribble Mind - (2005) - novelette
• The Bedroom Light - (2007) - short story
• In the House of Four Seasons - (2005) - short story
• The Dreaming Wind - (2007) - short story
• The Golden Dragon - (2008) - short story

Mixing the mundane with the metaphysical, the pairings of the everyday and the extraordinary in this collection of short fiction yield supernatural results--a young musician perceives another world while drinking coffee; a fairy chronicles his busy life in a sandcastle during the changing tide; a demonic 16th-century chess set shows up in a New Jersey bar; and Charon, the boatman of hell, takes a few days of vacation. Storylines both conventional and outlandish reveal humdrum routines as menacing and imaginary worlds as perfectly familiar. Allusions to authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne reinforce the fantasy tradition in these tales, while understated humor and moments of sadness add a quirky unpredictability. Each story is followed by a brief afterword that details its genesis, offering insight into the many autobiographical elements found within.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - (2006) - essay by Jonathan Carroll
• The Annals of Eelin-Ok - (2004) - shortstory
• The Annals of Eelin-Ok: Story Notes - (2006) - essay
• Jupiter's Skull - (2004) - shortstory
• Jupiter's Skull: Story Notes - (2006) - essay
• A Night in the Tropics - (2004) - shortstory
• A Night in the Tropics: Story Notes - (2006) - essay
• The Empire of Ice Cream - (2003) - novelette
• The Empire of Ice Cream: Story Notes - (2006) - essay
• The Beautiful Gelreesh - (2003) - shortstory
• The Beautiful Gelreesh: Story Notes - (2006) - essay
• Boatman's Holiday - (2005) - shortstory
• Boatman's Holidy: Story Notes - (2006) - essay
• Botch Town - (2006) - novella
• Botch Town: Story Notes - (2006) - essay
• A Man of Light - (2005) - shortstory
• A Man of Light: Story Notes - (2006) - essay
• The Green Word - (2002) - novelette
• The Green Word: Story Notes - (2006) - essay
• Giant Land - (2004) - shortstory
• Giant Land: Story Notes - (2006) - essay
• Coffins on the River - (2003) - novelette
• Coffins on the River: Story Notes - (2006) - essay
• Summer Afternoon - (2002) - shortstory
• Summer Afternoon: Story Notes - (2006) - essay
• The Weight of Words - (2002) - novelette
• The Weight of Words: Story Notes - (2006) - essay
• The Trentino Kid - (2003) - shortstory
• The Trentino Kid: Story Notes - (2006) - essay

In an explosion of love's metaphors, Fowler's debut collection of stories, SUSPENDED HEART, takes on American fabulism with a cast of unexpected heroines in the narratives of life and loss: women whose hearts fall out at public malls, women whose bodies bloom with changing seasons, women who sprout blades or have multiple eyes, sleep as snakes, or birth saints like lapis lazuli babies. Where there is struggle and sadness, there is also humor: Fowler's fictive voice has been compared to both Franz Kafka and Donald Barthelme. There's a fearlessness to this prose, a melody of life and magic and loss.

Selected stories in this volume have been published online and in Australia.

Poland's strong Catholic faith engendered in its literature a lively awareness of the Devil and a love of the supernatural and the fantastic. These stories are explorations of the extreme in human behaviour, where the bizarre chills the spine, and few authors can match Grabinski's depiction of seething sexual frenzy. The Dark Domain will introduce to English readers one of Europe's most important authors of literary fantasy.

This is an original collection which is comprised of stories originally written in Polish and subsequently translated.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Miroslaw Lipinski
• Fumes
• The Motion Demon
• The Area
• A Tale of the Gravedigger
• Szamota's Mistress
• The Wandering Train
• Strabismus
• Vengeance of the Elementals
• In the Compartment
• Saturnin Sektor
• The Glance
• Afterword: The Area - A Contemporary Horror Story? - (1993) - essay by Madeleine Johnson

A monogrammed cube appears in your town. Your landlord cheats you out of first place in the annual Christmas decorating contest. You need to learn how to love and care for your mate--a paring knife. These situations and more reveal the wondrous play and surreal humor that make up the stories in Amelia Gray's stunning collection of stories: Museum of the Weird.

Acerbic wit and luminous prose mark these shorts, while sickness and death lurk amidst the humor. Characters find their footing in these bizarre scenarios and manage to fall into redemption and rebirth. Museum of the Weird invites you into its hallways, then beguiles, bewitches, and reveals a writer who has discovered a manner of storytelling all her own.

THE CHRISTMAS SPIRITS --

Everyone knows the Chirstmas season has truly arrived when A Christmas Carol takes center stage in both amateur and professional porductions, and the classic films and animated versions are shown over and over on television. Now, Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg have challenged some fo the most creative minds in fantasy and science fiction to tell readers exactly what those Christmas ghosts are up to when they're not scaring a stingy old man into self-reformation. The result is a sondrous seasonal mix, a perfect present for those ready to snuggle up with a good book on a cold winter's night.

From a Chirstmas encounter with a beggar that may haunt a wealthy traveler for the rest of his life... to a far different journey into Scrooge's Christmases past, a visit that amy expose some unsuspected truths about Ebenezer's former friends and acquaintances... to a script writer hired to give the story of Christmas a real "nineties twist," here are tales to savor over a holidy punch, imaginatively wrapped up for you by such generous gift givers as Mercedes Lackey, Frank M. Robinson, Judith Tarr, and Kristing Kathryn Rusch.

Contents:

• 13 - Introduction (Christmas Ghosts) - (1993) - essay by Mike Resnick
• 15 - Hunger - (1993) - short story by Michelle West [as by Michelle Sagara]
• 27 - Merry Christmas, No. 30267 - (1993) - short fiction by Frank M. Robinson
• 39 - The One That Got Away - (1993) - short story by Mark Aronson
• 53 - Elephantoms - (1993) - short fiction by Lawrence Schimel
• 55 - A Foreigner's Christmas in China - (1993) - short story by Maureen F. McHugh
• 67 - Upon a Midnight Dreary - (1993) - short fiction by Laura Resnick
• 84 - Modern Mansions - (1993) - short fiction by Barbara Delaplace
• 101 - Cadenza - (1993) - short fiction by Terry McGarry
• 114 - Gordian Angel - (1993) - short fiction by Jack Nimersheim
• 126 - The Timbrel Sound of Darkness - (1993) - short story by Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg
• 136 - A Prophet for Chanukah - (1993) - short fiction by Deborah J. Wunder
• 152 - Dumb Feast - (1993) - short story by Mercedes Lackey
• 163 - Shades of Light and Darkness - (1993) - short fiction by Josepha Sherman
• 181 - The River Lethe Is Made of Tears - (1993) - short fiction by John Gregory Betancourt
• 188 - Absent Friends - (1993) - short story by Martha Soukup
• 201 - Presentes - (1993) - short story by Nicholas A. DiChario
• 208 - Peter's Ghost - (1993) - short fiction by Marie A. Parsons
• 220 - The Case of the Skinflint's Specters - (1993) - short fiction by Brian M. Thomsen
• 228 - Christmas Presence - (1993) - short story by Kate Daniel
• 241 - The Ghost of Christmas Scams - (1993) - short fiction by Lea Hernandez
• 250 - Wishbook Days - (1993) - short story by Janni Lee Simner
• 266 - Holiday Station - (1993) - short fiction by Judith Tarr
• 280 - State Road - (1993) - short fiction by Alan Dormire and Robin J. Nakkula
• 288 - The Ghosts of Christmas Future - (1993) - short fiction by Dean Wesley Smith
• 292 - Three Wishes Before a Fire - (1993) - short fiction by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
• 299 - The Ghost of Christmas Sideways - (1993) - short story by David Gerrold
• 307 - The Bear Who Found Christmas - (1993) - short fiction by Alan Rodgers

The gods are dead. About fifty years ago they turned on one another and tore each other apart. Nobody knows why.

In an alternative world, fifty years after the death of the gods, a fifteen-year-old boy, Hark, finds the still beating heart of a terrifying deity and uses it to try to save his best friend. Hark risks everything to keep the heart out of the hands of smugglers, military scientists and secret fanatical cults, to try to use it to sustain the life of his best friend, who is gradually and eerily transforming. But how long should someone stay loyal to a friend who is himself becoming a monster?

With this wonderfully irreverent comic novel, Harington leaves off chronicling the human inhabitants of the Arkansas Ozark town of Stay More and turns his attention to its insect world. In depicting the cockroach community, who perambulate on gitalongs, apprehend their environment through sniff whips and commit unwitting malapropisms about the mysterious world of Man (and Woman), Harington unleashes a sprightly, antic imagination.

Hugo Award-winning and Nebula, Eugie, and World Fantasy Award-nominated Short Story

This story originally appeared in Apex Magazine, Issue 105, February 2018. The story is included in the anthology The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year: Volume Thirteen (2019), edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Read the full story for free at Apex.

A demon lurks at the heart of the Church in this classic fantasy of black magic set in Victorian England.

Canon Throcton is a brilliant scholar, but the men of the Church can't bring themselves to trust him. His devoted study of Hebrew and Arabic has drawn him far from their intellectual center, and his interest in the obscure writings of the Middle East verges on heresy. Canon knows his brothers in the cathedral don't take him seriously, but he doesn't care. A great and terrible power hides within him, and he'll unleash it even if it destroys the Church, the town, and everyone he holds dear.

When a junior colleague is elevated above him, Canon reaches into his darkest volume of forbidden lore and tries his hand at black magic. It works better than he ever could have dreamed. His enemy is destroyed and Canon feels the tug of unimaginable power. He's taken the first step along the road to damnation--and soon he'll burn.

The Black Fox is English gothic at its best, a story of weird fiction steeped in author H. F. Heard's unparalleled knowledge of world religion. Never before had black magic been written about with such deep understanding, and never since has it been more terrifying.

Considered the most important work of modern Iranian literature, The Blind Owl is a haunting tale of loss and spiritual degradation. Replete with potent symbolism and terrifying surrealistic imagery, Sadegh Hedayat's masterpice details a young man's despair after losing a mysterious lover. And as the author gradually drifts into frenzy and madness, the reader becomes caught in the sandstorm of Hedayat's bleak vision of the human condition. The Blind Owl, which has been translated into many foreign languages, has often been compared to the writing of Edgar Allan Poe.

A contemporary gothic from an author in the company of Kelly Link and Aimee Bender, Mr. Splitfoot tracks two women in two times as they march toward a mysterious reckoning.

Ruth and Nat are orphans, packed into a house full of abandoned children run by a religious fanatic. To entertain their siblings, they channel the dead. Decades later, Ruth's niece, Cora, finds herself accidentally pregnant. After years of absence, Aunt Ruth appears, mute and full of intention. She is on a mysterious mission, leading Cora on an odyssey across the entire state of New York on foot. Where is Ruth taking them? Where has she been? And who -- or what -- has she hidden in the woods at the end of the road?

In an ingeniously structured dual narrative, two separate timelines move toward the same point of crisis. Their merging will upend and reinvent the whole. A subversive ghost story that is carefully plotted and elegantly constructed, Mr. Splitfoot will set your heart racing and your brain churning. Mysteries abound, criminals roam free, utopian communities show their age, the mundane world intrudes on the supernatural and vice versa.

In a fantastical version of New Orleans where music is magic, a battle for the city's soul brews between two young mages, a vengeful wraith, and one powerful song in this vibrant and imaginative debut.

Nola is a city full of wonders. A place of sky trolleys and dead cabs, where haints dance the night away and Wise Women keep the order, and where songs walk, talk and keep the spirit of the city alive. To those from Far Away, Nola might seem strange. To failed magician, Perilous Graves, it's simply home. Then the rhythm stutters.

Nine songs of power have escaped from the magical piano that maintains the city's beat and without them, Nola will fail. Unexpectedly, Perry and his sister, Brendy, are tasked with saving the city. But a storm is brewing and the Haint of All Haints is awake. Even if they capture the songs, Nola's time might be coming to an end.

Recently canned professor of American literature Chris Jaynes has just made a startling discovery: the manuscript of a crude slave narrative that confirms the reality of Edgar Allan Poe's strange and only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Determined to seek out Tsalal, the remote island of pure and utter blackness that Poe describes, Jaynes convenes an all-black crew of six to follow Pym's trail to the South Pole, armed with little but the firsthand account from which Poe derived his seafaring tale, a bag of bones, and a stash of Little Debbie snack cakes. Thus begins an epic journey by an unlikely band of adventurers under the permafrost of Antarctica, beneath the surface of American history, and behind one of literature's great mysteries.

From the bestselling author of the Sandman Slim series, a lush, dark, stand-alone fantasy built off the insurgent tradition of China Mieville and M. John Harrison--a subversive tale that immerses us in a world where the extremes of bleakness and beauty exist together in dangerous harmony in a city on the edge of civility and chaos.

The Great War is over. The city of Lower Proszawa celebrates the peace with a decadence and carefree spirit as intense as the war's horrifying despair. But this newfound hedonism--drugs and sex and endless parties--distracts from strange realities of everyday life: Intelligent automata taking jobs. Genetically engineered creatures that serve as pets and beasts of war. A theater where gruesome murders happen twice a day. And a new plague that even the ceaseless euphoria can't mask.

Unlike others who live strictly for fun, Largo is an addict with ambitions. A bike messenger who grew up in the slums, he knows the city's streets and its secrets intimately. His life seems set. He has a beautiful girlfriend, drugs, a chance at a promotion--and maybe, an opportunity for complete transformation: a contact among the elite who will set him on the course to lift himself up out of the streets.

But dreams can be a dangerous thing in a city whose mood is turning dark and inward. Others have a vision of life very different from Largo's, and they will use any methods to secure control. And in behind it all, beyond the frivolity and chaos, the threat of new war always looms.

C. F. Keary's collection of stories and sketches, 'Twixt Dog and Wolf (1901), is one of the rarest and most sought-after volumes in the annals of weird fiction. Collected here are 'The Message from the God', a decadent paean to the Great God Pan; 'Elizabeth', a tale of witchcraft in medieval Germany that John Buchan called 'one of the finest witch tales I know'; 'The Four Students', a story of black magic and alchemy in the bloody days of the French Reign of Terror; and a series of ten 'Phantasies', bizarre and hallucinatory nightmares in prose.

This first-ever reissue includes the unabridged text of the original edition, plus a new introduction and notes by James Machin.

Every marriage has two hearts, one light and one dark...

Lisey Landon shared a profound and sometimes frightening intimacy with her husband, Scott, a celebrated bestselling novelist -- and a man with many secrets. One was the place where his gifts of imagination came from, a place that could heal or destroy him. Now, two years after his death, it's Lisey's turn to face Scott's demons on a nearly fatal journey into the darkness he inhabited....

When a black hole materializes in the storage room down the hall from his apartment, poet and video store clerk Nicholas allows his curiosity to lead him into the depths of terror.

A celebration of a legendary Finnish author, with several novels, stories, and appreciations. For readers of Ursula K. Le Guin, Milan Kundera, Virginia Woolf, Tove Jansson, and Italo Calvino. Over 800 pages covering Leena Krohn's entire career.

"One of the most important books published in the U.S. this year. [Leena Krohn's Collected Fiction] is as important a publishing event in its own way as New Directions' release... of Clarice Lispector's Complete Stories." - The Mumpsimus "An extraordinary writer who deserves to be better known to readers in English?which, thanks to this excellent collection, is now possible. Reminiscent of Calvino, Borges, and Lem." - STARRED REVIEW, Kirkus

Translations by: Eva Buckwald, Bethany Fox, Hildi Hawkins, Anselm Hollo, Vivii Hyvönen, Leena Likitalo, Herbert Lomas, J. Robert Tupasela, and Anna Volmari. Nonfiction by Minna Jerrman, Desirina Boskovich, Matthew Cheney.

From cities of giant insects to a mysterious woman claiming to be the female Don Quixote, Leena Krohn's fiction has fascinated and intrigued readers for over forty years. Within these covers you will discover a pelican that can talk and a city of gold. You will find yourself exploring a future of intelligence both artificial and biotech, along with a mysterious plant that induces strange visions. Krohn writes eloquently, passionately, about the nature of reality, the nature of Nature, and what it means to be human. One of Finland's most iconic writers, translated into many languages, and winner of the prestigious Finlandia Prize, Krohn has had an incredibly distinguished career.

Collected Fiction provides readers with a rich, thick omnibus of the best of her work. This collection includes several previously unpublished English translations, foremost among them the novels Pereat Mundus and The Pelican's New Clothes. Other novels included are: Tainaron, Dona Quixote, Ophir City of Gold, and Datura.

TAINARON: Mail From Another City is the first American publication by the internationally acclaimed Finnish author, Leena Krohn. TAINARON consists of a series of letters sent beyond the sea from a city of insects. TAINARON is a book of changes. It speaks of metamorphoses that test all of nature from a flea to a star, from stone and grass to a human. The same irresistible force that gives us birth, also kills us. Nominated for the prestigious Finlandia prize, this is the perfect introduction to the work of a modern fabulist.

The Other Side tells of a dream kingdom which becomes a nightmare, of a journey to Pearl, a mysterious city created deep in Asia, which is also a journey to the depths of the subconcious, or as Kubin himself called it, 'a sort of Baedeker for those lands which are half known to us'. Written in 1908, and more or less half way between Meyrink and Kafka, it was greeted with wild enthusiasm by the artists and writers of the Expressionist generation.

Expressionist illustrator Kubin wrote this fascinating curio, his only literary work in 1908. A town named Pearl, assembled and presided over by the aptly named Patera, is the setting for his hallucinatory vision of a society founded on instinct over reason. Culminating apocalyptically - plagues of insects, mountains of corpses and orgies in the street - it is worth reading for its dizzying surrealism alone. Though ostensibly a gothic macabre fantasy, it is tempting to read The Other Side as a satire on the reactionary, idealist utopianism evident in German thought in the early twentieth century, highly prescient in its gloom, given later developments. The language often suggests Nietsche. The inevitable collapse of Patera's creation is lent added horror by hindsight. Kubin's depiction of absurd bureaucracy is strongly reminiscent of Kafka's The Trial, and his flawed utopia, situated next to a settlement of supposed savages, brings to mind Huxley's Brave New World; it precedes both novels, and this superb new translation could demonstrate its influence on subsequent modern literature.

It will appeal to fans of Mervyn Peake and readers who like the darkly decadent, the fantastic and the grotesque in their reading.

Eighteen boyfriends, twenty-three jobs, and one ghost who occasionally pops in to give advice: Temporary casts a hilarious and tender eye toward the struggle for happiness under late capitalism.

A young woman fills increasingly bizarre placements in the search for steadiness and something, at last, to call her own. Whether it's shining an endless closet of shoes, swabbing the deck of a pirate ship, assisting an assassin, or filling in for the Chairman of the Board, for the mythical Temporary "there is nothing more personal than doing your job."

This riveting quest, at once hilarious and profound, will resonate with anyone who has ever done their best at work, even when the work is only temporary.

Kelly Link has been called "the most impressive writer of her generation" by Peter Straub and "a national treasure" by Neil Gaiman. Publications from Time to the Village Voice, from Locus to Salon, have lauded her as wildly talented and widely influential. In 2001, Link caused the literary world to catch its breath with Stranger Things Happen, one of the first great single-author collections of the new century. When it debuted, the book broke new ground in fantastic literature, and still reads as fresh, provocative, and dazzlingly original.

These stories are strange, quirky, smart -- and like no others. In "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose," a dead man sends letters to his living wife. In "The Specialist"s Hat," the rhymes and games of two children and their babysitter come to define, but not explain, a uniquely haunted house. In "The Girl Detective," the case of the tap-dancing bank robbers means a trip to the underworld. Among the eleven stories gathered here, readers will find dictators and extraterrestrials, an apocalyptic beauty pageant and two women named Louise.

Stories from Stranger Things Happen won Nebula, World Fantasy, and Tiptree Awards, and the volume garnered widespread acclaim. Link continues to earn accolades and find new readers with each story she publishes.

Table of Contents:

• Stranger Things Happen - interior artwork by Kathleen Jennings
• Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose - (1998) - shortstory
• Water Off a Black Dog's Back - (1995) - shortstory
• The Specialist's Hat - (1998) - shortstory
• Flying Lessons - (1996) - novelette
• Travels with the Snow Queen - (1996) - novelette
• Vanishing Act - (1996) - shortfiction
• Survivor's Ball, or, The Donner Party - (1998) - shortfiction (variant of Survivor's Ball, or The Donner Party)
• Shoe and Marriage - (2000) - shortfiction
• Most of My Friends Are Two-Thirds Water - (2001) - shortstory
• Louise's Ghost - (2001) - novelette
• The Girl Detective - (1999) - novelette

Loory's collection of wry and witty, dark and perilous contemporary fables is populated by people--and monsters and trees and jocular octopi--who are motivated by the same fears and desires that isolate and unite us all. In this singular universe, televisions talk (and sometimes sing), animals live in small apartments where their nephews visit from the sea, and men and women and boys and girls fall down wells and fly through space and find love on Ferris wheels. In a voice full of fable, myth, and dream, Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day draws us into a world of delightfully wicked recognitions, and introduces us to a writer of uncommon talent and imagination.

Contains the stories "The Man and the Moose" and "The Duck," as heard on NPR's This American Life; "The Book," as heard on Selected Shorts; and "The TV," as published in The New Yorker.

Set in Japan, Luce's playful, tender stories--reminiscent of Haruki Murakami and Aimee Bender--tip into the fantastical, plumb the power of memory, and measure the human capacity to love. The award-winning narratives in this mesmerizing debut trace the lives of ex-pats, artists, and outsiders as they seek to find their place in the world. HANA SASAKI beguiles and surprises: stories include an oracular toaster, a woman who grows a tail, and a most unusual kind of sex reassignment.

All human beings, says an African legend, have an animal double. Some doubles are benign, others wicked. This legend comes to life in Alain Mabanckou's outlandish, surreal, and charmingly nonchalantMemoirs of a Porcupine.

When Kibandi, a boy living in a Congolese village, reaches the age of 11, his father takes him out into the night and forces him to drink a vile liquid from a jar that has been hidden for years in the earth. This is his initiation. From now on, he and his double, a porcupine, become accomplices in murder. They attack neighbors, fellow villagers, and people who simply cross their path, for reasons so slight that it is virtually impossible to establish connection between the killings. As he grows older, Kibandi relies on his double to act out his grizzly compulsions, until one day even the porcupine balks and turns instead to literary confession.

From the author of The Postmortal, a fantasy saga unlike any you've read before, weaving elements of folk tales and video games into a riveting, unforgettable adventure of what a man will endure to return to his family...

When Ben, a suburban family man, takes a business trip to rural Pennsylvania, he decides to spend the afternoon before his dinner meeting on a short hike. Once he sets out into the woods behind his hotel, he quickly comes to realize that the path he has chosen cannot be given up easily. With no choice but to move forward, Ben finds himself falling deeper and deeper into a world of man-eating giants, bizarre demons, and colossal insects.

On a quest of epic, life-or-death proportions, Ben finds help comes in some of the most unexpected forms, including a profane crustacean and a variety of magical objects, tools, and potions. Desperate to return to his family, Ben is determined to track down the "Producer," the creator of the world in which he is being held hostage and the only one who can free him from the path.

At once bitingly funny and emotionally absorbing, Magary's novel is a remarkably unique addition to the contemporary fantasy genre, one that draws as easily from the world of classic folk tales as it does from video games. In The Hike, Magary takes readers on a daring odyssey away from our day-to-day grind and transports them into an enthralling world propelled by heart, imagination, and survival.

"In the stories of Paul Meloy - where walk the living dead, genetically modified pandas, and the mad and terrible Nurse Melt, among others - raw, tell-it-like-it-is comedy brawls with trippy horror in a cage match for the human soul. Take a front row seat. Try not to get any blood on you" - Joe Hill

Phil Trevena's patients are dying and he needs answers. One of the disturbed men in his care tells him that he needs to find Daniel, that Daniel will be able to explain what is happening. But who is Daniel? Daniel was lost once, broken by the same force that has turned its hatred on Trevena. His destiny is greater than he could ever imagine.

Drawn together, Trevena and Daniel embark on an extraordinary journey of discovery, encountering The Firmament Surgeons in the Dark Time - the flux above our reality. Whoever controls Dark Time controls the minds of humanity. The Firmament Surgeons, aware of the approach of limitless hostility and darkness, are gathered to bring an end to the war that the Autoscopes, before they tear our reality apart...

The Night Clock is Paul Meloy's extraordinarily rich debut novel, introducing us to a world just beyond our own, shattering preconceptions about creativity and mental illness, and presenting us with a novel like no other.

"Paul Meloy has long been one of my favourite short fiction writers. When we first took on Solaris in 2009, he was one of first authors I approached about writing a novel for us. It's taken a few years but the wait has been well worth it. Meloy's stories are poetic, extraordinary and phantasmagoric, but, most importantly, they ring true. Paul's insights into mental health, the artistry of madness and the revelatory nature of the best genre fiction are what makes him one of most exciting writers working today." Jonathan Oliver, Solaris Editor-in-Chief

Two men in one body! That's how Lief Langdon had always felt. One part of him was a modern day adventurer, the other was a strange half-memory of another life where he was a High Priest sacrificing living people to Khalk'ru, a demon god from another time and space. Then Langdon stumbled through the mirage into a hidden Arctic valley, where he fell under the spell of Evalie, as beautiful outwardly as she was inwardly, and her friends the Little People, elfin warriors constantly warring with Lur, the Witch-Woman, and her demon riders, who raided the Little People's land for sacrifices to their dark god, the Kraken. Horrified at the thought of their becoming sacrifices, Langdon took up the Little People's cause and wooed Evalie. But when he learned the Kraken was also known as Khalk'ru, memories of his past life -- as Lur's lover and High Priest of her sect came rushing back. Soon Langdon was fighting against his other self, a far stronger self that submerges him entirely and eagerly joins Lur, to rain kisses on her lips and wield the bloody knife of sacrifice on his own best friends!

Explorer John Kenton returns from a lifetime of wanderings and the wreckage of World War I to discover a mysterious block of Babylonian basalt containing a crystal model of an ancient ship - the Ship of Ishtar! The sultry magic of the fabled ship draws Kenton into its dreamworld, where a strange crew plucked from the ages sails in a lushly imagined mystical seascape. At the fore of the ship is Sharane, beautiful, proud, luxurious priestess instilled with the power of Ishtar, goddess of Love, Wrath, and Vengeance. On the prow broods inhuman Klaneth, infused with the essence of Negal, god of the Underworld. Kenton finds himself in a cosmic struggle of wills between them - sixty centuries in the making! Will he claim Sharane and take command of the Ship of Ishtar, or will its mysterious power take command of him?

A thriller of war that never was--of survival in an impossible city--of surreal cataclysm. In The Last Days of New Paris, China Miéville entwines true historical events and people with his daring, uniquely imaginative brand of fiction, reconfiguring history and art into something new.

"Beauty will be convulsive...."

1941. In the chaos of wartime Marseille, American engineer--and occult disciple--Jack Parsons stumbles onto a clandestine anti-Nazi group, including Surrealist theorist André Breton. In the strange games of the dissident diplomats, exiled revolutionaries, and avant-garde artists, Parsons finds and channels hope. But what he unwittingly unleashes is the power of dreams and nightmares, changing the war and the world forever.

1950. A lone Surrealist fighter, Thibaut, walks a new, hallucinogenic Paris, where Nazis and the Resistance are trapped in unending conflict, and the streets are stalked by living images and texts--and by the forces of Hell. To escape the city, he must join forces with Sam, an American photographer intent on recording the ruins, and make common cause with a powerful, enigmatic figure of chance and rebellion: the exquisite corpse.

But Sam is being hunted. And new secrets will emerge that will test all their loyalties--to each other, to Paris old and new, and to reality itself.

The fierce, proud, and relentless commander of warriors, standing tall above her enemies and simmering with rage, Jirel bids farewell to the world of treacherous men and walks through a forbidden door into Hell itself in pursuit of freedom, justice, and revenge.

Table of Contents:

• Jirel Meets Magic (1935) - novelette
• Black God's Kiss (1934) - novelette
• Black God's Shadow (1934) - novelette
• The Dark Land (1936) - novelette
• Hellsgarde (1939) - novelette

Lyrical and intensely moving, The Opposite House explores the thin wall between myth and reality through the alternating tales of two young women. Growing up in London, Maja, a singer, always struggled to negotiate her Afro-Cuban background with her physical home. Yemaya is a Santeria emissary who lives in a mysterious somewherehouse with two doors: one opening to London, the other to Lagos. She is troubled by the ease with which her fellow emissaries have disguised themselves behind the personas of saints and by her inability to recognize them. Interweaving these two tales. Helen Oyeyemi, acclaimed author of The Icarus Girl, spins a dazzling tale about faith, identity, and self-discovery.

When you need a memory to be wiped, call me.

Transferring unwanted memories to my own mind is the only form of magic I've ever mastered. But now, I'm holding so many memories I'm not always sure which ones are actually mine, any more.

Some of them are sensitive; all of them are private. And there are those who are willing to kill to access the secrets I'm trying to bury...

A classic Parker tale with a strong supporting cast of princes, courtiers, merchants, academics, and generally unsavory people.

This novella was originally published as a chapbook. It was anthologized in The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2016 edited by Paula Guran, and collected in The Father of Lies (2018).

A young wife's new job in an enigmatic organization pits her against the unfeeling machinations of the universe in this inventive and compulsively page-turning first novel

In a windowless building in a remote part of town, the newly employed Josephine inputs an endless string of numbers into something known only as The Database. After a long period of joblessness, she's not inclined to question her fortune, but as the days inch by and the files stack up, Josephine feels increasingly anxious in her surroundings--the office's scarred pinkish walls take on a living quality, the drone of keyboards echoes eerily down the long halls. When one evening her husband Joseph disappears and then returns, offering no explanation as to his whereabouts, her creeping unease shifts decidedly to dread.

As other strange events build to a crescendo, the haunting truth about Josephine's work begins to take shape in her mind, even as something powerful is gathering its own form within her. She realizes that in order to save those she holds most dear, she must penetrate an institution whose tentacles seem to extend to every corner of the city and beyond. Both chilling and poignant, The Beautiful Bureaucrat is a novel of rare restraint and imagination. With it, Helen Phillips enters the company of Murakami, Bender, and Atwood as she twists the world we know and shows it back to us full of meaning and wonder--luminous and new.

With In the Palace of Repose, her debut collection of mostly unpublished work, Holly Phillips accomplished the improbable. The unknown Canadian author received critical acclaim and numerous honors including the 2006 Sunburst Award and nominations for the World Fantasy and Crawford Awards. Her accomplished prose sang with a unique voice, seamlessly blending emotion, insight, and craft.

Now, At the Edge of Waking presents her latest tales written with even more depth and range-including a new, never-published story. Portraying human reaction to dire change or extreme circumstance, combining the real intruded upon by the fantastic or the fantastic grounded in reality, Phillips describes the world as it is, as it may be, as something impossible yet entirely acceptable, enthralling the reader with her words.

Contents:

• Introduction (At the Edge of Waking) - (2012) - essay by Peter S. Beagle
• Brother of the Moon - (2007) - short story
• Castle Rock - (2012) - short story
• Cold Water Survival - (2009) - short story
• Country Mothers' Sons - (2010) - short story
• Gin - (2006) - short story
• Proving the Rule - (2008) - novella
• Queen of the Butterfly Kingdom - (2007) - short story
• Story Notes (At the Edge of Waking) - (2012) - essay
• The Long, Cold Goodbye - (2009) - novelette
• The Rescue - (2010) - short story
• Three Days of Rain - (2007) - short story
• Virgin of the Sands - (2006) - short story

'The essential Holly Phillips story begins like this: In a world that felt too little, there lived a girl who saw too much.' - Sean Stewart

In the Palace of Repose is a collection of nine such stories, ranging from the delightfully fantastic 'In the Palace of Repose,' to the delicately horrific 'One of the Hungry Ones,' to the hauntingly literary 'The Other Grace.' Here indeed are young women, and young men, who have seen too much, and who have been abandoned to wrestle alone with the strange, the wonderful, the terrifying. Some triumph, some tragically fail. Most struggle on beyond the boundaries of their stories, carrying their wonders and horrors into their lives, into their worlds-worlds, and lives, startlingly like our own.

Contents:

• Introduction - (2005) - essay by Sean Stewart
• In the Palace of Repose - (2004) - novelette
• The Other Grace - (2005) - novelette
• The New Ecology - (2002) - novelette
• A Woman's Bones - (2005) - short story
• Pen & Ink - (2005) - short story
• One of the Hungry Ones - (2005) - novelette
• By the Light of Tomorrow's Sun - (2005) - short story
• Summer Ice - (2005) - short story
• Variations on a Theme - (2005) - novelette

From acclaimed author Holly Phillips comes a major work of visionary fantasy in the vein of Jeff Vandermeer and China Miéville. As richly detailed as it is evocative, the vivid prose of this ambitious novel illuminates a lushly imagined world poised on the brink of revolution.

Lanterns and flickering bulbs light the shadowy world of the rasnan, the island at the edge of a world-spanning ocean that harbors, in its ivory towers and mossy temples, the descendants of men and women who long ago fled a world ruined by magical and technological excess. But not all the island's inhabitants are resigned to exile. A mysterious brotherhood seeks to pry open doors that lead back to their damaged, dangerous homeland. Others risk the even greater danger of flight, seeking new lands and new freedoms in the vast, uncharted sea.

Amid a web of conspiracy and betrayal, three people threaten to shatter this fragile world. Scheming Lord Ghar, faithful to lost gods and forbidden lore, plays an intricate power game; Lady Vashmarna, an iron-willed ruler, conceals a guilty secret behind her noble façade; and Moth, a poor, irreverent novice, holds perhaps the darkest power of all: a mysterious link to a shadowy force that may prove to be humanity's final hope–or its ultimate doom.

Irish writer Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany, ranks among the twentieth century's great masters of supernatural and science fiction. An outstanding dramatist whose supernatural plays anticipated the theater of the absurd, Dunsany was also a virtuoso writer of short stories and essays. This selection presents the finest of his works, gathered from long-out-of-print sources.

Contents include the famous "Three Sailors' Gambit," possibly the best chess story ever written; the remarkable trilogy about Nuth and the Gnoles, Thangobrind the Jeweller, and the Gibbelins; exploits of the Gods, including both "The Gods of Pengana" and adventures from other books; and favorite adventures of Jorkens, prince of liars. Dunsany's spellbinding tales are complemented by the remarkable visions of Sidney H. Sime, whose delicate illustrations form an indispensable complement to the stories.

In the Land of Time and Other Fantasy Tales is a posthumous collection of short stories by the writer Lord Dunsany, in the Penguin Classics series. Edited and with an introduction by S. T. Joshi, it assembles material from across Dunsany's long career. The cover illustration is a colourised version of a classic illustration for an early Dunsany story by his preferred artist, Sidney Sime.

The collection includes several of Dunsany's most famous stories. It is grouped in themed sections by the editor, and the contents are:

• Introduction (S. T. Joshi)
• Suggestions for Further Reading (S.T. Joshi)
• A Note on the Text (S. T. Joshi)
• Section I: Pegana and Environs
  • The Gods of Pegana (entire text)
  • Time and the Gods ("The Lament of the Gods for Sardathrion")
  • The Legend of the Dawn
  • In the Land of Time
  • The Relenting of Sarnidac
  • The Fall of Babbulkund
• Section II: Tales of Wonder
  • The Sword of Welleran
  • The Kith of the Elf-Folk
  • The Ghosts
  • The Fortress Unvanquishable Save for Sacnoth
  • Blagdaross
  • Idle Days on the Yann
  • A Shop in Go-by Street
  • The Avenger of Perdóndaris
  • The Bride of the Man-Horse
• Section III: Prose Poems
  • Where the Tides Ebb and Flow
  • The Raft Builders
  • The Prayer of the Flowers
  • The Workman
  • Charon
  • Carcassonne
  • Roses
  • The City
• Section IV: Fantasy and Reality
  • The Wonderful Window
  • The Coronation of Mr. Thomas Shap
  • The City on Mallington Moor
  • The Bureau d'Echange de Maux
  • The Exiles' Club
  • Thirteen at Table
  • The Last Dream of Bwona Khubla
• Section V: Jorkens
  • The Tale of the Abu Laheeb (the first Jorkens story)
  • Our Distant Cousins
  • The Walk to Lingham
  • The Development of the Rillswood Estate
  • A Life's Work
• Section VI: Some Late Tales
  • The Policeman's Prophecy
  • The Two Bottles of Relish
  • The Cut
  • Poseidon
  • Helping the Fairies
  • The Romance of His Life
  • The Pirate of the Round Pond
• Explanatory Notes (S.T. Joshi)

Ratspeak is the the shrill and sly language of the rats of New York City's subway. When a curious boy is granted his wish to speak and understand the secret language of the rats, he brings a curse upon his home. "Ratspeak" is a standalone story by the acclaimed author of Vassa in the Night (Tor Teen, September 2016).

Read the full story for free at Tor.com

After Many a Summer borrows its title from a line in Tennyson's famous poem "Tithonus." An elegiac appeal for death on the part of the titular figure from myth, a man who was granted the everlasting life he had originally begged from the gods, only to have their gift turn to ashes in his mouth, only, as Tennyson wrote, to become someone whom "only cruel immortality consumes."

What does this have to do with homelessness, troubled movie production companies, kidnapped heiresses, prophecies delivered by taxidermized heads, and a Los Angeles County rendered with such masterful, lived in, bone deep attention to physical detail that to read the opening is to feel the heat from cracked asphalt rising through your shoes and to taste cheap fortified wine grown warm in the sun cloying your tongue? Can all these seemingly disparate things be connected, cohered, clarified?

Of course they can.

Conrad is a down on his luck screenwriter who takes a very strange assignment that leads him to encounter a kidnapped heiress after delivering her ransom--a hundred-year-old mummified head fond of cryptic utterances. Nothing goes Conrad's way, though, because nothing, no matter how bizarre, is what it seems.

From the award-winning author of Hide Me Among the Graves, Last Call, Declare, and Three Days to Never, comes a phantasmagoric, thrilling, mind-bending tale of speculative fiction in which one man must uncover occult secrets of 1920s Hollywood to save his family.

In the wake of their Aunt Amity's suicide, Scott and Madeline Madden are summoned to Caveat, the eerie, decaying mansion in the Hollywood hills in which they were raised. But their decadent and reclusive cousins, the malicious wheelchair-bound Claimayne and his sister, Ariel, do not welcome Scott and Madeline's return to the childhood home they once shared. While Scott desperately wants to go back to their shabby South-of-Sunset lives, he cannot pry his sister away from this haunted "House of Usher in the Hollywood Hills" that is a conduit for the supernatural.

This is a ghost story. It is a story about werewolves, and things that go bump in the night. It is a story of an ill-fated land, the pathless moors of Northern England so well chronicled in Wuthering Heights. And it is the story of a real family whose destiny it is to deal with this darkly glamorous and dangerous world.

When young Emily Brontë helps a wounded man she finds at the foot of an ancient pagan shrine in the remote Yorkshire moors, her life becomes contentiously entwined with his. He is Alcuin Curzon, embittered member of a sect working to eradicate the resurgent plague of lycanthropy in Europe and northern England.

But Emily's father, curate of the Haworth village church, is responsible for having unwittingly brought a demonic werewolf god to Yorkshire forty years ago--and it is taking possession of Emily's beloved but foolish and dissolute brother. Curzon must regard Emily's family as a dire threat.

In spite of being at deadly odds, Emily and Curzon find themselves thrown together in fighting werewolves, confronting pagan gods, even saving each other from the lures of moorland demons. And in a final battle that sweeps from the haunted village of Haworth to a monstrous shrine far out on the moors, the two of them must be reluctant allies against an ancient power that seems likely to take their souls as well as their lives.

In the slum known as the St. Giles rookery in 19th century London, the beggar guild run by Horrabin the Clown is the last resort of the down-and-out. Horrabin is rumored to maim his people to make them more effective mendicants, and when dimwitted beggar Isaac Fairchild is summoned by the clown, he fears the worst.

But in the subterranean chamber known as the Nursery, Fairchild learns that Horrabin's purpose is to greatly increase his intelligence, by grafting his rudimentary mind into the group mind shared by Horrabin's gang of Spoonsize Boys - alchemically-hatched homunculi, two-inch-tall men employed by the clown for subtle thefts and assassinations.

Fairchild yearns to be able at last to think clearly, understand conversations - read books! - but there's a cost.

A man tumbles through wild surf, half drowned, to collapse on a moonlit beach. When he regains consciousness, he has no memory of who he is or where he came from. he know only that the woman who washed ashore with him has disappeared sometime in the night, and that he has awakened in a surreal landscape of savage beauty -- a mysterious watery world encircled by a thin spine of land. Aided by strange tribesmen, he will journey to the cove of the spine kings, a brutal race that has enslaved the woman and several of the tribesmen. That is only the beginning of his quest, as he struggles to find her identity in this wondrous and cruel land -- and seeks out the woman whose hold on his imagination is both unfathomable and unshakable.

Haunting and lyrical, filled with uncommon beauty and terrible peril, A Short, Sharp Shock is an ambitious and enthralling story by one of science fiction's most respected talents.

A dog detective is hired by a female human to investigate a murder that she committed. But of course, all is not as it seems in this strange, mysterious world rendered wonderfully by speculative fiction author Christopher Rowe

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

From the author of the Finlandia Award-winning novel Troll: A Love Story, The Core of the Sun further cements Johanna Sinisalo's reputation as a master of literary speculative fiction and of her country's unique take on it, dubbed "Finnish weird." Set in an alternative historical present, in a "eusistocracy"--an extreme welfare state--that holds public health and social stability above all else, it follows a young woman whose growing addiction to illegal chili peppers leads her on an adventure into a world where love, sex, and free will are all controlled by the state.

The Eusistocratic Republic of Finland has bred a new human sub-species of receptive, submissive women, called eloi, for sex and procreation, while intelligent, independent women are relegated to menial labor and sterilized so that they do not carry on their "defective" line. Vanna, raised as an eloi but secretly intelligent, needs money to help her doll-like sister, who has disappeared. Vanna forms a friendship with a man named Jare, and they become involved in buying and selling a stimulant known to the Health Authority to be extremely dangerous: chili peppers. Then Jare comes across a strange religious cult in possession of the Core of the Sun, a chili so hot that it is rumored to cause hallucinations. Does this chili have effects that justify its prohibition? How did Finland turn into the North Korea of Europe? And will Vanna succeed in her quest to find her sister, or will her growing need to satisfy her chili addiction destroy her?

Johanna Sinisalo's tautly told story of fight and flight is also a feisty, between-the-lines social polemic--a witty, inventive, and fiendishly engaging read.

First published in Tähtivaeltaja magazine March, 1994

Can be read for free at Finnish Weird 3: Enter the Weird

Translated by J. Robert Tupasela

Vern - seven months pregnant and desperate to escape the strict religious compound where she was raised - flees for the shelter of the woods. There, she gives birth to twins, and plans to raise them far from the influence of the outside world.

But even in the forest, Vern is a hunted woman. Forced to fight back against the community that refuses to let her go, she unleashes incredible brutality far beyond what a person should be capable of, her body wracked by inexplicable and uncanny changes.

To understand her metamorphosis and to protect her small family, Vern has to face the past, and more troublingly, the future - outside the woods. Finding the truth will mean uncovering the secrets of the compound she fled but also the violent history in America that produced it.

In the weird and wonderful tradition of Kelly Link and Karen Russell, Amber Sparks's dazzling new collection bursts forth with stories that render the apocalyptic and otherworldly hauntingly familiar. In "The Cemetery for Lost Faces," two orphans translate their grief into taxidermy, artfully arresting the passage of time. The anchoring novella, "The Unfinished World," unfurls a surprising love story between a free and adventurous young woman and a dashing filmmaker burdened by a mysterious family. Sparks's stories?populated with sculptors, librarians, astronauts, and warriors?form a veritable cabinet of curiosities. Mythical, bizarre, and deeply moving, The Unfinished World and Other Stories heralds the arrival of a major writer and illuminates the search for a brief encounter with the extraordinary.

"I have never read anything like Jagannath. Karin Tidbeck's imagination is recognizably Nordic, but otherwise unclassifiable -- quietly, intelligently, unutterably strange. And various. And ominous. And funny. And mysteriously tender. These are wonderful stories."--Ursula K. Le Guin

"Restrained and vivid, poised and strange, Tidbeck, with her impossible harmonies, is a vital voice."--China Mieville

Enter the strange and wonderful world of Swedish sensation Karin Tidbeck with this feast of darkly fantastical short stories. Whether through the falsified historical record of the uniquely weird Swedish creature known as the "Pyret" or the title story, "Jagannath," about a biological ark in the far future, Tidbeck's unique imagination will enthrall, amuse, and unsettle you. How else to describe a collection that includes "Cloudberry Jam," a story that opens with the line "I made you in a tin can"? Marvels, quirky character studies, and outright surreal monstrosities await you in the book widely praised by Michael Swanwick, Ursula K. Le Guin, China Mieville, and Karen Joy Fowler. Publishers Weekly calls it "brave... and brilliant." Locus Magazine says this is the most significant debut since the award-winning Margo Lanagan. Introduction by Elizabeth Hand, afterword by the author.

"Tidbeck has a gift for the uncanny and the unsettling. In these wonderful, subtle stories, magic arrives quietly. It comes from the forests or the earth or was always there in your own family or maybe exists in another realm entirely... leaving you slightly dazed and more than a little enchanted."--Karen Joy Fowler

"Were this collection to contain only its biomechanoid wonder of a title story, it would still be amazing. Jagannath heralds the arrival of a bold and brilliant new voice, which I see too few of these days. You must read Karin Tidbeck."--Caitlin R. Kiernan

"In Karin Tidbeck's collection Jagannath, the mundane becomes strange and the strange familiar with near-Hitchcockian subtlety. I loved Tidbeck's clean, classic prose. It creates beautifully eerie music for a twilight domain."--Karen Lord

"I can't think of when I last read a collection that blew me away the way that Jagannath has, or one that's left me somewhat at a loss to describe just how strange and beautiful and haunting these tales are."--Elizabeth Hand (from her introduction)

In a world just parallel to ours exists a mystical realm known only as the Gardens. It's a place where feasts never end, games of croquet have devastating consequences, and teenagers are punished for growing up. For a select group of Masters, it's a decadent paradise where time stands still. But for those who serve them, it's a slow torture where their lives can be ended in a blink.

In a bid to escape before their youth betrays them, Dora and Thistle – best friends and confidants – set out on a remarkable journey through time and space. Traveling between their world and ours, they hunt for the one person who can grant them freedom. Along the way, they encounter a mysterious traveler who trades in favors and never forgets debts, a crossroads at the center of the universe, our own world on the brink of war, and a traveling troupe of actors with the ability to unlock the fabric of reality.

Ian Tregillis's Something More Than Night is a Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler inspired murder mystery set in Thomas Aquinas's vision of Heaven. It's a noir detective story starring fallen angels, the heavenly choir, nightclub stigmatics, a priest with a dirty secret, a femme fatale, and the Voice of God.

Somebody has murdered the angel Gabriel. Worse, the Jericho Trumpet has gone missing, putting Heaven on the brink of a truly cosmic crisis. But the twisty plot that unfolds from the murder investigation leads to something much bigger: a con job one billion years in the making.

Because this is no mere murder. A small band of angels has decided to break out of heaven, but they need a human patsy to make their plan work.

Much of the story is told from the point of view of Bayliss, a cynical fallen angel who has modeled himself on Philip Marlowe. The yarn he spins follows the progression of a Marlowe novel--the mysterious dame who needs his help, getting grilled by the bulls, finding a stiff, getting slipped a mickey.

Angels and gunsels, dames with eyes like fire, and a grand maguffin, Something More Than Night is a murder mystery for the cosmos.

Descend into shadowy cities, grotesque rituals, chaotic festivals, and deadly cults. Plunge into terrifying domains, where bodies are remade into surreal monstrosities, where the desperate rage against brutal tyrants. Where everything is lethal and no one is innocent, where Peake began and Lovecraft left off--this is where you will find the New Weird.

Edgy, urban fiction with a visceral immediacy, the New Weird has descended from classic fantasy and dime-store pulp novels, from horror and detective comics, from thrillers and noir. All grown-up, it emerges from the chrysalis of nostalgia as newly literate, shocking, and utterly innovative.

Here is the very best of the New Weird from some of its greatest practitioners. This canonic anthology collects the original online debates first defining the New Weird and critical writings from international editors, culminating in a ground-breaking round-robin piece, "Festival Lives," which features some of the hottest new names in New Weird fiction.

Contents:

• "A Guide to the Zoo" - Stepan Chapman
• "The Beautiful Gelreesh" - Jeffrey Ford
• "The Toes of the Sun" - Rhys Hughes
• "My Stark Lady" - D.F. Lewis
• "Python" - Ursula Pflug
• "Free Time" - James Sallis
• "The Scream" - Michael Cisco
• "Dr. Black in Rome" - Brendan Connell
• "Lights" - D.F. Lewis
• "Mortal Love" - Elizabeth Hand
• "A Dream of the Dead" - Steve Rasnic Tem
• "A Hero for the Dark Towns" - Jay Lake
• "The Catgirl Manifesto" - Christina Flook
• "Eternal Horizon" - Rhys Hughes
• "Maldoror Abroad" - K. J. Bishop

In his debut novel, literary alchemist Jeff VanderMeer takes us on an unforgettable journey, a triumph of the imagination that reveals the magical and mysterious city of Veniss through three intertwined voices. First, Nicholas, a would-be Living Artist, seeks to escape his demons in the shadowy underground–but in doing so makes a deal with the devil himself. In her fevered search for him, his twin sister, Nicola, spins her own unusual and hypnotic tale as she discovers the hidden secrets of the city. And finally, haunted by Nicola's sudden, mysterious disappearance and gripped by despair, Shadrach, Nicola's lover, embarks on a mythic journey to the nightmarish levels deep beneath the surface of the city to bring his love back to light. There he will find wonders beyond imagining…and horrors greater than the heart can bear.

By turns beautiful, horrifying, delicate, and powerful, Veniss Underground explores the limits of love, memory, and obsession in a landscape that defies the boundaries of the imagination. This special edition includes the short stories "The Sea, Mendeho, and Moonlight"; "Detectives and Cadavers"; and "A Heart for Lucretia" and the novella Balzac's War, offering a complete tour of the fantastic world of Veniss.

It is too bad that The Witching Night is Leslie Waller's only foray into weird fiction, because it's a chilling tour de force. Written early in the bestselling author's career, Waller used the pseudonym C. S. Cody to distinguish the novel from the crime fiction and international intrigue he would later become famous for.

Groundbreaking in its approach, The Witching Night pits medical science against a relentless, malignant force. Dr. Loomis--a young, well-grounded MD who operates a small clinic in Chicago--draws on his medical training by using pharmaceuticals to keep himself buoyant and lucid in the midst of a direct attack by a malicious entity... or is it a curse? Nameless, indefinable... one thing is certain: it's a killer, and likes to torture before it kills.

He has been too many things to count. He has been a dragon with a boy on his back. He has been a scholar, a warrior, a lover, and a thief. He has been dream and dreamer. He has been a god.

But "he" is in fact nothing more than a spark of idea, a character in the mind of Sylvia Harrison, 73, award-winning author of thirty novels over forty years. He has played a part in most of those novels, and in the recesses of her mind, Sylvia has conversed with him for years.

But Sylvia won't live forever, any more than any human does. And he's trapped inside her cave of bone, her hollow of skull. When she dies, so will he.

Now Sylvia is starting a new novel, a fantasy for adult readers, set in Thalia, the Florence-resembling imaginary city that was the setting for a successful YA trilogy she published decades before. Of course he's got a part in it. But he also has a notion. He thinks he knows how he and Sylvia can step off the wheel of mortality altogether. All he has to do is convince her.

In 1888 in Victoria, Texas, for a simple job, a Chicago private eye gets caught up in the poker game to end all poker games.

Shannon, a Chicago private detective, returns home to Galveston, Texas for a wedding. Galveston's new rabbi asks Shannon to find Nathan Silverberg, gone missing along with a group of swindlers who claim to be soliciting money for a future colony of Romanian Jewish refugees.

What seems to be a simple job soon pushes Shannon into stranger territory. His investigations lead him to a malevolent white-haired gambler, monstrous sand dune totems, and a group of skull-headed poker players trapped in an endless loop of cards and alcohol, who may be his only means to survive the business.

All is not well in Glassholm. Life under the moon has always been so predictable: day follows night, wax phases to wane and, after the despair of every Darkday, a person's mood soars to euphoria at Full. So it has been for five hundred years, ever since the Lunane captured the moon and tethered it to the city.

Now, all that has changed. Amidst rumours of unsettling dreams and strange whispering children, society is disintegrating into unrest and violence. The very sea has turned against Glassholm and the island's luck monkeys have gone wild, distributing new fates to all and sundry. Turmoil is coming.

Three people find themselves at the eye of the storm: a former policeman investigating a series of macabre murders, an outsider artist embroiled in the murky intrigues of revolution, and a renegade engineer tasked with fixing the ancient machine at the city's heart. Each must fulfil their role or see Glassholm shaken apart, while all are subject to the machinations of their inscrutable and eternal monarch, The Moon King.

Gene Wolfe may be the single best writer in fantasy and SF today. His quotes and reviews certainly support that contention, and so does his impressive short fiction oeuvre. Innocents Aboard gathers fantasy and horror stories from the last decade that have never before been in a Wolfe collection. Highlights from the twenty-two stories include "The Tree is my Hat," adventure and horror in the South Seas, "The Night Chough," a Long Sun story, "The Walking Sticks," a darkly humorous tale of a supernatural inheritance, and "Houston, 1943," lurid adventures in a dream that has no end. This is fantastic fiction at its best.

In the tradition of Angela Carter, this luminous, spellbinding debut reinvents the stuff of myth.

Straying husbands lured into the sea by mermaids can be fetched back, for a fee. Trees can make wishes come true. Houses creak and keep a fretful watch on their inhabitants, straightening shower curtains and worrying about frayed carpets. A mother, who seems alone and lonely, may be rubbing sore muscles or holding the hands of her invisible lover as he touches her neck. Phantom hounds roam the moors and, on a windy beach, a boy and his grandmother beat back despair with an old white door.

In these stories, the line between the real and the imagined is blurred as Lucy Wood takes us to Cornwall's ancient coast, building on its rich storytelling history and recasting its myths in thoroughly contemporary ways. Calling forth the fantastic and fantastical, she mines these legends for that bit of magic remaining in all our lives--if only we can let ourselves see it.

Table of Contents:

• Diving Belles
• Countless Stones
• Of Mothers and Little People
• Lights in Other People's Houses
• Magpies
• The Giant's Boneyard
• Beachcombing
• Notes From the House Spirits
• The Wishing Tree
• Blue Moon
• Wisht
• Some Drolls Are Like That and Some Are Like This

As the November winds wail in ivied chimneys we are drawn into a Victorian Gothic atmosphere of menacing, sombre gloom and ebony shadows. Sheridan Le Fanu leaves us in no doubt that we are in for a feast of exciting drama, luring us into the intensely claustrophobic world of the nineteenth century sensational novel. Le Fanu is amongst the top-notch exponents of the creepy, the criminal and the oppressive. In this tale of the orphaned teenage heiress Maud Ruthyn, fearing for her life at the hands of her sinister uncle, he has created a rattling good plot with the depth of a social novel and the power of high romance.

From the author of Borne and Annihilation comes the one-volume hardcover reissue of his cult classic Ambergris Trilogy.

Before Area X, there was Ambergris. Jeff VanderMeer conceived what would become his first cult classic series of speculative works: the Ambergris Trilogy. Now, for the first time ever, the story of the sprawling metropolis of Ambergris is collected into a single volume, including City of Saints and Madmen, Shriek: An Afterword, andFinch.

Once upon a time, on the banks of the River Moth, a city sprang up like no other in or out of history. Founded on the blood of the original inhabitants, the stealthy gray caps, and steeped for centuries in the aftermath of that struggle, Ambergris has become a cruelly beautiful metropolis--a haven for artists and thieves, for composers and murderers. City includes the World Fantasy Award-winning novella The Transformation of Martin Lake.

Narrated with flamboyant intensity by one-time society figure Janice Shriek, and presenting a vivid gallery of strange characters and even stranger events, this is an account of the adventures of her brother Duncan, a historian obsessed with a doomed love affair and a dark secret that may kill or transform him. It involves, too, a war between rival publishing houses which threatens to change Ambergris forever, and rivalry with a marginalised race known as the "grey caps" who, armed with advanced fungal technologies, wait underground for their chance to recover the city that was once theirs. This story of the family Shriek is an exotic and colourful novel of love, life and death which brings to fruition the author's genius for capturing the truly weird.

In Finch, mysterious underground inhabitants known as the gray caps have reconquered the failed fantasy state Ambergris and put it under martial law. They have disbanded House Hoegbotton and are controlling the human inhabitants with strange addictive drugs, internment in camps, and random acts of terror. The rebel resistance is scattered, and the gray caps are using human labor to build two strange towers.

Against this backdrop, John Finch, who lives alone with a cat and a lizard, must solve an impossible double murder for his gray cap masters while trying to make contact with the rebels. Nothing is as it seems as Finch and his disintegrating partner Wyte negotiate their way through a landscape of spies, rebels, and deception. Trapped by his job and the city, Finch is about to come face to face with a series of mysteries that will change him and Ambergris forever.

In this breathtaking debut novel by Felix Gilman, one man embarks on a thrilling and treacherous quest for his people's lost god-in an elaborate Dickensian city that is either blessed... or haunted.

Arjun arrives in Ararat just as a magnificent winged creature swoops and sails over the city. For it is the day of the return of that long-awaited, unpredictable mystical creature: the great Bird. But does it come for good or ill? And in the service of what god? Whatever its purpose, for one inhabitant the Bird sparks a long-dormant idea: to map the mapless city and liberate its masses with the power of knowledge.

As the creature soars across the land, shifting topography, changing the course of the river, and redrawing the territories of the city's avian life, crowds cheer and guns salute in a mix of science and worship. Then comes the time for the Bird's power to be trapped-within the hull of a floating warship called Thunderer, an astounding and unprecedented weapon. The ship is now a living temple to the Bird, a gift to be used, allegedly, in the interests of all of Ararat.

Hurtled into this convulsing world is Arjun, an innocent who will unwittingly unleash a dark power beyond his imagining-and become entangled in a dangerous underground movement that will forever transform Ararat. As havoc overtakes the streets, Arjun dares to test the city's moving boundaries. In this city of gods, he has come to search among them, not to hide.

A tour de force of the imagination, and a brilliant tale of rebellion, Thunderer heralds the arrival of a truly gifted fantasy writer who has created a tale as rich, wondrous, and captivating as the world in which it is set.

Collection of early Lovecraft stories inspired by Lord Dunsany.

Table of Contents:

• About The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath and H. P. Lovecraft: Through the Gates of Deeper Slumber - essay by Lin Carter
• The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath - (1943) - novella
• Celephais - (1922) - shortstory
• The Silver Key - (1929) - shortstory
• Through the Gates of the Silver Key - (1934) - novelette by H. P. Lovecraft and E. Hoffmann Price
• The White Ship - (1919) - shortstory
• The Strange High House in the Mist - (1931) - shortstory
• Postscript About The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath and H. P. Lovecraft - (1966) - poem by Lin Carter

She is the last hope of good in the war against the evil sorceress known as the Lady. From a secret base on the Plains of Fear, where even the Lady hesitates to go, the Black Company, once in service to the Lady, now fights to bring victory to the White Rose. But now an even greater evil threatens the world. All the great battles that have gone before will seem a skirmishes when the Dominator rises from the grave.

A hundred years ago, the Minotaurs saved Caeli-Amur from conquest. Now, three very different people may hold the keys to the city's survival.

Once, it is said, gods used magic to create reality, with powers that defied explanation. But the magic--or science, if one believes those who try to master the dangers of thaumaturgy--now seems more like a dream. Industrial workers for House Technis, farmers for House Arbor, and fisher folk of House Marin eke out a living and hope for a better future. But the philosopher-assassin Kata plots a betrayal that will cost the lives of godlike Minotaurs; the ambitious bureaucrat Boris Autec rises through the ranks as his private life turns to ashes; and the idealistic seditionist Maximilian hatches a mad plot to unlock the vaunted secrets of the Great Library of Caeli-Enas, drowned in the fabled city at the bottom of the sea, its strangeness visible from the skies above.

In a novel of startling originality and riveting suspense, these three people, reflecting all the hopes and dreams of the ancient city, risk everything for a future that they can create only by throwing off the shackles of tradition and superstition, as their destinies collide at ground zero of a conflagration that will transform the world... or destroy it.

Unwrapped Sky is a stunningly original debut by Rjurik Davidson, a young master of the New Weird.

Jant is the Messenger, one of The Circle, a cadre of 50 immortals who serve the Emperor, and the only who can fly. The Emperor seeks to protect mankind from the hordes of giant insects who have plagued the land for centuries. But he must also contend with the rivalries of his chosen immortals.

NATHAN TREEVES is dead, murdered by the Master of Mordew, his remains used to create the powerful occult weapon known as the Tinderbox.

His companions, scattered, are making for Malarkoi -- the city of the Mistress, the Master's most powerful enemy. Hoping to find welcome there, or at least safety, they find neither... and instead become embroiled in a life and death struggle against assassins, demi-gods, and the cunning plans of the Mistress.

Only Sirius, Nathan's faithful dog, has not forgotten the boy. Bent on revenge, he returns to the shattered remains of Mordew, newly deformed into an impossible mountain, swarming with monsters. He senses something in the Manse at its pinnacle -- the Master is there, grieving the loss of his manservant, Bellows -- and in the ruins of the slums he finds a power capable of destroying his foe, if only he has the strength to use it.

Abalone, Arizona, is a sleepy southwestern town whose chief concerns are boredom and surviving the Great Depression--that is, until the circus of Dr. Lao arrives and immensely and irrevocably changes the lives of everyone drawn to its tents.

Expecting a sideshow spectacle, the citizens of Abalone instead confront and learn profound lessons from the mythical made real--a chimera, a Medusa, a talking sphinx, a sea serpent, witches, the Hound of the Hedges, a werewolf, a mermaid, an ancient god, and the elusive, ever-changing Dr. Lao himself. The circus unfolds, spinning magical, dark strands that ensnare the town's populace: the sea serpent's tale shatters love's illusions; the fortune-teller's shocking pronouncements toll the tedium and secret dread of every person's life; sensual undercurrents pour forth for men and women alike; and the dead walk again.

Dazzling and macabre, literary and philosophical, The Circus of Dr. Lao has been acclaimed as a masterpiece of speculative fiction and influenced such writers as Ray Bradbury.

After attending a séance, Maskull, a restless and rootless man, finds himself embarking on a journey to the planet Tormance, which orbits Arcturus. Alone, he wanders the startling landscape, open to a bewildering range of experiences from love to ritual murder, encountering new monsters at every turn, metamorphosing, constantly seeking the truth about the divinity known as Shaping, Surtur and Crystalman.

A Voyage to Arcturus is David Lindsay's masterpiece, an extraordinary imaginative tour de force.

Professor James Lowry didn't believe in spirits, or witches, or demons. Not until a gentle spring evening when his hat disappeared, and suddenly he couldn't remember the last four hours of his life. Now, the quiet university town of Atworthy is changing - slightly at first, then faster and more frighteningly each time he tries to remember. Lowry is pursued by a dark, secret evil that is turning his whole world against him while it whispers a warning from the shadows: If you find your hat you'll find your four hours. If you find your four hours then you will die...

As the novel opens, Titus, lord of Castle Gormenghast, has abdicated his throne. Born and brought to the edge of manhood in the huge, rotting castle, Titus rebels against the age-old ritual of which he is both lord and prisoner and rushes headlong into the world. From that moment forward, he is thrust into a stormy land of a dark imagination, where figures and landscapes loom up with force and vividness of a dream--or a nightmare.

This final installment in the Gormenghast trilogy is a fantastic triumph--a conquest awash in imagination, terror, and charm.

To save the Library of the Unwritten in Hell, former librarian Claire and her allies may have to destroy it first.

Claire, the rakish Hero, the angel Rami, and the muse turned librarian Brevity have accomplished the impossible by discovering the true nature of unwritten books. But now that the secret is out, Hell will be coming for every wing of the library in its quest for power.

North America 5000 Years after the Death. Part two of Hiero's Journey scatters Hiero and his band of compatriots across the face of the continent. Hiero will face capture by the unclean, death by dehydration in the deserts of death, vicious attacks by murderous, mutated animals, and the most devastating terror of all... Hiero's loss of his unparalleled mental powers. He and his allies will be tested to the very limits of their abilities. They are bolstered only by a fierce determination to defeat the Unclean. It is that determination upon which their survival depends, and which must bring victory in their ultimate confrontation with the unclean if the remnants of civilization are to survive.

Beyond the wall of sleep lies the Dreamlands. For countless millennia, they have been explored only by those philosophers, mystics, and poets with a certain detachment from mundane reality. Well, those halcyon days are over, beatniks.

Johannes Cabal is coming.

Cabal, a necromancer of some little infamy, is employed by the mysterious Fear Institute to lead an expedition into the Dreamlands to hunt and destroy the dread Phobic Animus, the very source of all the world's fear. Along the way, they will encounter witches, vile abominations, and far too many zebras.

And, when they finally come close to their goal, Cabal will have to face his own nightmares. But for a man who communes easily with devils and the dead, surely there is nothing left to fear....

The adventures of Sergeant and his cat continue! The human Beast Catcher has been forcibly separated from his furry girlfriend Shelly, but our hero's character level is too low to follow her into the wider world or take proper vengeance. All he can do now is gain strength, level up his character and skills, and add to his ever growing list of enemies to one day be punished... or leave that to his ginger kitten Whiskers, fast becoming an expert in curse magic.

In the meantime, a terrible storm is brewing in the sandbox for beginner players. The humans and the sherkhs are on the brink of war for domination of this land fenced off from the rest of the world. The sherkhs are choosing a general for their army, and one of the candidates is an old acquaintance of our hero. The main task for Sergeant and his cat now is to avoid falling into the grip of a bloody conflict.

Beneath the towering bleached ribs of a dead, ancient beast lies New Crobuzon, a squalid city where humans, Re-mades, and arcane races live in perpetual fear of Parliament and its brutal militia. The air and rivers are thick with factory pollutants and the strange effluents of alchemy, and the ghettos contain a vast mix of workers, artists, spies, junkies, and whores. In New Crobuzon, the unsavory deal is stranger to none not even to Isaac, a brilliant scientist with a penchant for Crisis Theory.

Isaac has spent a lifetime quietly carrying out his unique research. But when a half-bird, half-human creature known as the Garuda comes to him from afar, Isaac is faced with challenges he has never before fathomed. Though the Garuda's request is scientifically daunting, Isaac is sparked by his own curiosity and an uncanny reverence for this curious stranger.

While Isaac's experiments for the Garuda turn into an obsession, one of his lab specimens demands attention: a brilliantly colored caterpillar that feeds on nothing but a hallucinatory drug and grows larger and more consuming by the day. What finally emerges from the silken cocoon will permeate every fiber of New Crobuzon and not even the Ambassador of Hell will challenge the malignant terror it invokes...

Aboard a vast seafaring vessel, a band of prisoners and slaves, their bodies remade into grotesque biological oddities, is being transported to the fledgling colony of New Crobuzon. But the journey is not theirs alone. They are joined by a handful of travelers, each with a reason for fleeing the city. Among them is Bellis Coldwine, a renowned linguist whose services as an interpreter grant her passageand escape from horrific punishment. For she is linked to Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, the brilliant renegade scientist who has unwittingly unleashed a nightmare upon New Crobuzon.

For Bellis, the plan is clear: live among the new frontiersmen of the colony until it is safe to return home. But when the ship is besieged by pirates on the Swollen Ocean, the senior officers are summarily executed. The surviving passengers are brought to Armada, a city constructed from the hulls of pirated ships, a floating, landless mass ruled by the bizarre duality called the Lovers. On Armada, everyone is given work, and even Remades live as equals to humans, Cactae, and Cray. Yet no one may ever leave.

Lonely and embittered in her captivity, Bellis knows that to show dissent is a death sentence. Instead, she must furtively seek information about Armada's agenda. The answer lies in the dark, amorphous shapes that float undetected miles below the watersterrifying entities with a singular, chilling mission....

Following Perdido Street Station and The Scar, acclaimed author China Miéville returns with his hugely anticipated Del Rey hardcover debut. With a fresh and fantastical band of characters, he carries us back to the decadent squalor of New Crobuzon-this time, decades later.

It is a time of wars and revolutions, conflict and intrigue. New Crobuzon is being ripped apart from without and within. War with the shadowy city-state of Tesh and rioting on the streets at home are pushing the teeming city to the brink. A mysterious masked figure spurs strange rebellion, while treachery and violence incubate in unexpected places.

In desperation, a small group of renegades escapes from the city and crosses strange and alien continents in the search for a lost hope.

In the blood and violence of New Crobuzon's most dangerous hour, there are whispers. It is the time of the iron council....

The bold originality that broke Miéville out as a new force of the genre is here once more in Iron Council: the voluminous, lyrical novel that is destined to seal his reputation as perhaps the edgiest mythmaker of the day.

Christopher Moore returns to the mean streets of San Francisco in this outrageous follow-up to his madcap novel Noir.

San Francisco, 1947. Bartender Sammy "Two Toes" Tiffin and the rest of the Cookie's Coffee Irregulars--a ragtag bunch of working mugs last seen in Noir--are on the hustle: they're trying to open a driving school; shanghai an abusive Swedish stevedore; get Mable, the local madam, and her girls to a Christmas party at the State Hospital without alerting the overzealous head of the S.F.P.D. vice squad; all while Sammy's girlfriend, Stilton (a.k.a. the Cheese), and her "Wendy the Welder" gal pals are using their wartime shipbuilding skills on a secret project that might be attracting the attention of some government Men in Black. And, oh yeah, someone is murdering the city's drag kings and club owner Jimmy Vasco is sure she's next on the list and wants Sammy to find the killer.

Meanwhile, Eddie "Moo Shoes" Shu has been summoned by his Uncle Ho to help save his opium den from Squid Kid Tang, a vicious gangster who is determined to retrieve a priceless relic: an ancient statue of the powerful Rain Dragon that Ho stole from one of the fighting tongs forty years earlier. And if Eddie blows it, he just might call down the wrath of that powerful magical creature on all of Fog City.

Strap yourselves in for a bit of the old razzmatazz, ladies and gentlemen. It's Christopher Moore time.

In a terraced city at the heart of the world, humans are mere underlings of the arrogant Rat-Lords. Men and women are confined to certain districts of the city, while the Rats are restricted to others by their own masters, the Decans. Incarnate in living rock, the thirty-six Lords of Heaven and Hell impose their divine will over Rats and humans alike through gargoyle acolytes, who in their hundreds of thousands wait to swoop down and devour any who oppose the god-daemons.

And opposition is growing.... For generations uncounted, human slaves were forced to build the mountainous Fane, but now the long-held dream of raising their own lost Temple has spurred the builders to revolt. Forbidden the knowledge to build for themselves, they plot to uncover the Masonic wisdom that has been lost for millennia - secrets that will free them from their rulers once and for all. But they need access to parts of the city denied them, and so they strike a deal with the Rat-Priest Plessiez, who has a grand scheme of his own.

Into this conspiracy step Prince Lucas of Candover, a student at the University of Crime, and no man's slave; Zari, a young Kadayan woman who is destined to become the living Memory of all that follows; and the White Crow, a woman whose powers are far greater than anyone suspects.

Two powerful magicians -- the White Crow and her husband, Lord-Architect Casaubon -- become embroiled in a deadly conflict of politics and magic as the opposing forces of Queen Carola and Protector-General Olivia battle for control of seventeenth-century London.

The only life Tress has known on her island home in an emerald-green ocean has been a simple one, with the simple pleasures of collecting cups brought by sailors from faraway lands and listening to stories told by her friend Charlie. But when his father takes him on a voyage to find a bride and disaster strikes, Tress must stow away on a ship and seek the Sorceress of the deadly Midnight Sea. Amid the spore oceans where pirates abound, can Tress leave her simple life behind and make her own place sailing a sea where a single drop of water can mean instant death?

Old Canhoon, the City of Wonders, is facing a population explosion as refugees from Tyrne and Roathes alike try to escape the Sa'ba Taalor. All along the border between the Blasted Lands and the Fellein Empire, armies clash and the most powerful empire in the world is pushed back toward the old Capital. From the far east, the Pilgrim gathers an army of the faithful, heading for Old Canhoon.

In Old Canhoon itself, the imperial family struggles against enemies old and new, as the agents of their enemies begin removing threats to the gods of the Seven Forges and prepare the way for the invading armies of the Seven Kings. In the distant Taalor valley, Andover Lashk continues his quest and must make a final decision, while at the Mounds, something inhuman is awakened and set free.

War is here. Blood will flow and bodies will burn.

Cassie did not feel the soul rider enter her body...but suddenly she knew that Anchor was corrupt, and that, far from being a formless void from which could issue only mutant changelings and evil wizards, Flux was the source of Anchor's very existence.

The price of her new knowledge is exile, yet Cassie and the Rider of her soul are the only hope for the redemption of both Flux and Anchor.

Cassie did not feel the soul rider enter her body... but suddenly she knew that Anchor was corrupt, and that, far from being a formless void from which could issue ony mutant changelings and evil wizards, Flux was the soure of Anchor's very existence. The price of her new knowledge is exile, yet Cassie and the Rider of her soul are the only hope for the redemption of both Flux and Anchor.

The Time of Danger Is at Hand

Mervyn, wizard and Fluxlord, leader of the Nine Who Guard, faces the ultimate threat of the opposing Seven Who Wait: the opening of the Hellgates to World. Closed more than 2,000 years ago, they are portals to unknowable danger and, perhaps, great power.

Mervyn must gather the shattered forces of guardianship, dispersed and reeling after the battle with Coydt: Cassie, once the powerful saint and crusader, now the brainwashed slave of an oppressive male dictatorship; Spirit, her daughter, controlled by her mysterious Soul Rider; Jeff, Spirit's son; Matson, he will lead the entire force of the Stringers Guild to war, if need be. But all of them are doomed to death unless they can become Masters of Flux & Anchor.

When the pulp magazine Weird Tales appeared on newsstands in 1923, it proved to be a pivotal moment in the evolution of speculative fiction. Living up to its nickname, "The Unique Magazine," Weird Tales provided the first real venue for authors writing in the nascent genres of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. Weird fiction pioneers such as H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, Catherine L. Moore, and many others honed their craft in the pages of Weird Tales in the 1920s and 1930s, and their work had a tremendous influence on later generations of genre authors.

In The Unique Legacy of Weird Tales: The Evolution of Modern Fantasy and Horror, Justin Everett and Jeffrey Shanks have assembled an impressive collection of essays that explore many of the themes critical to understanding the importance of the magazine. This multi-disciplinary collection from a wide array of scholars looks at how Weird Tales served as a locus of genre formation and literary discourse community. There are also chapters devoted to individual authors--including Lovecraft, Howard, and Bloch--and their particular contributions to the magazine.

As the literary world was undergoing a revolution and mass-produced media began to dwarf high-brow literature in social significance, Weird Tales managed to straddle both worlds. This collection of essays explores the important role the magazine played in expanding the literary landscape at a very particular time and place in American culture. The Unique Legacy of Weird Tales will appeal to scholars and aficionados of fantasy, horror, and weird fiction and those interested in the early roots of these popular genres.

Table of Contents:

• ix - Introduction: Weird Tales -- Discourse Community and Genre Nexus - essay by Jeffrey Shanks and Justin Everett [as by Justin Everett and Jeffrey H. Shanks]
• 3 - "Something That Swayed as If in Unison": The Artistic Authenticity of Weird Tales in the Interwar Periodical Culture of Modernism - essay by Jason Ray Carney
• 15 - Weird Modernism: Literary Modernism in the First Decade of Weird Tales - essay by Jonas Prida
• 29 - The Lovecraft Circle and the "Weird Class": "Against the Complacency of an Orthodox Sun-Dweller" - essay by Dániel Nyikos
• 51 - Strange Collaborations: Weird Tales's Discourse Community as a Site of Collaborative Writing - essay by Nicole Emmelhainz
• 63 - Gothic to Cosmic: Sword-and-Sorcery Fiction in Weird Tales - essay by Morgan Holmes [as by Morgan T. Holmes]
• 83 - A Nameless Horror: Madness and Metamorphosis in H. P. Lovecraft and Postmodernism - essay by Clancy Smith
• 105 - Great Phallic Monoliths: Lovecraft and Sexuality - essay by Bobby Derie
• 119 - Evolutionary Otherness: Anthropological Anxiety in Robert E. Howard's "Worms of the Earth" - essay by Jeffrey Shanks [as by Jeffrey H. Shanks]
• 131 - Eugenic Thought in the Works of Robert E. Howard - essay by Justin Everett
• 153 - Pegasus Unbridled: Clark Ashton Smith and the Ghettoization of the Fantastic - essay by Scott Connors
• 173 - "A Round Cipher": Word-Building and World-Building in the Weird Works of Clark Ashton Smith - essay by Geoffrey Reiter
• 187 - C. L. Moore, M. Brundage, and Jirel of Joiry: Women and Gender in the October 1934 Weird Tales - essay by Jonathan Helland
• 193 - Weird Tales, October 1934 (cover) - (1934) - interior artwork by Margaret Brundage (variant of cover art for Weird Tales, October 1934)
• 194 - The Black God's Kiss - (1934) - interior artwork by H. R. Hammond
• 201 - Psycho-ology 101: Incipient Madness in the Weird Tales of Robert Bloch - essay by Paul W. Shovlin
• 211 - "To Hell and Gone": Harold Lawlor's Self-Effacing Pulp Metafiction - essay by Sidney Sondergard

Walker Easterling is a retired actor turned successful screenwriter living in the Vienna of strong coffee, fascinating friends, and mysterious cafes. When he falls in love with Maris York, a beautiful artist who creates cities, his life becomes alive in fantastic and unsettling ways. As Walker's love for Maris grows, his life gets more and more bizarre-he discovers he can see things happening just before they happen, and at the same time feels an incredibly strong tug from his past-so a friend steers him to Venasque, an odd little man reputed to be a powerful shaman. Venasque helps Walker discover and unravel his many interconnected past lives, and it is soon clear that an unresolved conflict from these past lives has resurfaced, and now threatens to undo Walker and Maris's love.

Weber Gregston and Philip Strayhorn are best friends. They were at college together; they struggle as nobodies in Hollywood together. Weber soon becomes the most acclaimed director of his generation. Phil is unrecognised for years, and then makes a series of notorious horror films. He has everything; love, fame, money.

Then he takes a gun and blows his head off. Why? Weber hopes the answer is on the video tapes that Phil has left him. But when he plays them, he finds messages from beyond the grave. Step by step, Weber learns that the evil Phil portrayed in his last film is not just slasher gore. He has created something which threatens his friends' lives. And if Weber doesn't put it right, and fast, that evil will extend far beyond a handful of people in Hollywood.

Exploring love and cruelty, creation and ambition, A Child Across the Sky is a brilliant tale of wonder and fear. It is also one of the most important novels of fantastic fiction in recent years.

It's 2017 and angels and demons walk the earth. Once they were human; now they are unkin, transformed by the ancient machine-code language of reality itself. They seek The Book of All Hours, the mythical tome within which the blueprint for all reality is transcribed, which has been lost somewhere in the Vellum - the vast realm of eternity upon which our world is a mere scratch.

The Vellum, where the unkin are gathering for war.

The Vellum, where a fallen angel and a renegade devil are about to settle an age-old feud.

The Vellum, where the past, present, and future will collide with ancient worlds and myths.

And the Vellum will burn....

The City Imperishable's secret master and heir to the long-vacant throne has vanished from a locked room, as politics have turned deadly in a bid to revive the city's long-vanished empire. The city's dwarfs, stunted from spending their childhoods in confining boxes, are restive. Bijaz the Dwarf, leader of the Sewn faction among the dwarfs, fights their persecution. Jason the Factor, friend and apprentice to the missing master, works to maintain stability in the absence of a guiding hand. Imago of Lockwood struggles to revive the office of Lord Mayor in a bid to turn the City Imperishable away from the path of destruction. These three must contend with one another as they race to resolve the threats to the city.

The battle has been fought and won, and all have been transformed by the struggle. Imago of Lockwood has become Lord Mayor of the City Imperishable, though at a price beyond his wildest imagination. Bijaz the Dwarf has been imbued with a godlike power and a responsibility he scarcely understands. And Jason the Factor, resurrected from death at the hands of his sister, the Tokhari sandwalker Kalliope, has become the sula ma-jieni na-dia, the fabled Dead Man of Winter.

When a beautiful mountebank arrives in the City Imperishable, offering to lead an expedition to uncover the lost tomb of the Imperator Terminus, she stirs up the mob with promises of treasure and imperial power... but what will her quest unleash? Political intrigue, adventure, and all-out war await the principles and inhabitants of the City Imperishable. Through it all, the City may endure, but none will remain untouched by the Madness of Flowers...

The Third Volume in the Epic Dark Tower Series, The Waste Lands. Roland, the last gunslinger, moves ever closer to the Dark Tower of his dreams and nightmares as he travels through city and country in Mid-World -- a macabre world that is a twisted image of our own. With him are those he has drawn to this world: street-smart Eddie and courageous, wheelchair-bound Susannah. Ahead of him are mind-bending revelations about who and what is driving him. Against him is arrayed a swelling legion of foes," both more and less than human....

Short but powerful, this neo-gothic novel, which is illustrated by Harry O. Morris, uses the crisp immediacy of the present tense to lead the reader on a hallucinatory journey from humanity to inhuman transcendence. After a miraculous recovery from near death, a young man known only as the Divinity Student is beset by strange dreams whose lingering effects further alienate him from his fellows.

The sequel to the International Horror Guild Award-winning novel that launched the career of a writer sometimes described as "the American Kafka." Struck by lightning, resurrected, cut open, and stuffed full of arcane documents, the Divinity Student constructs a golem replacement to pursue his love underground, with lyrical consequences. As Publishers Weekly wrote, "Cisco wields words in sweeping, sensual waves, skillfully evoking multiple layers of image and metaphor." Recommended for fans of Clive Barker, Thomas Ligotti, Gemma Files, Kafka, Leonora Carrington and other masters of weird fiction. With an introduction by Paul Tremblay.

Every great city has a soul. Some are as ancient as myths, and others are as new and destructive as children. New York City? She's got six.

But every city also has a dark side. A roiling, ancient evil stirs in the halls of power, threatening to destroy the city and her six newborn avatars unless they can come together and stop it once and for all.

Every great city has a soul. A human avatar that embodies their city's heart and wields its magic. New York? She's got six.

But all is not well in the city that never sleeps. Though Brooklyn, Manny, Bronca, Venezia, Padmini, and Neek have temporarily managed to stop the Woman in White from invading--and destroying the entire universe in the process--the mysterious capital "E" Enemy has more subtle powers at her disposal. A new candidate for mayor wielding the populist rhetoric of gentrification, xenophobia, and "law and order" may have what it takes to change the very nature of New York itself and take it down from the inside. In order to defeat him, and the Enemy who holds his purse strings, the avatars will have to join together with the other Great Cities of the world in order to bring her down for good and protect their world from complete destruction.

Born in tragedy and raised in poverty, Krishanjit never aspired to be anything greater than what he was: a humble goatherd, tending his flock on the slopes of his isolated mountain home.

But Krish has learned that he's the son of the king of Ashanesland - and the moon god reborn. Now, with the aid of his allies, Krish is determined to fight his murderous father and seize control of Ashanesland. But his allies Dae Hyo, Eric and Olufemi, are dangerously unreliable and hiding secrets of their own.

To take Ashanesland, Krish must travel to the forbidden Mirror Town and unlock the secrets of its powerful magic. But the price of his victory may be much greater than the consequences of his defeat... For, deep in the distant Moon Forest lives a girl called Cwen - a disciple of the god known only as the Hunter. She believes that Krish represents all that is evil in the world. And she has made it her life's mission to seek Krish and destroy all who fight by his side.

The Emperor needs necromancers. The Ninth Necromancer needs a swordswoman. Gideon has a sword.

Brought up by unfriendly, ossifying nuns, ancient retainers, and countless skeletons, Gideon is ready to abandon a life of servitude and an afterlife as a reanimated corpse. She packs up her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and prepares to launch her daring escape. But her childhood nemesis won't set her free without a service.

Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House and bone witch extraordinaire, has been summoned into action. The Emperor has invited the heirs to each of his loyal Houses to a deadly trial of wits and skill. If Harrowhark succeeds she will be become an immortal, all-powerful servant of the Resurrection, but no necromancer can ascend without their cavalier. Without Gideon's sword, Harrow will fail, and the Ninth House will die.

Of course, some things are better left dead.

Her city is under siege.

The zombies are coming back.

And all Nona wants is a birthday party.

In many ways, Nona is like other people. She lives with her family, has a job at her local school, and loves walks on the beach and meeting new dogs. But Nona's not like other people. Six months ago she woke up in a stranger's body, and she's afraid she might have to give it back.

The whole city is falling to pieces. A monstrous blue sphere hangs on the horizon, ready to tear the planet apart. Blood of Eden forces have surrounded the last Cohort facility and wait for the Emperor Undying to come calling. Their leaders want Nona to be the weapon that will save them from the Nine Houses. Nona would prefer to live an ordinary life with the people she loves, with Pyrrha and Camilla and Palamedes, but she also knows that nothing lasts forever.

And each night, Nona dreams of a woman with a skull-painted face...

Jonathan Lambshead stands to inherit his deceased grandfather's overstuffed mansion - a veritable cabinet of curiosities - once he and two schoolmates catalog its contents. But the three soon discover that the house is filled with far more than just oddities: It holds clues linking to an alt-Earth called Aurora, where the notorious English occultist Aleister Crowley has stormed back to life on a magic-fueled rampage across a surreal, through-the-looking-glass version of Europe replete with talking animals (and vegetables).

Swept into encounters with allies more unpredictable than enemies, Jonathan pieces together his destiny as a member of a secret society devoted to keeping our world separate from Aurora. But as the ground shifts and allegiances change with every step, he and his friends sink ever deeper into a deadly pursuit of the profound evil that is also chasing after them.

The Pastel City of Viriconium was a temple of lost hope.

The gods had come down to frolic drunkenly in the gutters. Time had been stretched so thin as to lose its meaning. The pestilence had spread from the Low City to the High. And the last great artist sat in the plague zone where she waited for the end. Something had to be done. Ashlyme had to do it. And in that year of the apocalypse, he was the only man who dared.

First published in the UK as In Viriconium.

Prepare to lose yourself in the heady, mythical expanse of The Vorrh, a daring debut that Alan Moore has called "a phosphorescent masterpiece" and "the current century's first landmark work of fantasy."

Next to the colonial town of Essenwald sits the Vorrh, a vast--perhaps endless--forest. It is a place of demons and angels, of warriors and priests. Sentient and magical, the Vorrh bends time and wipes memory. Legend has it that the Garden of Eden still exists at its heart. Now, a renegade English soldier aims to be the first human to traverse its expanse. Armed with only a strange bow, he begins his journey, but some fear the consequences of his mission, and a native marksman has been chosen to stop him. Around them swirl a remarkable cast of characters, including a Cyclops raised by robots and a young girl with tragic curiosity, as well as historical figures, such as writer Raymond Roussel and photographer and Edward Muybridge. While fact and fictional blend, and the hunter will become the hunted, and everyone's fate hangs in the balance, under the will of the Vorrh.

In the stunning conclusion to this endlessly imaginative saga, the young Afrikaner socialite Cyrena Lohr is mourning the death of her lover, the cyclops Ishmael, when she rekindles a relationship with famed naturalist Eugène Marais. Before departing down his own dark path, Marais presents her with a gift: an object of great power that grants her visions of a new world.

Meanwhile, the threat of Germany's Blitz looms over London, and only Nicholas the Erstwhile senses the danger to come. Will he be able to save the man who saved him? And as Nazi forces descend upon Africa, will the Vorrh finally succeed in enacting its revenge against those who have invaded and defiled it?

The Cloven is a book of battles and betrayals, in which Catling's incredible creations all fulfill their destinies and lead us to an epic conflagration with the fate of mankind hanging in the balance.

The nightmare metropolis called the Well-Built City exists because the satanic genius and Master, Drachton Below, wished it so. And few within its confines hold the power of Physiognomist First Class Cley. With scalpels, calipers, and the other instruments of his science, Cley can divine good and evil, determine character and intelligence, uncover dark secrets and foretell a person's destiny, through the careful study of facial and bodily features.

But now the Master has ordered the great physiognomist out of the City on a seemingly trivial assignment into the rural hinterlands. but there, removed from Below's omnipresent scrutiny, even the most loyal servant of logic and order can fall prey to seductions of the flesh and spirit. And in this strange and unfamiliar place possessing terrors uniquely its own, there are stark truths awaiting the eminent Cley -- and inescapable revelations that could shatter his perceptions of himself, his profession, and his world.

After beholding the destruction of the Well-Built City, physiognomist Cley is now a simple healer seeking peace and atonement in the happy village of survivors. When the town falls into a deadly sleeping sickness, Cley must make a dangerous trip to the ruins of City—now beset by mechanical birds and werewolves—to seek out an antidote. The evil Master Below is still alive, but an accidental exposure to the sickness that he created has put him into a coma. With the help of Below’s adopted demon son, found in the wreckage of the laboratory, Cley ventures into the mind and intricate memories of Below to search for a cure. Cley will encounter wonders and dangers undreamed of in the second installment of this classic trilogy.

Shunned by the village he saved and seeing no future in the ruins of the Well-Built City, the reformed physiognomist, Cley, ventures into the wilderness to seek forgiveness from a woman that he once hideously harmed. Wandering through this eerie land known as “The Beyond," he encounters ghosts, monsters, omnivorous trees, and more on his quest. Meanwhile, Cley’s demon friend pursues his own dangerous, drug-induced journey to seek out his own humanity. This is the conclusive leg in the bizarre life-journey of one of the most gripping and complex characters in the fantasy genre.

Jennifer Mazden is the survivor of a wrecked marriage and she worries about the usual things in life - work, companionship and her future. But then strange things starts happenening to her and she becomes pregnant - from a dream. At that moment she struggles to take charge of her life.

Verity Fassbinder has her feet in two worlds.

The daughter of one human and one Weyrd parent, she has very little power herself, but does claim unusual strength - and the ability to walk between us and the other - as a couple of her talents. As such a rarity, she is charged with keeping the peace between both races, and ensuring the Weyrd remain hidden from us.

But now Sirens are dying, illegal wine made from the tears of human children is for sale - and in the hands of those Weyrd who hold with the old ways - and someone has released an unknown and terrifyingly destructive force on the streets of Brisbane.

And Verity must investigate - or risk ancient forces carving our world apart.

Something weird is happening to the Los Angeles freeways--phantom cars, lanes from nowhere, and sometimes unmarked offramps that give glimpses of a desolate desert highway--and Sebastian Vickery, disgraced ex-Secret Service agent, is a driver for a covert supernatural-evasion car service. But another government agency is using and perhaps causing the freeway anomalies, and their chief is determined to have Vickery killed because of something he learned years ago at a halted Presidential motorcade.

Reluctantly aided by Ingrid Castine, a member of that agency, and a homeless Mexican boy, and a woman who makes her living costumed as Supergirl on the sidewalk in front of the Chinese Theater, Vickery learns what legendary hell it is that the desert highway leads to--and when Castine deliberately drives into it to save him from capture, he must enter it himself to get her out.

Alternate Routes is a fast-paced supernatural adventure story that sweeps from the sun-blinded streets and labyrinthine freeways of Los Angeles to a horrifying other world out of Greek mythology, and Vickery and Castine must learn to abandon old loyalties and learn loyalty to each other in order to survive as the world goes mad around them.

Why did Cecil B. DeMille really bury the Pharoah's Palace set after he filmed The Ten Commandments in 1923?

Fugitives Sebastian Vickery and Ingrid Castine find themselves plunged into the supernatural secrets of Los Angeles--from Satanic indie movies of the '60s, to the unqiet La Brea Tar Pits at midnight, to the haunted Sunken City off the coast of San Pedro... pursued by a Silicon Valley guru who is determined to incorporate their souls into the creation of a new and predatory World God.

The definitive English language translation of the internationally bestselling Russian novel--a brilliant dark fantasy with "the potential to be a modern classic" (Lev Grossman), combining psychological suspense, enchantment, and terror that makes us consider human existence in a fresh and provocative way.

Our life is brief...

While vacationing at the beach with her mother, Sasha Samokhina meets the mysterious Farit Kozhennikov under the most peculiar circumstances. The teenage girl is powerless to refuse when this strange and unusual man with an air of the sinister directs her to perform a task with potentially scandalous consequences. He rewards her effort with a strange golden coin.

As the days progress, Sasha carries out other acts for which she receives more coins from Kozhennikov. As summer ends, her domineering mentor directs her to move to a remote village and use her gold to enter the Institute of Special Technologies. Though she does not want to go to this unknown town or school, she also feels it's the only place she should be. Against her mother's wishes, Sasha leaves behind all that is familiar and begins her education.

As she quickly discovers, the institute's "special technologies" are unlike anything she has ever encountered. The books are impossible to read, the lessons obscure to the point of maddening, and the work refuses memorization. Using terror and coercion to keep the students in line, the school does not punish them for their transgressions and failures; instead, their families pay a terrible price. Yet despite her fear, Sasha undergoes changes that defy the dictates of matter and time; experiences which are nothing she has ever dreamed of... and suddenly all she could ever want.

A complex blend of adventure, magic, science, and philosophy that probes the mysteries of existence, filtered through a distinct Russian sensibility, this astonishing work of speculative fiction--brilliantly translated by Julia Meitov Hersey--is reminiscent of modern classics such as Lev Grossman's The Magicians, Max Barry's Lexicon, and Katherine Arden's The Bear and the Nightingale, but will transport them to a place far beyond those fantastical worlds.

Ebora was once a glorious city, defended by legendary warriors and celebrated in song. Now refugees from every corner of Sarn seek shelter within its crumbling walls, and the enemy that has poisoned their land won't lie dormant for long.

The deep-rooted connection that Tormalin, Noon and the scholar Vintage share with their Eboran war-beasts has kept them alive so far. But with Tor distracted, and his sister Hestillion hell-bent on bringing ruthless order to the next Jure'lia attack, the people of Sarn need all the help they can get.

Noon is no stranger to playing with fire and knows just where to recruit a new - and powerful - army. But even she underestimates the epic quest that is to come. It is a journey wrought with pain and sacrifice - a reckoning that will change the face of Sarn forever.