Search Worlds Without End

A swan princess hunted for her bones, a broken musician and his silver pipe, and a rat named Maurice bring justice to a town under fell enchantment. A gang of courageous kids confronts both a plague-destroyed world and an afterlife infested with clowns but robbed of laughter. In an island city, the murder of a child unites two lovers, but vengeance will part them. Only human sacrifice will save a city trapped in ice and darkness. Gold spun out of straw has a price, but not the one you expect.

World Fantasy Award winner Ellen Kushner has called Cooney's writing "stunningly delicious! Cruel, beautiful and irresistible." Bone Swans, the infernally whimsical debut collection from C. S. E. Cooney, gathers five novellas that in the words of Andre Norton Award winner Delia Sherman are "bawdy, horrific, comic, and moving-frequently all at the same time." Cooney's mentor, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master Gene Wolfe, proclaims in his introduction that her style is so original it can only be described as "pure Cooney," and he offers readers a challenge: "Try to define that when you've finished the stories in this book."

Table of Contents:

• Introducing C. S. E. Cooney - essay by Gene Wolfe
• Life on the Sun - (2013) - novelette
• The Bone Swans of Amandale - (2015) - novella
• Martyr's Gem - (2013) - novella
• How the Milkmaid Struck a Bargain With the Crooked One - (2013) - novella
• The Big Bah-Ha - (2011) - novella

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Clockwork Phoenix 3: New Tales of Beauty and Strangeness (2010), edited by Mike Allen. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011, edited by Rich Horton.

Listen to the full story for free at PodCastle.

In Desdemona and the Deep, the spoiled daughter of a rich mining family must retrieve the tithe of men her father promised to the world below. On the surface, her world is rife with industrial pollution that ruins the health of poor factory workers while the idle rich indulge themselves in unheard-of luxury. Below are goblins, mysterious kingdoms, and an entirely different hierarchy.

This is a novella of approximately 42,000 words.

This novella originally appeared on Giganotosaurus, May 1, 2013. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2014, edited by Rich Horton. The story is included in the collection Bone Swans: Stories (2015).

Read the full story for free at Giganotosaurus.

Short story originally published in Subterranean Press Magazine, Summer 2007, where it can still be read for free.

Nebula-nominated Novella

This is a riff on the Pied Piper story, told by a shapeshifting rat who's in love with a shapeshifting Swan Princess. This one has that mythic logic, too: it's all about sacrifices made at the right time for the right reasons, getting back things that aren't quite what you wanted, and the very hard reality of ritual magic. The tone is irreverent and offbeat, almost too much so at points, but it works; without the protagonist's rattishness, the story might come across as far too stuffy or overblown. Instead, the odd mix of tones makes for a fairly compelling story of magic people and magic places. -- Brit Mandelo, Tor.com

Collected in The Bone Swans (2015). The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2016, edited by Paula Guran.

Read this story online for free at the publisher's website.

This short story originally appeared on Strange Horizons, 7 March 2011. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2012, edited by Rich Horton.

Read the full story for free at Strange Horizons.

This short story originally appeared in Uncanny Magazine, September-October 2017. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Twelve (2018), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2018, edited by Rich Horton.

Read the full story for free at Uncanny.

Short story originally published in Subterranean Press Magazine, Winter 2009, where it can still be read for free.

Elliot Howell is a rising star in the Seafall painting community. He has a promising career as a portrait artist, good friends, and a fabulously wealthy patroness. In other words, he has everything to lose.

Queen Nyx rules the Gentry court in Valwode, the magic country between the mortal world and Bana the Bone Kingdom where goblins dwell. She is powerful, and beautiful, and wise beyond all imagining, but her heir is planning a coup to overthrow her and tear the Antler Crown from her brow.

Elliot and Nyx meet at Breaker House, a building anchored in all three worlds: mortal, Gentry, and goblin. For Elliot, seeing Nyx is love at first sight. For Nyx, loving a mortal man may mean giving up her crown, her country, and her eternal life.

But some things are worth any price.

This novella was reprinted in Lightspeed, October 2017.

Sculptor Gideon Alderwood can't decide if he worships Analise or loathes her. Novelist Analise Field is pretty sure that if Gideon cuts her one more time with the sharp side of his tongue, she'll grab a sledgehammer and break something other than his beautiful clay statues.

Neither can bear to live more than one wall apart from each other in the Seafall city garret they call home.

Gideon is determined that Analise will never discover the secret of his statues, lest her life be in as much danger as his. He will do anything to protect her, even if it means destroying their tenuous chance to be together. Analise will not stand by and watch any friend of hers fight an impossible war alone. If she has to walk through the shifting walls of Breaker House and into another world to help him, that's what she'll do.

But in order to go up against a magical Gentry army, Analise Field needs allies. Maybe even one she has to steal right out from under Gideon Alderwood's nose.

This novella can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016, edited by Rich Horton.

Nothing complicates life like Death.

Lanie Stones, the daughter of the Royal Assassin and Chief Executioner of Liriat, has never led a normal life. Born with a gift for necromancy and a literal allergy to violence, she was raised in isolation in the family's crumbling mansion by her oldest friend, the ancient revenant Goody Graves.

When her parents are murdered, it falls on Lanie and her cheerfully psychotic sister Nita to settle their extensive debts or lose their ancestral home--and Goody with it. Appeals to Liriat's ruler to protect them fall on indifferent ears... until she, too, is murdered, throwing the nation's future into doubt.

Hunted by Liriat's enemies, hounded by her family's creditors and terrorised by the ghost of her great-grandfather, Lanie will need more than luck to get through the next few months--but when the goddess of Death is on your side, anything is possible.

This short story originally appeared on Strange Horizons, 21 July 2014. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015, edited by Rich Horton.

Read the full story for free at Strange Horizons.