Kiernan Caitlín R. Bücher

"Pure genius."--New York Times "Lyrically compelling tales that are nearly impossible to stop reading...fans of weird writers like Carmen Maria Machado, Jeff VanderMeer, and China Mieville will be glad to find this volume and thereby discover a writer who inspired them all." --Booklist Caitlín R. Kiernan is one of dark fantasy and horror's most acclaimed and influential short fiction writers. Her powerful, unexpected stories shatter morality, gender, and sexuality: a reporter is goaded by her toxic girlfriend into visiting sadistic art exhibits; a countess in a decaying movie theater is sated by her servants; a collector offers his greatest achievement to ensnare a musician who grieves for her missing sister. In this retrospective collection of her finest work--previously only available in limited editions--Kiernan cuts straight to the heart of the emotional truths we cannot ignore.

This collection of twenty-two short stories by the author of Daughter of Hounds and Alabaster, originally published in 2000, firmly established Caitlín R. Kiernan as one of the preeminent voices in dark fantasy today. Through a cycle of interconnected narratives, Kiernan unflinchingly explores a surreal world where the fantastic and the mundane are never separated by more than the insubstantial thickness of a shadow. From the murderous back-streets of New Orleans toan abandoned shipyard on the Hudson River, from sun-weary Los Angeles to a maze of dank and forgotten tunnels beneath Man-hattan, these stories present a landscape at once alien and un-deniably familiar.

A year after her death in a burning barn, Dancy's Flammarion's now finds herself in a Hell of her own creation. A new evil haunts the sun-scorched back roads and ghost towns of the American South - murderous twins who command a legion of ghouls. Once again, Dancy must face down demons, those who walk the world unchallenged and those in her own shattered mind. Collects Alabaster: The Good, the Bad, and the Bird #1-5 Praise for the work of Caitlín R. Kiernan: "Caitlín R. Kiernan is the poet and the bard of the wasted and the lost." -Neil Gaiman "One of our essential writers of dark fiction . . . a cartographer of lost worlds." -The New York Times "Kiernan's richly evocative prose vividly portrays her twisted characters as well as it illustrates their eerie, kudzu-infested, Deep South surroundings." -Booklist "Kiernan imbues the tales with disquieting gothic imagery and envelops them in rich, evocative prose that conveys cohesiveness beyond their fragmentary plots." -Publisher's Weekly