Lois H. Gresh is the New York Times bestselling author (six times), Publishers Weekly bestselling paperback author, Publishers Weekly bestselling paperback children’s author, and USA Today bestselling author of twenty-eight books and sixty short stories. Current books are anthology Dark Fusions: Where Monsters Lurk! (editor), story collection Eldritch Evolutions, The Divergent Companion, Innsmouth Nightmares (editor), and Cult of the Dead and Other Weird and Lovecraftian Tales. Look for recent stories in anthologies The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu, Black Wings III, Gothic Lovecraft, Madness of Cthulhu, Searchers After Horror, That Is Not Dead, Expiration Date, Dark Phantastique, Black Wings IV, Mark of the Beast, Summer of Lovecraft, Mountain Walked, Eldritch Chrome and Jews Versus Aliens.
Brian Hodge is one of those people who always has to be making something. So far, he’s made ten novels spanning horror, crime, and historical fiction, and is working on number eleven, as well as nearly 120 shorter works and five collections. He lives in Colorado, where he also likes to make music and photographs; loves everything about organic gardening except the thieving squirrels; and trains in Krav Maga and kickboxing, which are of no use at all against the squirrels. Recent and forthcoming works include Whom the Gods Would Destroy and The Weight of the Dead, both standalone novellas; Worlds of Hurt, an omnibus edition of the first four works in his Misbegotten mythos; an updated hardcover edition of Dark Advent, his early post-apocalyptic epic; Who We Are In the Dark, his next collection; and his next novel, Leaves of Sherwood.
The New York Times recently hailed Caitlín R. Kiernan as “one of our essential writers of dark fiction.” Her novels include The Red Tree (nominated for the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards) and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir (winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and the Bram Stoker Award, nominated for the Nebula, Locus, Shirley Jackson, World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and Mythopoeic awards). In 2014 she was honored with the Locus Award for short fiction (“The Road of Needles”), the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story (“The Prayer of Ninety Cats”), and a second World Fantasy Award for Best Collection (The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories).To date, her short fiction has been collected in thirteen volumes. Currently, she’s writing the graphic novel series Alabaster for Dark Horse.
Before he became one of the creators and lead writer on the Half-Life videogame series, Marc Laidlaw was an acclaimed writer of short stories and novels. His novel The 37th Mandala won the International Horror Guild Award for Best Novel. A writer at Valve since 1997, his short fiction continues to appear in various magazines and anthologies.
John Langan is the author of two collections, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (Prime, 2008) and The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies (Hippocampus, 2013), and a novel, House of Windows (Night Shade, 2009). With Paul Tremblay, he has co-edited Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (Prime, 2011). He lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with his wife, younger son, and an ark’s worth of animals.
Helen Marshall is an award-winning Canadian author, editor, and doctor of medieval studies. Her poetry and fiction have been published in Chiaroscuro, Abyss & Apex, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and Tor.com and have been reprinted in several year’s best anthologies. Her debut collection of short stories Hair Side, Flesh Side (ChiZine Publications) was named one of the top ten books of 2012 by January Magazine. It won the 2013 British Fantasy Award for Best Newcomer and was short-listed for an 2013 Aurora Award by the Canadian Society of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Her most recent book is collection Gifts for the One Who Comes After, also from ChiZine Publications.
Sarah Monette grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the three secret cities of the Manhattan Project, and now lives in a 108-year-old house in the Upper Midwest with a great many books, two cats, one grand piano, and one husband. Her PhD diploma (English Literature) hangs in the kitchen. She has published more than fifty short stories and has two short story collections The Bone Key and Somewhere Beneath Those Waves. She has written two novels (A Companion to Wolves and The Tempering of Men) and four short stories with Elizabeth Bear, and hopes to write more. Her first four novels (Melusine, The Virtu, The Mirador, Corambis) were published by Ace. Her latest novel, The Goblin Emperor, published under the pen name Katherine Addison, came out from Tor in 2014. Visit her online at sarahmonette.com and katherineaddison.com.
Mexican by birth, Canadian by inclination. Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s debut novel, Signal to Noise, about sorcery, music, and Mexico City, was released this year by Solaris. Her first collection, This Strange Way of Dying, was a finalist for The Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. She is the editor of Fractured, Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse, and other strange works. She blogs at www.silviamoreno-garcia.com.
Wilum H. Pugmire has been writing like crazy ever since S. T. Joshi moved to his home town and became Pugmire’s hypnotic mentor. Two new collections, Spectres of Lovecraftian Horror and Monstrous Aftermath, will be published this year. Pugmire is now busy assembling his second collection for Centipede Press, and is writing a second collection of Enoch Coffin stories with Jeffrey Thomas.
Specializing in dark fantasy and horror, Angela Slatter is the author of the Aurealis Award-winning The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales, the World Fantasy Award finalist Sourdough and Other Stories, Aurealis finalist Midnight and Moonshine (with Lisa L. Hannett), as well as Black-Winged Angels, The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings, and The Female Factory (again with Lisa L. Hannett). Her short stories have appeared in Fantasy, Nightmare, Lightspeed, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Fearie Tales, A Book of Horrors, and Australian, UK and U.S. “best of” anthologies. She is the first Australian to win a British Fantasy Award, holds an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing, is a graduate of Clarion South and the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, and was an inaugural Queensland Writers Fellow. She blogs at angelaslatter.com about shiny things that catch her eye.
Michael Shea learned to love the “genres” from the great Jack Vance’s Eyes of the Overworld, chance-discovered in a flophouse in Juneau when Shea was twenty-one. He tilled the field of sword-and-sorcery for more than a decade (Quest for Simbilis; In Yana, the Touch of Undying, Nifft the Lean). Concurrently he wallowed in the delights of supernatural/extraterrestrial horror, primarily in the novella form (as can be seen in the collections Polyphemus and The Autopsy and Other Tales). In the last decade or so he added homages to H. P. Lovecraft to his novella work (as in collection Copping Squid.) His novel Nifft the Lean won a World Fantasy Award, as did novella “The Growlimb.” His most recent novels are dark, satirical thrillers The Extra and Assault on Sunrise. Shea passed away on 16 February 2014.
Emmy-nominated John Shirley is a prolific writer of novels, short fiction, TV scripts, and screenplays who has published over three dozen novels and eight collections. His latest novels are Doyle After Death and his first historical novel, Wyatt in Wichita, which was published last year. As a musician Shirley has fronted his own bands and written lyrics for Blue Öyster Cult and others. In 2013 Black October Records released a two-CD compilation of Shirley’s own recordings, Broken Mirror Glass: The John Shirley Anthology. See john-shirley.com for more information.
Simon Strantzas is the author of four collections of short fiction, including Burnt Black Suns from Hippocampus Press (2014), as well as the editor of Shadows Edge (Gray Friar Press, 2013) and Aickman’s Heirs (Undertow Publications, 2015). His writing has been reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, The Best Horror of the Year, The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror; has been translated into other languages; and has been nominated for the British Fantasy Award. He lives in Toronto, Canada, with his wife and an unyielding hunger for the flesh of the living.
Charles Stross is a British SF writer, born in Leeds, England, and living in Edinburgh, Scotland. He has worked as a tech writer, a programmer, a journalist, and a pharmacist; he holds degrees in Pharmacy and in Computer Science. He has won three Hugo Award
s for his fiction—including one for the novella reprinted in this volume—and his work has been extensively praised by, among others, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman. Among Stross’s more recent novels are The Revolution Business and The Trade of Queens (in his Merchant Princes series), The Apocalypse Codex (part of the Laundry series of novels and stories), Rule 34, and, with Cory Doctorow, The Rapture of the Nerds.
Carrie Vaughn is the author of the New York Times bestselling series of novels about a werewolf named Kitty, the fourteenth and final installment of which—Kitty Saves the World—will be published this summer. She’s written several other contemporary fantasy and young adult novels, as well as upwards of seventy short stories. She’s a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared world superhero books edited by George R. R. Martin. An Air Force brat, she survived her nomadic childhood and managed to put down roots in Boulder, Colorado. Visit her at www.carrievaughn.com.
Kyla Ward is a Sydney-based creative who works in many modes. Her latest release is The Land of Bad Dreams, a collection of dark poetry. Her novel Prismatic (co-authored as Edwina Grey) won an Aurealis Award. Her short fiction has appeared on Gothic.net and in the Schemers and Macabre anthologies, amongst others. Roleplaying games, short films, and plays—if you can scare people by doing it she probably has, to the extent of programming the horror stream for the 2010 Worldcon. A practicing occultist, she likes raptors, swordplay, and the Hellfire Club. To see some very strange things, try tabula-rasa.info.
Don Webb’s most recent book is collection Through Dark Angles: Works Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft (Hippocampus Press). Webb has had sixteen books and more than four hundred short stories published. He lives in Austin, Texas and teaches creative writing for UCLA Extension,
Acknowledgments
“Mysterium Tremendum” © 2010 Laird Barron. First publication: Occultation and Other Stories (Night Shade Books, 2010).
“The Wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward” © 2012 Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette. First appearance: The Drabblecast #254 & #255, August/September 2012.
“The Litany of Earth” © 2014 Ruthanna Emrys. First publication: Tor.com, 14 May, 2014.
“Necrotic Cove” © 2013 Lois Gresh. First publication: Black Wings III, ed. S. T. Joshi (PS Publishing, 2013).
“The Same Deep Waters As You” © 2013 Brian Hodge. First publication: Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth, ed. Stephen Jones (Fedogan & Bremer, 2013).
“The Transition of Elizabeth Haskings” © 2012 Caitlín R. Kiernan. First publication: Sirenia Digest #74, January 2012.
“The Boy Who Followed Lovecraft” © 2011 Marc Laidlaw. First publication: Subterrranean Press Magazine, Winter 2011.
“Bloom” © 2012 John Langan. First publication: Black Wings II, ed. S. T. Joshi (PS Publishing, 2012).
“All My Love, A Fishhook” © 2014 Helen Marshall. First publication: Gifts for the One Who Comes After (ChiZine Publications, 2014).
“In the House of the Hummingbirds” © 2012 Silvia Moreno-Garcia. First publication: Lovecraft eZine, Issue #19, November 2012.
“They Smell of Thunder” © 2013 W. H. Pugmire. First publication: Encounters with Enoch Coffin (Dark Regions Press, 2013).
“Momma Durtt” © 2012 Michael Shea. First publication: Weird Tales #360, Fall 2012.
“At Home with Azathoth” © 2014 John Shirley. First publication: Searchers After Horror: New Tales of the Weird and Fantastic, ed. S. T. Joshi (Fedogan & Bremer, 2014).
“The Song of Sighs” © 2013 Angela Slatter. First publication: Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth, ed. Stephen Jones (Fedogan & Bremer, 2013).
“On Ice” © 2014 Simon Strantzas. First publication: Burnt Black Suns (Hippocampus Press, 2014).
“Equoid” © 2013 Charles Stross. First publication: Tor.com, 24 September, 2014.
“Fishwife” © 2013 Carrie Vaughn LLC. First publication: Nightmare, Issue 97, June 2013.
“Who Looks Back?” © 2013 Kyla Ward. First publication: Shotguns v. Cthulhu, ed. Robin D. Laws (Stone Skin Press, 2013).
“The Doom that Came to Devil Reef” © 2014 Don Webb. First publication: Through Dark Angles (Hippocampus, 2014).
Other Anthologies Edited by
Paula Guran
Embraces
Best New Paranormal Romance
Best New Romantic Fantasy
Zombies: The Recent Dead
The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2010
Vampires: The Recent Undead
The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2011
Halloween
New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird
Brave New Love
Witches: Wicked, Wild & Wonderful
Obsession: Tales of Irresistible Desire
The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2012
Extreme Zombies
Ghosts: Recent Hauntings
Rock On: The Greatest Hits of Science Fiction & Fantasy
Season of Wonder
Future Games
Weird Detectives: Recent Investigations
The Mammoth Book of Angels & Demons
The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2013
Halloween: Magic, Mystery, & the Macabre
Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales
Magic City: Recent Spells
The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2014
Zombies: More Recent Dead
Time Travel: Recent Trips
New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird Page 57