Search Worlds Without End

A is for Alien is award-winning author Caitlín R. Kiernan's first collection devoted entirely to her science-fiction work. It includes the critically acclaimed novelette "Riding the White Bull" (chosen for The Year's Best Science Fiction, 22nd Annual Collection), along with seven other tales of a less-than-utopian future. Ranging from the wastelands and mountains of Mars to the streets of a late 21st-Century Manhattan, from the moons of Europa and Saturn to an iceless Antarctica, these tales bring Kiernan's trademark brand of the eco-gothic to bear on what it means to be human and the paths and decisions that may face mankind only a little farther along.

Table of Contents:

• Riding the White Bull
• Faces in Revolving Souls
• Zero Summer
• The Pearl Diver
• In View of Nothing
• Ode to Katan Amano
• A Season of Broken Dolls
• Bradbury Weather
• Afterword by Elizabeth Bear

WFA-nominated Novella

This story originally appeared as a companion to the limited-edition collection The Ape's Wife and Other Stories (2013). The story is also included in the collection Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume Two) (2015). It was later expanded to a short novel of the same name.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - (1998) - essay by Poppy Z. Brite
• The Last Child of Lir - (1997) - short story
• A Story for Edward Gorey - (1997) - short story
• Postcards from the King of Tides - (1998) - short story
• Caitlín R. Kiernan Biography

Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart is the follow-up to Caitlín R. Kiernan's World-Fantasy Award nominated The Ammonite Violin & Others, a collection that drew comparisons to the writings of such luminaries of the macabre and surreal as Angela Carter, Thomas Ligotti, Shirley Jackson, and Harlan Ellison. Here, again, in her eighth collection, we visit the borderlands where the weird, horrific, mythic, and erotic intersect. Once again, Kiernan sets her masterful, intoxicating prose to the task of retelling fairy tales, spinning sensual post-Lovecraftian yarns, and blurring the lines between pain and pleasure. Here is a celebration of the bizarre and beautiful, and a marriage of unlikely worlds. From a reverence of the dead to the sacrifices the living make to unspeakable gods, from clockwork dreams to tales of merciless revenge, Kiernan blurs the artificial lines of genre, and shows us a world where there is no division between the light and dark.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Sexing the Weird - essay
• The Wolf Who Cried Girl - (2007) - short story
• The Bed of Appetite - (2007) - short story
• Subterraneus - (2012) - short story
• The Collector of Bones - (2008) - short story
• Beatification - (2008) - short story
• Untitled Grotesque - (2007) - short story
• Flotsam - (2009) - short story
• Regarding Attrition and Severance - (2008) - short story
• Rappaccini's Dragon (Murder Ballad No. 5) - (2008) - short story
• Unter den Augen des Mondes - (2008) - short story
• The Melusine (1898) - (2011) - short story
• Fecunditatum (Murder Ballad No. 6) - (2012) - short story
• I Am the Abyss, and I Am Light - (2008) - short story
• Dancing with the Eight of Swords - (2008) - short story by Caitlín R. Kiernan
• Murder Ballad No. 7 - (2008) - short story
• Lullaby of Partition and Reunion - (2008) - short story
• Derma Sutra (1891) - (2008) - short story
• The Thousand-and-Third Tale of Scheherazade - (2009) - short story
• The Belated Burial - (2009) - short story
• The Bone's Prayer - (2009) - short story
• A Canvas for Incoherent Arts - (2009) - short story
• The Peril of Liberated Objects, or the Voyeur's Seduction - (2009) - short story
• Pickman's Other Model (1929) - (2008) - novelette
• At the Gate of Deeper Slumber - (2009) - short story
• Fish Bride - (2009) - short story
• "But She Also Lies Broken and Transformed": An Afterword - essay by Sonya Taaffe
• About the Author - essay

What exactly is the difference between a love letter and a suicide note? Is there really any difference at all? These might be the questions posed by Dear Sweet Filthy World, Caitlin R. Kiernan's fourteenth collection of short fiction, comprised of twenty-eight uncollected and impossible-to-find stories.

Treading the grim places where desire and destruction, longing and horror intersect, the author rises once again to meet the high expectations she set with such celebrated collections as Tales of Pain and Wonder, To Charles Fort, With Love, and the World Fantasy Award-winning The Ape's Wife and Other Stories. In these pages you'll meet a dragon's lover, a drowned vampire cursed always to ride the tides, a wardrobe that grants wishes, and a lunatic artist's marriage of the Black Dahlia and the Beast of Gévaudan. You'll visit a ruined post-industrial Faerie, travel back to tropical Paleozoic seas and ahead to the far-flung future, and you'll meet a desperate writer forced to sell her memories for new ideas. Here are twenty-eight tales of apocalypse and rebirth, of miraculous transformation and utter annihilation. Here is the place where professing your undying devotion might be precisely the same thing as signing your own death warrant or worse.

The stories in Dear Sweet Filthy World were first published in the subscription-only Sirenia Digest, run by Caitlin for her most devoted readers. This publication marks the first availability to the general public for most of these rare tales.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Outsiders: 22 All-New Stories from the Edge (2005), edited by Nancy Holder and Nancy Kilpatrick, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, November 2010. The story can also be found in the anthology in Lightspeed: Year One (2011), edited by John Joseph Adams. It is included in the collection A Is for Alien (2009).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in Sirenia Digest, June 2017. It can also be found in the anthlology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Twelve (2018), edited by Jonathan Strahan. The story is included in the collection The Dinosaur Tourist (2018).

Locus Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia (2012), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. It can also be found in the collection The Dinosaur Tourist (2018).

Tiptree nominated novelette. Originally published in Jonathan Strahan Eclipse Three: New Science Fiction and Fantasy (2009), later collected in The Ape's Wife and Other Stories (2013).

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution (2012), edited by Ann VanderMeer. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Seven (2013), edited by Jonathan Strahan. The story is included in the collection Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume Two) (2015).

Table of Contents:

• Lovecraft and I by Caitlin R. Kiernan
• Valentia (1994)
• So Runs the World Away
• From Cabinet 34, Drawer 6
• The Drowned Geologist (1898)
• The Dead and the Moonstruck
• Houses Under the Sea
• Pickman's Other Model (1929)
• The Thousand-and-Third Tale of Scheherazade
• The Bone's Prayer
• The Peril of Liberated Objects, or the Voyeur's Seduction
• At the Gate of the Deeper Slumber
• Fish Bride
• The Alchemist's Daughter (A Fragment)
• Hounwife
• Tidal Forces
• John Four
• On the Reef
• The Transition of Elizabeth Haskings
• A Mountain Walked
• Love is Forbidden, We Croak and Howl
• Pushing the Sky Away (Death of a Blasphemer)
• Black Ships Seen South of Heaven
• Pickman's Madonna
• The Peddler's Tale, or Isobel's Revenge
• The Cats of River Street
• M is for Mars

The Dandridge Cycle

• A Redress for Andromeda (2001)
• Nor the Demon Down Under the Sea (1957)
• Study for The Witch House (2013)
• Andromeda Among the Stones

• Publication History and Acknowledgments

This novelette originally appreared in Sirenia Digest #100, May 2014. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Nine (2015), edited by Jonathan Strahan, The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Seven (2015), edited by Ellen Datlow, and Nightmares: A New Decade of Modern Horror (2016), edited by Ellen Datlow. The story is included in the collection Dear Sweet Filthy World (2017).

WFA nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the collection To Charles Fort, With Love (2005), and was reprinted in Lightspeed, March 2017. The story can also be found in the anthologies Horror: The Best of the Year: 2006 Edition, edited by Sean Wallace and John Gregory Betancourt, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 17 (2006), edited by Stephen Jones and New York Fantastic (2017), edited by Paula Guran. It is included in the collection Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (2011).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This novelette originally appeared in Argosy Magazine, January-February 2004, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld, June 2015. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Second Annual Collection (2005), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collections A Is for Alien (2009) and Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (2011).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

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 backstreets of New Orleans to an abandoned shipyard of the Hudson River, from sun-weary Los Angeles to a maze of dank and forgotten tunnels beneath Manhattan, these stories present a landscape at once alien and undeniably familiar.

Including such acclaimed tales as "Estate" (selected for The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror), "Postcards from the King of Tides" (selected for The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror), "In the Water Works" (the basis of Kiernan's award-winning second novel, Threshold), and "Tears Seven Times Salt" (to be reprinted in The Century's Best Horror), Tales of Pain and Wonder is destined to stand as a modern classic of weird and supernatural fiction.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Pain, Wonder, and Caitlín R. Kiernan (Tales of Pain and Wonder) - essay by Douglas E. Winter
• xi - Preface (Tales of Pain and Wonder) - essay
• 1 - Anamorphosis - (1996) - novelette
• 21 - To This Water (Johnstown, Pennsylvania 1889) - (1996) - novelette
• 41 - Bela's Plot - (1997) - short story
• 55 - Tears Seven Times Salt - (1996) - short story
• 69 - Superheroes - (1997) - short story
• 83 - Glass Coffin - [Salmagundi Desvernine] - (1999) - short story
• 99 - Breakfast in the House of the Rising Sun - [Salmagundi Desvernine] - (1997) - novelette
• 117 - Estate - (1997) - short story
• 131 - The Last Child of Lir - (1997) - short story
• 149 - A Story for Edward Gorey - (1997) - short story
• 161 - Salammbô - (1999) - short story (variant of Salammbo)
• 177 - Paedomorphosis - (1998) - short story
• 191 - Postcards from the King of Tides - (1998) - short story
• 211 - Rats Live on No Evil Star - (1999) - short story
• 223 - Salmagundi - [Salmagundi Desvernine] - (1998) - short fiction
• 235 - In the Water Works (Birmingham, Alabama 1888) - [Dancy Flammarion] - (2000) - short story
• 249 - The Long Hall on the Top Floor - (1999) - short story
• 261 - San Andreas - (2000) - short fiction
• 279 - Angels You Can See Through - (2000) - short fiction
• 289 - Lafayette - (2000) - short story
• 305 - ...Between the Gargoyle Trees - [Salmagundi Desvernine] - (2000) - short fiction
• 321 - Epilogue: Zelda Fitzgerald in Ballet Attire - (2000) - poem

In Caitlín R. Kiernan's The Ammonite Violin & Others, one of contemporary dark fantasy's most bewitching and distinctive voices is back with another banquet of the weird and unexpected. In his introduction, Jeff VanderMeer (City of Saints and Madmen, Finch) writes, "Kiernan creates her own light in this remarkable collection, and shines it on dark places. In doing so, she gives us gritty, lyrical, horrible, beautiful truths."

In The Ammonite Violin & Others, the author rises to meet the high expectations she set with such collections as Tales of Pain and Wonder, A is for Alien, and the World Fantasy Award-nominated To Charles Fort, With Love. Within these pages, you'll discover a dazzling suite of stories situated on the borderlands between the unspeakbale and the erotic, the grotesque and the sublime. Here are stories of dream and metamorphosis, strange lands and beings existing beyond the veil of death and beyond this earth. Here is a selkie who's lost her sealskin, a woman with a blackhole in her heart, a fairie girl fallen to the Queen of Decay, the descent of a modern-day Orpheus, and a killer who has fashioned the most exquisite musical instrument from the remains of one of his victims. Here are dreams, nightmares, and worse things yet.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction by Jeff VanderMeer
• Madonna Littoralis
• Orpheus at Mount Pangeum
• Bridle
• For One Who Has Lost Herself
• Ode to Edvard Munch
• The Cryomancer's Daughter (Murder Ballad No. 3)
• A Child's Guide to the Hollow Hills
• The Ammonite Violin (Murder Ballad No. 4)
• The Lovesong of Lady Ratteanrufer
• Metamorphosis A
• The Sphinx's Kiss
• The Voyuer in the House of Glass
• Metamorphosis B
• Skin Game
• The Hole With a Girl In Its Heart
• Outside the Gates of Eden
• In the Dreamtime of Lady Resurrection
• Anamnesis, or the Sleepless Nights of Léon Spilliaert
• Scene in the Museum (1896)
• The Madam of the Narrow Houses

This short story originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, #12 September 2007. It can also be found in the anthologies Realms: The First Year of Clarkesworld Magazine (2007), edited by Sean Wallace and Nick Mamatas, and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 19 (2008), edited by Stephen Jones. The story is included in the collections The Ape's Wife and Other Stories (2013) and Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume Two).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld - Part 1 - Part 2.

In The Ape's Wife and Other Stories -- Kiernan's twelfth collection of short fiction since 2001 -- she displays the impressive range that characterizes her work. With her usual disregard for genre boundaries, she masterfully navigates the territories that have traditionally been labeled dark fantasy, sword and sorcery, science fiction, steampunk, and neo-noir. From the subtle horror of 'One Tree Hill (The World as Cataclysm)' and 'Tall Bodies' to a demon-haunted, alternate reality Manhattan, from Mars to a near-future Philadelphia, and from ghoulish urban legends of New England to a feminist-queer retelling of Beowulf, these thirteen stories keep reader always on their toes, ever uncertain of the next twist or turn.

Table of Contents:

• The Ape's Wife and Other Stories - interior artwork by Vince Locke
• The Steam Dancer (1896) - (2008) - short story
• The Maltese Unicorn - (2011) - novelette
• One Tree Hill (The World as Cataclysm) - (2013) - short story
• The Colliers' Venus (1893) - (2011) - novelette
• Galápagos - (2009) - novelette
• Tall Bodies - (2012) - short story
• As Red as Red - (2010) - short story
• Hydraguros - (2011) - novelette
• Slouching Towards the House of Glass Coffins - (2011) - short story
• Tidal Forces - (2011) - short story
• The Sea Troll's Daughter - (2010) - novelette
• Random Notes Before a Fatal Crash - (2012) - novelette
• The Ape's Wife - (2007) - short story
• Notes (The Ape's Wife and Other Stories) - essay

Almost nothing is only what it seems to be at first glance. Appearances can be deceiving and first impressions often lead us disastrously astray. If we're not careful, assumption and expectation can betray us all the way to madness and death and damnation. In The Dinosaur Tourist, Caitlín R. Kiernan's fifteenth collection of short fiction, nineteen tales of the unexpected and the uncanny explore that treacherous gulf between what we suppose the world to be and what might actually be waiting out beyond the edges of our day-to-day experience. A mirror may be a window into another time. A cat may be our salvation. Your lover may be a fabulous being. And a hitchhiker may turn out to be anyone at all.

Table of Contents:

• The Beginning of the Year Without a Summer
• Far From Any Shore
• The Cats of River Street (1925)
• Elegy for a Suicide
• The Road of Needles
• Whilst the Night Rejoices Profound and Still
• Ballad of an Echo Whisperer
• The Cripple and the Starfish
• Fake Plastic Trees
• Whisper Road (Murder Ballad No. 9)
• Animals Pull the Night Around Their Shoulders
• Untitled Psychiatrist No. 2
• Excerpts from An Eschatology Quadrille
• Ballad of a Catamite Revolver
• Untitled Psychiatrist No. 3
• Albatross (1994)
• Fairy Tale of Wood Street
• The Dinosaur Tourist (Murder Ballad No. 11)
• Objects in the Mirror

India Morgan Phelps-Imp to her friends-is schizophrenic. Struggling with her perceptions of reality, Imp must uncover the truth about her encounters with creatures out of myth-or from something far, far stranger...

World Fantasy Award winning novelette. It originally appeared in Subterranean, Spring 2013. The story can aslo be found in the anthology The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2014, edited by Paula Guran. It is included in the collection Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume Two) (2015).

Read the full story for free at Subterranean.

Sarah Crowe left Atlanta, and the remnants of a tumultuous relationship, to live alone in an old house in rural Rhode Island. Within its walls she discovers an unfinished manuscript written by the house's former tenant-a parapsychologist obsessed with the ancient oak growing on a desolate corner of the property. And as the gnarled tree takes root in her imagination, Sarah risks her health and her sanity to unearth a revelation planted centuries ago...

Locus Award winning short story. It originally appeared in the anthology Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales (2013), edited by Paula Guran. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eight (2014), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and Beyond the Woods: Fairy Tales Retold (2016), edited by Paula Guran.

This story originally appeared in the anthology Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy (2008), edited by William Schafer, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, April 2012. It can also be found in the anthologies Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded (2010), edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer, and The Mammoth Book of Steampunk (2012), edited by Sean Wallace. The story is included in the collections The Ape's Wife and Other Stories (2013) and Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume Two) (2015).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Caitlín R. Kiernan is widely acknowledged as one of dark fantasy and horror’s most acclaimed short fiction writers. Collected in this retrospective volume is her finest work: visceral, sensual, devastating, and impossible to resist.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Richard Kadrey
• Andromeda Among the Stones - [Dandridge Cycle] - (2003) - novelette
• La Peau Verte - (2005) - novelette
• Houses Under the Sea - (2006) - novelette
• Bradbury Weather - (2005) - novelette
• A Child's Guide to the Hollow Hills - (2006) - short story
• The Ammonite Violin (Murder Ballad No. 4) - (2006) - short story
• A Season of Broken Dolls - (2007) - short story
• In View of Nothing - (2007) - short story
• The Ape's Wife - [King Kong] - (2007) - short story
• The Steam Dancer (1896) - (2008) - short story
• Galápagos - (2009) - novelette
• Fish Bride (1970) - (2015) - short story (variant of Fish Bride 2009)
• The Mermaid of the Concrete Ocean - (2015) - short story
• Hydrarguros - (2015) - novelette (variant of Hydraguros 2011)
• The Maltese Unicorn - (2011) - novelette
• Tidal Forces - (2011) - short story
• The Prayer of Ninety Cats - (2013) - novelette
• One Tree Hill (The World as Cataclysm) - (2013) - short story
• Interstate Love Song (Murder Ballad No. 8) - (2014) - novelette
• Fairy Tale of Wood Street - (2017) - short story

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Eclipse Four: New Science Fiction and Fantasy (2011), edited by Jonathan Strahan. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Six (2012), edited by Jonathan Strahan. The story is included in the collections The Ape's Wife and Other Stories (2013) and Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume Two) (2015).

Read the full story for free at the Baen website.

To Charles Fort, With Love is award-winning fantasist Caitlín R. Kiernan's third collection of short fiction, a haunting parade of the terrible things which may lie beyond the boundaries of science, the minds which may exist beyond psychology, and the forbidden places which will never be located in any orthodox globe.

To quote the object of Kiernan's affection, meta-poet and arch-enemy of dogma Charles Hoy Fort, "The little harlots will caper, and freaks will distrac t attention, and the clowns will break the rhythm of the whole with their buffooneries?but the solidity of the procession as a whole: the impressiveness of things that pass and pass and pass, and keep on and keep on and keepon coming."

A deceptively even dozen, this collection includes Kiernan's celebrated stories "Onion" and "Andromeda Among the Stones," as well as a number of more obscure pieces. Though Kiernan was recently praised as "the new Lovecraft," these stories stand as testimony that she will never be merely the "new" anyone, that hers is a unique and demanding voice entirely unlike any other.

Table of Contents:

• To Charles Fort, with Love - interior artwork by Richard E. Kirk
• [5] - Fort Valentine - interior artwork by Katherine A. Pollnac
• 11 - Preface: Looking for Innsmouth - essay
• 21 - Valentia - (2000) - short story
• 35 - Spindleshanks (New Orleans, 1956) - (2000) - short story
• 49 - So Runs the World Away - (2001) - short story
• 71 - Standing Water - (2002) - short story
• 83 - La Mer Des Rêves - (2004) - short story
• 91 - The Road of Pins - (2002) - short story
• 111 - Onion - (2001) - novelette
• 143 - Apokatastasis - (2002) - short story
• 157 - La Peau Verte - novelette
• 187 - The Dead and the Moonstruck - (2004) - novelette
• 205 - A Redress for Andromeda - [Dandridge Cycle] - (2000) - short story
• 219 - Nor the Demons Down Under the Sea - [Dandridge Cycle] - (2002) - short story
• 235 - Andromeda Among the Stones - [Dandridge Cycle] - (2003) - novelette
• 267 - Afterword: A Certain Inexplicability - essay by Ramsey Campbell

This short story originally appeared in Sirenia Digest, July 2016. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eleven (2017), edited by Jonathan Strahan. The story is included in the collection The Dinosaur Tourist (2018).

This short story originally appeared in Sirenia Digest #111. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Ten (2016), edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Chance Matthews is drawn into a battle between angels and monsters because of something in her possession-a fossil of a creature that couldn't possibly have ever existed. But it did. And still does.

Several years after the events in Threshold, Chance and Deacon have married. They're looking ahead to the future, trying to put the past behind them. But new nightmares await them as a woman with a need for violence enters their lives. And something even worse has followed her...

They are the Children of the Cuckoo. Stolen from their cribs and concealed in shadows to be raised by ghouls, they are now changelings in service to the creatures who rule the world Below and despise the world Above. Any human contact is strictly forbidden and punishment is swift and severe for those who disobey.

Raised by her widower father, Emmie Silvey has a precocious personality and striking yellow eyes that have left her a solitary child. But that changes when two women enter her life-one who stalks her, one who haunts her dreams- both insisting that her entire life is a lie and warning her of an encroaching darkness.

To the residents of her small southern city, second-hand store owner Spyder Baxter is crazy. But her friends and followers know better. Something lives within Spder's brain. Something powerful. Something wonderful. Something dangerous. Pray it never escapes.

Ten years ago, Niki Ky and Daria Parker saw something unspeakable in an old house in Birmingham, Alabama. Daria has denied it, escaping into a frantic music career and various addictions. But Niki has not had so many distractions. Diagnosed schizophrenic, she's lost years in a haze of therapy and anti-psychotics.

But now, Niki's dead lover, Spyder Baxter, is calling to her from another world-an alien, impossible place where Niki is known as a Hierophant, a feared prophesied sorceress who can open a portal between worlds. And Daria will finally have to face what really happened ten years ago, if she's to help Niki save a world... or destroy it.

Caitlin R. Kiernan's short fiction was first published in 1995. Over the intervening decade and a half, she has proven not only one of dark fantasy and science fiction's most prolific and versatile authors, but, to quote Ramsey Campbell, "One of the most accomplished writers in the field, and very possibly the most lyrical." S. T. Joshi has written, "Kiernan's witchery of words creates a mesmerizing effect that we haven't seen since the days of Lovecraft and Bradbury."

Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitl'n R. Kiernan (Volume One) presents a stunning retrospective of the first ten years of her work, a compilation of more than two hundred thousand words of short fiction, including many of her most acclaimed stories, as well as some of the author's personal favorites, several previously uncollected, hard-to-find pieces, and her sf novella, The Dry Salvages, and a rare collaboration with Poppy Z. Brite. Destined to become the definitive look at the early development of Kiernan's work, Two Worlds and In Between is a must for fans and collectors alike, as well as an unprecedented introduction to an author who, over the course of her career, has earned the praise of such luminaries as Neil Gaiman, Peter Straub, Charles De Lint, and Clive Barker.

Contents:

• Emptiness Spoke Eloquent - (1997)
• Two Worlds, and in Between - (1997)
• To This Water (Johnstown, Pennsylvania 1889) - (1996)
• Tears Seven Times Salt - (1996)
• Breakfast in the House of the Rising Sun (Murder Ballad No. 1) - (1997)
• Estate - (1997)
• Rats Live on No Evil Star - (1999)
• Salmagundi (New York City, 1981) - (1998)
• Postcards from the King of Tides - (1998)
• Giants in the Earth - (1996)
• Zelda Fitzgerald in Ballet Attire - poem (2000)
• Spindleshanks (New Orleans, 1956) - (2000)
• The Road of Pins - (2002)
• Onion - (2001)
• In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers - (2002)
• Night Story 1973 - (2002) - by Poppy Z. Brite and Caitlín R. Kiernan
• From Cabinet 34, Drawer 6 - (2005)
• Andromeda Among the Stones - (2002)
• La Peau Verte - (2005)
• Riding the White Bull - (2004)
• Waycross - (2003)
• The Dead and the Moonstruck - (2004)
• The Daughter of the Four of Pentacles - (2007)
• The Dry Salvages - (2004)
• The Worm in My Mind's Eye - (2005)
• Houses Under the Sea - (2006)

In his Locus review of "Two Worlds and In Between"--the first volume of The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan--Gary K. Wolfe wrote, "...it makes you wish the second volume were here now." Well, the long wait is almost over. "Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume Two)" completes this ambitious undertaking, collecting the finest of Kiernan's stories from 2004 to 2012, selected by the author herself. The book includes twenty-five short stories and one poem, plus the short novel "Black Helicopters"--over two hundred thousand words of fiction, including the World Fantasy Award-winning "The Prayer of Ninety Cats."

In his introduction, S. T. Joshi writes, "Caitlín R. Kiernan does not care to be called a 'horror writer,' and with good reason: that term is far too crude and blunt to convey even a fraction of all the diverse elements that make her work unique. Perhaps she wishes to be a writer of what Lovecraft called 'weird fiction'; or maybe she prefers Aickman's coinage 'strange stories.' These terms seem sufficiently broad and ambiguous to encompass the multiplicity of tones, moods, manners, and motifs that make up Kiernan's short fiction, and in this volume you will find the full range of her work amply displayed. Her output to date has already placed her at the head of her field; she has nothing more to prove. Any subsequent work can only augment her achievement."

The collection includes the first complete bibliography of Kiernan's writing (1985-2015).

Contents:

• Bradbury Weather - (2005)
• Pony - (2007)
• Untitled 17 - (2007)
• A Child's Guide to the Hollow Hills - (2006)
• The Cryomancer's Daughter (Murder Ballad No. 3) - (2006)
• The Ammonite Violin (Murder Ballad No. 4) - (2006)
• A Season of Broken Dolls - (2007)
• In View of Nothing - (2007)
• The Ape's Wife - (2007)
• The Steam Dancer (1896) - (2008)
• In the Dreamtime of Lady Resurrection - (2007)
• Pickman's Other Model (1929) - (2008)
• Galápagos - (2009)
• The Melusine (1898) - (2011)
• As Red as Red - (2010)
• Fish Bride (1970)
• The Mermaid of the Concrete Ocean - (2015)
• The Sea Troll's Daughter - (2010)
• Hydrarguros (2011)
• Houndwife - (2012)
• The Maltese Unicorn - (2011)
• Tidal Forces - (2011)
• And the Cloud That Took the Form - (2010)
• The Prayer of Ninety Cats - (2013)
• Daughter Dear Desmodus - (2011)
• Goggles (c.1910) - (2012)
• One Tree Hill (The World as Cataclysm) - (2013)
• Black Helicopters - (2013)
• Atlantis - (2012) - poem

A government special agent known only as the Signalman gets off a train on a stunningly hot morning in Winslow, Arizona. Later that day he meets a woman in a diner to exchange information about an event that happened a week earlier for which neither has an explanation, but which haunts the Signalman.

In a ranch house near the shore of the Salton Sea a cult leader gathers up the weak and susceptible -- the Children of the Next Level -- and offers them something to believe in and a chance for transcendence. The future is coming and they will help to usher it in.

A day after the events at the ranch house which disturbed the Signalman so deeply that he and his government sought out help from 'other' sources, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory abruptly loses contact with NASA's interplanetary probe New Horizons. Something out beyond the orbit of Pluto has made contact.

And a woman floating outside of time looks to the future and the past for answers to what can save humanity.

Just as the Signalman stood and faced the void in Agents of Dreamland, so it falls to Ptolema, a chess piece in her agency's world-spanning game, to unravel what has become tangled and unknowable.

Something strange is happening on the shores of New England. Something stranger still is happening to the world itself, chaos unleashed, rational explanation slipped loose from the moorings of the known. Two rival agencies stare across the Void at one another. Two sisters, the deadly, sickened products of experiments going back decades, desperately evade their hunters.

An invisible war rages at the fringes of our world, with unimaginable consequences and Lovecraftian horrors that ripple centuries into the future.

This edition of Caitlín R. Kiernan's Black Helicopters is an expanded and completed version of the World Fantasy Award-nominated novella of the same name.

A rundown apartment in Koreatown. A Los Angeles winter. A strung out, worn out, wrecked and used government agent is scraped up off the pavement, cleaned up, and reluctantly sent out into battle one last time.

Ellison Nicodemo has seen and done terrible things. She thought her only remaining quest was for oblivion. Then the Signalman comes calling. He wants to learn if she can stop the latest apocalypse. Ellison, once a unique and valuable asset, can barely remember why she ever fought the good fight.

Still, you don't say no to the Signalman, and the time has come to face her fears and the nightmare forces that almost destroyed her. Only Ellison can unleash the hound of Tindalos.