Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart
Page 35
To pervert, from the Latin pervertere: to turn round or turn about, to turn a thing from its rightful course and send it in another direction altogether, now used almost solely in the sexual sense or the sense of ideological distortion. In quae miracula... verteris? one of Ovid’s characters asks another, mid-transformation—What astonishing thing are you turning into? (A dolphin, as it happens. Do not mistreat Dionysos, virginea puerum... forma, a boy with a maiden’s look.) It is an alterity that would be recognized by more characters than Medon or Tess Brockett, though some of them would also count it a gift. It is the twists and bends the author gives to familiar elements of myth and folklore as they are retold and repurposed in the telling, so that neither mermaids nor harpies nor satyrs can look quite the same when these stories are done with them. And it is a depravity, if it is a depravity, or a release, if it is a release, which is not confined to the turning page. Reader, you have let the writer in. You have allowed her stories to enter you and they must, like any foreign introduction, effect a change. (In the red book of “The Peril of Liberated Objects, or The Voyeur’s Seduction,” rape is committed by one archetypal figure of innocence on another while the woman reading reaches climax: “‘She perceives the unicorn’s every violent thrust, but is no less the victim than the rapist, no more the ravager than she is the ravaged, broken maiden. And she won Id have it no other way.” Did you read the story? Were you her, too? Is that perverted? Discuss.) At the end of this book, you also lie broken and transformed. Or perhaps you are admiring your tattoos. Either way, Caitlín R. Kiernan has changed you, and like all the best metamorphoses, it is not over yet.
Closing Epigraph
It is that sinister enchantment which derives from a profound evil that is kept at just the right distance from us so that we may experience both our love and our fear of it in one sweeping sensation.
Thomas Ligotti, “Nethescurial” (1991)
The preceding stories first appeared in Sirenia Digest, Issues Nos. 23-41, October 2007-May 2009. The author would like to thank all the people who have made, and continue to make, the Digest possible, beginning with the subscribers, and including William K. Schafer, Vince Locke, Kathryn Pollnac, Jacob Garbe, Gordon Duke, Sonya Taaffe, and Geoffrey H. Goodwin. You guys still keep the wolves at bay.
“Subterraneous” and “Fecunditatum (Murder Ballad No. 6)” originally appeared as “Untitled 31” and “Untitled 33,” respectively. “Murder Ballad No. 7” originally appeared as “Murder Ballad No. 6.” Also, the Elder Sign as depicted in “At the Gate of Deeper Slumber” follows August Derleth’s version, and for that I apologize to the memory of Lovecraft.
About the Author
Trained as a vertebrate paleontologist, Caitlín R. Kiernan did not turn to fiction writing until 1992. Since then, she has published eight novels—The Five of Cups, Silk, Threshold, Low Red Moon, Murder if Angels, Daughter of Hounds, The Red Tree, and, most recently, The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. Her short fiction has been collected in Tales of Pam and Wonder; Wrong Things (with Poppy Z. Brite); From Weird and Distant Shores; the World Fantasy Award-nominated Alabaster and To Charles Fort, With Love; and A is for Alien. She has also published a short sf novel, The Dry Salvages, and two volumes of erotica, Frog Toes and Tentacles and Tales from the Woeful Platypus. She has scripted graphic novels for DC Vertigo, including thirty-eight issues of The Dreaming and the mini-series The Girl Who Would Be Death and Bast: Eternity Game. In 2012, she will return to comics with Alabaster (Dark Horse). Her many chapbooks have included Trilobite: The Writing of Threshold, The Mere wife, and The Black Alphabet. In 2011, Subterranean Press released a retrospective of her early work, Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One). She recently completed her next novel, Blood Oranges.
VERSION HISTORY
VERSION #: v3.0
SIGIL VERSION USED: 0.7.2
ORIGINAL FORMAT: ePub
DATE CREATED: April 20, 2013
LAST EDITED: April 20, 2013
CORRECTION HISTORY:
VERSION HISTORY FRAMEWORK FOR THIS BOOK:
v0.0/UC ==> This is a book that that's been scanned, OCR'd and converted into HTML or EPUB. It is completely raw and uncorrected. I do essentially no text editing within the OCR software itself, other than to make sure that every page has captured the appropriate scanning area, and recognized it as the element (text, picture, table, etc.) that it should be.
v1.0 ==> All special style and paragraph formatting from the OCR product is removed, except for italics and small-caps (where they are being used materially, and not as first-line-of-a-new-chapter eye-candy). Unstyled, chapter & sub-chapter headings are applied. ~35 search templates which use Regular Expressions have been applied to correct common transcription errors: faulty character replacement like "die" instead of "the", "comer" instead of "corner", "1" instead of "I"; misplaced punctuation marks; missing quotation marks; rejoining broken lines; breaking run-on dialogue, etc.
v2.0 ==> Page-by-page comparison against the original scan/physical book, to format scenebreaks (the blank space between paragraph denoting an in-chapter break), blockquotes, chapter heading, and all other special formatting. This also includes re-breaking some lines (generally from poetry or song lyrics that have been blockquoted in the original book) that were incorrectly joined during the v1 general correction process.
v3.0 ==> Spellchecked in Sigil (an epub editor). My basic goal in this version is to catch most non-words, and all indecipherable words (i.e., those that would require the original text in order to properly interpret). Also, I try to add in diacritics whenever appropriate. In other words, I want to get the book in shape so that someone who wants to make full readthrough corrections will be able to do so without access to the original physical book.
v4.0 ==> I've done a complete readthrough of the book, and have made any corrections to errors caught in the process. This version level is probably comparable in polish to a physical retail book.
SOME ADDITIONAL NOTES:
vX.1-9 ==> within my own framework, these smaller incremental levels are completely unstandardized. What it means is that I—or you!—have made some minor corrections or adjustment that leave me somewhere between "vX" and "vX+1". It's very unlikely that I'll ever use these decimal adjustments on anything less than a "v3".
Correcting my ebooks — Even at their best, I've yet to read one of my v3.0s that was completely error free. For those of you inclined to make corrections to those books I post (v3, v4, v5, and all points in between), I gratefully welcome the help. However, I would urge you to make those correction in the original EPUB file using Sigil or some other HTML editor, and not in a converted file. The reason is this: when you convert a file, the code—and occasionally the formatting—is altered. If you make corrections in this altered version, in order to use that "corrected" version, I'm going to have to reformat it all over again from scratch, which is at best hugely inefficient and at worst impossible (if, say, I no longer have an original copy available). More likely, I'll just end up doing the full readthrough myself on my file and discarding all of your hard work. Unlike some of the saintly retail posters who contribute books that they have no interest whatsoever in reading, I never create a book that I don't want to read... at least a little. So, having to do a full readthrough on my own books isn't really going to put me out, but it will mean that the original editor's work (i.e. your work )will have been completely wasted, and I'd feel more than slightly crummy about that. So, to re-cap, I am endlessly grateful to those who add further polish to the books I make, but it's only an efficient use of your time if you make corrections in the original EPUB file as you downloaded it.
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