Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters
Page 45
Clive Barker was born in Liverpool in 1952. He is the author of The Books of Blood (in six volumes), The Damnation Game, Weaveworld, Cabal, The Great and Secret Show, Imajica, Everville and Sacrament as well as writing, directing and producing for the screen—his films include Hellraiser and Nightbreed. He presently lives in Los Angeles.
Laird Barron’s work has appeared in numerous anthologies. Much of it has been collected in two books, The Imago Sequence and Occultation. He lives in Olympia, Washington.
Nadia Bulkin is a writer and political science student. Her short fiction has appeared in ChiZine, Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, the anthology Bewere The Night, and elsewhere; more information is available at nadiabulkin.wordpress.com. She spent her impressionable teen years in the suburban wilds of Nebraska. Her world view (and “Absolute Zero”) was greatly influenced by her environmental science minor and the 1982 movie about life out of balance, Koyaanisqatsi.
F. Brett Cox’s fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including Century, North Carolina Literary Review, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Postscripts, and Phantom. With Andy Duncan, he co-edited Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic (Tor, 2004). A native of North Carolina, Brett is Associate Professor of English at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont, and lives in Roxbury, Vermont, with his wife, playwright Jeanne Beckwith.
Gemma Files’s first novel, A Book of Tongues: Volume One of the Hexslinger Series (ChiZine Publications), won Dark Scribe Magazine’s 2010 Black Quill “Small Press Chill” award; its sequel, A Rope of Thorns, will be released in May 2011. She also won the 1999 International Horror Guild’s Best Short Fiction award for her story “The Emperor’s Old Bones.” Learn more about her at musicatmidnight-gfiles.blogspot.com.
Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels, The Physiognomy, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl In the Glass, The Shadow Year, and the story collections, The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life. He lives in the world capital of Creatures, New Jersey, and teaches Fiction Writing and Early American Lit. at Brookdale Community College.
Christopher Golden is the author of such novels as Of Saints and Shadows, The Myth Hunters, The Boys Are Back in Town, Strangewood and, with Mike Mignola, Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire. His work for teens and young adults includes The Secret Journeys of Jack London, co-authored with Tim Lebbon, and the Body of Evidence series. His other hats include editor, screenwriter, video game scripter, and comic book creator. Golden was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives with his family. His original novels have been published in more than fourteen languages in countries around the world. Please visit him at www.christophergolden.com.
Stephen Graham Jones is the author of It Came from Del Rio, the horror collection That Ones That Got Away, and seven other books, with two more on the way from Dzanc. His stories have appeared in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Best Horror of the Year(s), and around a hundred and twenty magazines and journals. Jones teaches in the MFA program at CU Boulder. More at demontheory.net.
Alaya Dawn Johnson is the author of several short stories and three novels: Moonshine, Racing the Dark and The Burning City. She lives in New York City and can be contacted via her website www.alayadawnjohnson.com.
Michael Kelly is the author of Scratching the Surface, and Undertow and Other Laments. His short fiction has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including Best New Horror, Dark Arts, Nemonymous, PostScripts, Space & Time, Supernatural Tales, and Tesseracts 13. Michael edited the anthologies Apparitions (for which he was a Shirley Jackson Award finalist), and Chilling Tales. He also runs Undertow Publications, and its flagship publication, Shadows & Tall Trees.
Carrie Laben, formerly of Buffalo, Ithaca, and Brooklyn, is currently studying for her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Montana. As a result she has eaten more elk in the past six months than she even considered eating in the first thirty-one years of her life. Her work has previously appeared in venues such as Clarkesworld, Chizine, Haunted Legends, and the anthology Phantom. When she is not writing she looks at birds.
John Langan is the author of a novel, House of Windows (Night Shade 2009), and a collection of stories, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (Prime 2008). He lives in upstate New York with his wife, son, dog, and a trio of mutually-suspicious cats.
Sarah Langan is the author of the novels The Keeper and The Missing, and Audrey’s Door. She is currently finishing her fourth book, Empty Houses. Her work has garnered three Bram Stoker Awards, an ALA Award, a New York Times Book Review editor’s pick, a PW favorite book of the year selection, and been optioned by The Weinstein Company for film. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, daughter, and rabbit.
Joe R. Lansdale is the author of over thirty novels and eighteen short story collections. His work has appeared in numerous markets here and abroad. His work has been recognized by numerous awards, including The Edgar and seven Bram Stokers. His novella, Bubba Hotep, was filmed by Don Coscarelli and has become a cult film.
Kelly Link is the author of three collections, Pretty Monsters, Magic for Beginners and Stranger Things Happen. Her short stories have won three Nebula awards, a Hugo, a Locus and a World Fantasy Award. She was born in Miami, Florida, and once won a free trip around the world by answering the question “Why do you want to go around the world?” (“Because you can’t go through it.”) Link lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she and her husband, Gavin J. Grant, run Small Beer Press and play ping-pong. In 1996 they started the occasional zine Lady Churchill Rosebud’s Wristlet.
Robert McCammon is the bestselling author of eighteen novels, including the classic horror novels Swan Song and The Wolf’s Hour and the imaginative (tour de force?) Boy’s Life, which is taught in seventy percent of American schools. McCammon is also the author of the Matthew Corbett mystery/adventure series, set in Colonial America. His latest novel, The Five, will be published in May and follows a rock band on their final and fateful tour across the Southwest as they are pursued by a dark force of destruction. McCammon lives in Birmingham, Alabama.
China Miéville is the author of King Rat; Perdido Street Station, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Fantasy Award; The Scar, winner of the Locus Award and the British Fantasy Award; Iron Council, winner of the Locus Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award; Looking for Jake, a collection of short stories; Un Lun Dun, his New York Times bestselling book for younger readers; The City & The City, named one of the top 100 Books of the Year by Publishers Weekly; and most recently the novel Kraken. He lives and works in London.
Norman Partridge’s fiction includes horror, suspense, and the fantastic—“sometimes all in one story” says his friend Joe Lansdale. Partridge’s novel Dark Harvest was chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the 100 Best Books of 2006, and two short story collections were published in 2010—Lesser Demons from Subterranean Press and Johnny Halloween from Cemetery Dance. Other work includes the Jack Baddalach mysteries Saguaro Riptide and The Ten-Ounce Siesta, plus The Crow: Wicked Prayer, which was adapted for film. He can be found on the web at NormanPartridge.com and americanfrankenstein.blogspot.com.
Cherie Priest is the author of ten novels from Bantam, Tor, and Subterranean Press, including Dreadnought and Boneshaker—which was nominated for a Nebula Award and a Hugo Award, and won the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel—plus Bloodshot, the Eden Moore series, Clementine, and Fathom.
Brett Alexander Savory is the Bram Stoker Award-winning editor-in-chief of ChiZine: Treatments of Light and Shade in Words, co-publisher of ChiZine Publications, has had about fifty short stories published, and has written two novels, The Distance Travelled and In and Down, and one short story collection, No Further Messages. He is now at work on his third novel, Lake of Spaces, Wood of Nothing. He lives in Toronto with his wife, writer/editor Sandra Kasturi.
David J. Schow’s short stories have been regularly selected fo
r over twenty-five volumes of “Year’s Best” anthologies across two decades and have won the World Fantasy Award, the ultra-rare Dimension Award from Twilight Zone magazine, plus a 2002 International Horror Guild Award for his collection of Fangoria columns, Wild Hairs. His novels include The Kill Riff, The Shaft, Rock Breaks Scissors Cut, Bullets of Rain, Gun Work, Internecine and the forthcoming Upgunned. His short stories are collected in Seeing Red, Lost Angels, Black Leather Required, Crypt Orchids, Eye, Zombie Jam and Havoc Swims Jaded. He is the author of the exhaustively detailed Outer Limits Companion and has written extensively for films (Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, The Crow) and television (Perversions of Science, The Hunger, Masters of Horror). His bibliography and many other fascinating details are available online at his official site, Black Leather Required: www.davidjschow.com
Jim Shepard is the author of six novels, including most recently Project X, and four story collections, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize, and most recently You Think That’s Bad, released March 2011. He teaches at Williams College.
Al Sarrantonio is the author of forty-five books. He is a winner of the Bram Stoker Award and has been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award. His novels, spanning many genres, include Moonbane, The Masters of Mars trilogy and the Orangefield Halloween trilogy. Hailed as “a master anthologist” by Booklist, he has edited numerous collections, including the highly acclaimed 999 and, most recently, Portents and, with co-editor Neil Gaiman, Stories.
Paul Tremblay is the author of the weirdboiled novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland, the short story collection In the Mean Time, and the novella The Harlequin and the Train. His short fiction has appeared in Weird Tales and Year’s Best American Fantasy 3. He’s the co-editor of the anthologies Fantasy, Bandersnatch, and Phantom. He still has no uvula and lives somewhere south of Boston with his wife and two kids.
Lisa Tuttle has been writing strange, weird stories nearly all her life, and this year marks the fortieth anniversary of her first professional sale. Stranger in the House, the first volume of her “Collected Short Supernatural Fiction” was published by Ash-Tree Press in 2010. Her novels include Lost Futures, The Mysteries and The Silver Bough. A native of Texas, she presently resides with her family in the highlands of Scotland.
Genevieve Valentine’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, Apex, and others, and in the anthologies Federations, The Living Dead 2, Running with the Pack, Teeth, and more. Her nonfiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Tor.com, and Fantasy Magazine. Her first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, is forthcoming from Prime Books in 2011. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog: www.genevievevalentine.com.
Jeff VanderMeer is a two-time winner of the World Fantasy Award, with novels published in over twenty languages. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s SF Magazine, Black Clock, Conjunctions, Clarkesworld, and many anthologies. He reviews books for the New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and many others.
Publication Credits
“The Monsters of Heaven” Copyright © 2007 Nathan Ballingrud. Originally published in Inferno. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Rawhead Rex” Copyright © 1985 Clive Barker. Originally published in Books of Blood Volume 3. Reprinted by permission of the rights holder.
“Proboscis” Copyright © 2006 Laird Barron. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Absolute Zero” Copyright © 2011 Nadia Bulkin. Original to this volume.
“The Serpent and the Hatchet Gang” Copyright © 2008 F. Brett Cox. Originally published in Black Static. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Blood Makes Noise” Copyright © 1999 Gemma Files. Originally published in TransVersions. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“After Moreau” Copyright © 2008 Jeffrey Ford. Originally published in Clarkesworld. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Under Cover of Night” Copyright © 2007 Christopher Golden. Originally published in Five Strokes to Midnight. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Among Their Bright Eyes” Copyright © 2006 Alaya Dawn Johnson. Originally published in Fantasy Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Little Monsters,” Copyright © 2011 Stephen Graham Jones. Original to this volume.
“The Kraken” Copyright © 2008 Michael Kelly. Originally published in The Second Humdrumming Book of Horror Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Underneath Me, Steady Air” Copyright © 2011 Carrie Laben. Original to this volume.
“The Changeling” Copyright © 2006 Sarah Langan. Originally published in Phantom Issue Zero. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Godzilla’s Twelve Step Program” Copyright © 1994 Joe R. Lansdale. Originally appeared in Writer of the Purple Rage. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Monster” Copyright © 2005, Kelly Link. Originally published in Noisy Outlaws. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Deep End” Copyright © 1987 Robert R. McCammon. Originally published in Night Visions 4. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Familiar” Copyright © 2005 China Miéville. Originally published in Looking for Jake. Used by permission of Del Rey Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
“The Hollow Man” Copyright © 1991 Norman Partridge. Originally published in Grue Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Wishbones” Copyright © 2006 Cherie Priest. Originally published in Aegri Somnia. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Ropy Thing” Copyright © 1999 Al Sarrantonio. Originally published in 999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Machine Is Perfect, The Engineer Is Nobody” Copyright © 2008 Brett Alexander Savory. Originally published in Taddle Creek. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Not from Around Here” Copyright © 1990 David J. Schow. Originally published in Seeing Red. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Creature from the Black Lagoon” Copyright © 2004 Jim Shepard. Published in Love and Hydogren: New and Selected Stories (Vintage). Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Replacements” Copyright © 1992 Lisa Tuttle. Originally published in Metahorror. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Keep Calm and Carillon” Copyright © 2009 Genevieve Valentine. Originally published in Farrago’s Wainscot. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Third Bear” Copyright © 2007 Jeff VanderMeer. Originally published in Clarkesworld Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Table of Contents
Godzilla’s Twelve-Step Program
The Creature From the Black Lagoon
After Moreau
Among Their Bright Eyes
Under Cover of Night
The Kraken
Underneath Me, Steady Air
Rawhead Rex
Wishbones
The Hollow Man
Not From Around Here
The Ropy Thing
The Third Bear
Monster
Keep Calm and Carillon
The Deep End
The Serpent and the Hatchet Gang
Blood Makes Noise
The Machine is Perfect, The Engineer is Nobody
Proboscis
Familiar
Replacements
Little Monsters
The Changeling
The Monsters of Heaven
Absolute Zero
Biographies
Publication Credits
Paul, Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters