That said, I’m going to forget some of the names I should be listing here, given that it’s been four years spent on this project. Some of the conversations around it fleeting. Others drawn out over months, sometimes years. And still more just so ongoing that this book came up I don’t know how many times in the course of other conversations, had longer still.
But additional thanks are owed to Paula Guran for prior conversations about more general anthology concerns that aided very much putting this one together. Rose Lemberg and Sonya Taaffe for additional story recommendations. All of the authors for their enthusiasm and patience. Dominik Parisien for proofreading the final manuscript. Natasha Bozorgi for her work on the layout. And Erik Mohr for his work on the cover.
And to anyone else I’ve forgotten, consider yourself thanked in absentia; it is not my intention to overlook anyone’s aid. All of which has been much appreciated and very welcome.
about the authors
Nathan Ballingrud is the author of North American Lake Monsters: Stories, from Small Beer Press; and The Visible Filth, a novella from This Is Horror. His work has appeared in numerous Year’s Best anthologies, and he has twice won the Shirley Jackson Award. He lives with his daughter in Asheville, NC.
Laird Barron is the author of several books, including The Croning, Occultation, and The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. His work has also appeared in many magazines and anthologies. An expatriate Alaskan, Barron currently resides in upstate New York.
Polenth Blake lives with cockroaches and likes photographing tiny things. Polenth’s work has appeared in Nature, Strange Horizons, and Unlikely Story. More can be found at http://www.polenthblake.com.
Leah Bobet’s first novel, Above, was nominated for the 2012 Andre Norton Award and the 2013 Aurora Award, and her short fiction has appeared in several Year’s Best anthologies and as part of the online serial Shadow Unit. She lives in Toronto, Ontario, where she edits Ideomancer Speculative Fiction, picks urban apple trees, does civic engagement activism, and works as a bookseller at Bakka-Phoenix Books, Canada’s oldest science fiction bookstore. Leah’s second novel, An Inheritance of Ashes—a dustbowl-style epic fantasy with a touch of the weird—will appear from Clarion Books in the US and Scholastic in Canada in October 2015.
Indrapramit Das is a writer from Kolkata. His debut novel The Devourers (written as Indra Das) is out from Penguin Books India. His short fiction has appeared in various publications and anthologies including Asimov’s Science Fiction, Tor.com, Strange Horizons, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction (St. Martin’s Griffin). He has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and is a grateful graduate of the 2012 Clarion West Writers’ Workshop and a recipient of the Octavia E. Butler Scholarship Award.
Berit Ellingsen is the author of one short story collection, Beneath the Liquid Skin (firthFORTH Books 2012), and two novels, Une Ville Vide (PublieMonde 2013), and Landscapes, Fragments (Two Dollar Radio 2015). Berit’s work has appeared in W.W. Norton’s Flash Fiction International Anthology, the Litro Blog, SmokeLong Quarterly, Unstuck, and other places, and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the British Science Fiction Award. Find out more at http://beritellingsen.com.
Film critic and teacher turned award-winning horror author Gemma Files is best known for her Weird Western Hexslinger series (A Book of Tongues, A Rope of Thorns, and A Tree of Bones, all from ChiZine Publications). Her short fiction has been collected in two volumes (Kissing Carrion and The Worm in Every Heart), as well as a story cycle, We Will All Go Down Together: Stories of the Five-Family Coven (CZP), and her poetry has been collected in two chapbooks (Bent Under Night and Dust Radio). Her next novel, Experimental Film, will also be published by CZP. Why mess with success?
Neil Gaiman is the bestselling author of books for adults and children. The recipient of numerous awards, his works have been adapted for film, television, stage, and radio. Some of Neil’s most notable titles include the novels The Graveyard Book (the first book to ever win both the Newbery and Carnegie medals), American Gods, and the UK’s National Book Award 2013 Book of the Year, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. His enchantingly reimagined fairy tale, The Sleeper and the Spindle (illustrated by Chris Riddell) was published in September. Born in England, Neil now lives in the US with his wife, the musician and author, Amanda Palmer.
Maria Dahvana Headley is the author of the young adult fantasy novel Magonia (HarperCollins), the dark fantasy/alt-history novel Queen of Kings (Dutton), and the internationally bestselling memoir The Year of Yes (Hyperion). With Neil Gaiman, she is the New York Times-bestselling co-editor of the anthology Unnatural Creatures (HarperChildrens), benefitting 826DC. With Kat Howard, she is the author of the novella The End of the Sentence (Subterranean Press)—recently named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2014. Her Nebula and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated short fiction has recently appeared in Lightspeed, Uncanny, Nightmare, Tor.com, Apex, The Journal of Unlikely Entomology, Subterranean Online, and many more, as well as in many Year’s Bests.
She lives in Brooklyn in an apartment shared with a seven-foot-long stuffed crocodile, and a heap of French anatomical charts from the 1950s.
Kij Johnson is the author of several novels, including The Fox Woman and Fudoki; a short story collection, At the Mouth of the River of Bees; and about fifty short stories. She is a three-time winner of the Nebula Award, and has also won the Hugo, World Fantasy, Sturgeon, and Crawford Awards. She teaches at the University of Kansas, where she is associate director for the Center for the Study of Science Fiction.
Joe R. Lansdale is the author of over 40 novels and three hundred short works of fiction and non-fiction. He has received The Edgar Award and 9 Bram Stokers, including Lifetime Achievement. He has written for animation, film, and comics. His story Bubba Ho-Tep has been filmed, as has his novel Cold In July. His newest novel is Paradise Sky.
Yoon Ha Lee’s work has appeared in Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other venues. Their collection Conservation of Shadows came out from Prime Books in 2013. They live in Louisiana with family and have not yet been eaten by gators.
Rose Lemberg is a queer immigrant from Eastern Europe. Her work has appeared in Apex, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Interfictions, and other venues. Rose edits Stone Telling, a magazine of boundary-crossing poetry, with Shweta Narayan. She has edited Here, We Cross, an anthology of queer and genderfluid speculative poetry from Stone Telling (Stone Bird Press), and The Moment of Change, an anthology of feminist speculative poetry (Aqueduct Press), and is currently editing a new fiction anthology, An Alphabet of Embers. You can find rose Rose at http://roselemberg.net and @roselemberg, and support her on Patreon at patreon.com/roselemberg.
Livia Llewellyn is a writer of horror, dark fantasy, and erotica, whose fiction has appeared in ChiZine, Subterranean, Apex Magazine, Postscripts, Nightmare Magazine, as well as numerous anthologies. Her first collection, Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors, was published in 2011 by Lethe Press, and received two Shirley Jackson Award nominations, for Best Collection, and Best Novelette (for “Omphalos”). Her story “Furnace” received a 2013 SJA nomination for Best Short Fiction. You can find her online at liviallewellyn.com.
Alex Dally MacFarlane is a writer, editor and historian. When not researching narrative maps in the legendary traditions of Alexander III of Macedon, she writes stories, found in Clarkesworld, Interfictions Online, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and the anthologies Phantasm Japan, Solaris Rising 3, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2014. She is the editor of Aliens: Recent Encounters (2013) and The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (2014). In 2015, she joined Sofia Samatar as co-editor of non-fiction and poetry for Interfictions Online. For Tor.com, she runs the Post-Binary Gender in SF column. Find her on Twitter: @foxvertebrae.
Michael Matheson is a genderfluid writer, editor, poet, book reviewer, and sometime
anthologist. They’re a graduate of the 2014 Clarion West Writers’ Workshop, and their fiction and poetry has appeared in Ideomancer, Stone Telling, and a handful of anthologies. They live in Toronto. The Humanity of Monsters is their first anthology as editor. Find them online at http://michaelmatheson.wordpress.com, or on Twitter @sekisetsu.
Meghan McCarron’s fiction and essays have recently appeared in The Toast, The Collagist, Electric Literature, and Gigantic Worlds. She has been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards.
Sunny Moraine’s short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Uncanny, and Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, among other places. They are also responsible for the novels Line and Orbit (co-written with Lisa Soem) and the Casting the Bones trilogy, as well as Labyrinthian, and A Brief History of the Future: collected essays. In addition to authoring, Sunny is a doctoral candidate in sociology and a sometimes college instructor; that last may or may not have been a good move on the part of their department. They unfortunately live just outside Washington DC in a creepy house with two cats and a very long-suffering husband.
Mexican by birth, Canadian by inclination, Silvia Moreno-Garcia is the author of Signal to Noise, a novel about music, magic, and Mexico City. Her first collection, This Strange Way of Dying, was a finalist for The Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. Her stories have also been collected in Love & Other Poisons. She can be found at http://www.silviamoreno-garcia.com.
Chinelo Onwualu is a writer, editor, journalist, and dog person living in Abuja, Nigeria. She is a graduate of the 2014 Clarion West Writers’ Workshop which she attended as the recipient of the Octavia E. Butler Scholarship. Her writing has appeared in several places, including the Kalahari Review, Saraba Magazine, Sentinel Nigeria Magazine, Jungle Jim Magazine, and the anthologies AfroSF: African Science Fiction by African Writers and Mothership: Tales of Afrofuturism and Beyond. She runs Sylvia Fairchild Editorial Services, a consultancy providing writing, research, and editing services to individuals and organisations. Follow her on Twitter @chineloonwualu.
Sofia Samatar is the author of the novel A Stranger in Olondria, the Hugo and Nebula nominated short story “Selkie Stories Are for Losers,” and other works. She is the winner of the John W. Campbell Award, the Crawford Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. She is a co-editor for Interfictions: A Journal of Interstitial Arts, and teaches literature and writing at California State University Channel Islands.
Rachel Swirsky holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Hugo Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Locus Award, and received the Nebula Award twice. She is not a dinosaur, but if she were, she’d want to be a feathered one.
Sonya Taaffe’s short fiction and poetry can be found in the collections Ghost Signs (Aqueduct Press), A Mayse-Bikhl (Papaveria Press), Postcards from the Province of Hyphens (Prime Books), and Singing Innocence and Experience (Prime Books), and in anthologies including Aliens: Recent Encounters, Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction, The Moment of Change: An Anthology of Feminist Speculative Poetry, People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Alchemy of Stars: Rhysling Award Winners Showcase, and The Best of Not One of Us. She is currently senior poetry editor at Strange Horizons; she holds master’s degrees in Classics from Brandeis and Yale and once named a Kuiper belt object. She lives in Somerville with her husband and two cats.
Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lambda, Locus, and Hugo awards. She has been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with a small but growing menagerie of beasts, some of which are human.
Bram Stoker Nominee and Shirley Jackson Award winner Kaaron Warren has lived in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Fiji. Kaaron has written about monsters in many of her short stories and novels, including serial killers (Slights), vampires who steal the will to survive (“All You Can Do is Breathe”) and magicians (Mistification). Her most recent short story collections are The Gate Theory, from Cohesion Press, and Cemetery Dance Select: Kaaron Warren from the Cemetery Dance series of that name.
Peter Watts is a multi-award-winning SF author, marine biologist, flesh-eating-disease survivor and convicted felon whose novels—despite an unhealthy focus on Space Vampires—are required texts for undergraduate courses ranging from Philosophy to Neuropsychology. His work is available in 18 languages. He also likes cats.
A.C. Wise is the author of numerous short stories appearing in publications such as Clarkesworld, Shimmer, Uncanny, and the Year’s Best Weird Fiction Vol. 1, among others. In addition to her writing, she co-edits Unlikely Story. Her first collection, The Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron Saves the World Again, is available from Lethe Press. Visit her online at www.acwise.net.
copyright / acknowledgements
“Tasting Gomoa” by Chinelo Onwualu. Copyright © 2014 Chinelo Onwualu. First published in Ideomancer Speculative Fiction 13.3. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Dead Sea Fruit” by Kaaron Warren. Copyright © 2006 Kaaron Warren. First published in Fantasy Magazine #4. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Bread We Eat in Dreams” by Catherynne M. Valente. Copyright © 2011 Catherynne M. Valente. First published in Apex Magazine #30. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Emperor’s Old Bones” by Gemma Files. Copyright © 1998 Gemma Files. First published in Northern Frights #5. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Things” by Peter Watts. Copyright © 2010 Peter Watts. First published in Clarkesworld Magazine #40. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“muo-ka’s Child” by Indrapramit Das. Copyright © 2012 Indrapramit Das. First published in Clarkesworld Magazine #72. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Six” by Leah Bobet. Copyright © 2009 Leah Bobet. First published in Clockwork Phoenix 2. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Nazir” by Sofia Samatar. Copyright © 2012 Sofia Samatar. First published in Ideomancer Speculative Fiction 11:1. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“A Handful of Earth” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Copyright © 2011 Silvia Moreno-Garcia. First published in Expanded Horizons Issue 30. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“In Winter” by Sonya Taaffe. Copyright © 2014 Sonya Taaffe. First published in Lackington’s #3. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Ghostweight” by Yoon Ha Lee. Copyright © 2011 Yoon Ha Lee. First published in Clarkesworld Magazine #52. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“How to Talk to Girls at Parties” by Neil Gaiman. Copyright © 2006 Neil Gaiman. First published in Fragile Things. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Night They Missed the Horror Show” by Joe R. Lansdale. Copyright © 1988 Joe Lansdale. First published in Silver Scream. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love” by Rachel Swirsky. Copyright © 2013 Rachel Swirsky. First published in Apex Magazine #46. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream” by Maria Dahvana Headley. Copyright © 2012 Maria Dahvana Headley. First published in Lightspeed Magazine #26. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Horse Latitudes” by Sunny Moraine. Copyright © 2013 Sunny Moraine. First published in Ideomancer Speculative Fiction 12:1. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Boyfriend and Shark” by Berit Ellingsen. Copyright © 2011 Berit Ellingsen. First published in COFFINMOUTH Issue 1: Dreams Eat Themselves. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Mantis Wives” by Kij Johnson. Copyright © 2012 Kij Johnson. First published in Clarkesworld Magazine #71. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Proboscis” by Laird Barron. Copyright © 2005 Laird Barron. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction February 2005. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Out They Come” by Alex Dally MacFarlane. Copyright © 2013 Alex Dally MacFarlane. First published in Shimmer #17. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“and Love shall have no Dominion” by Livia Llewellyn. Copyright © 2011 Livia Llewellyn. First published in Demons: Encounters with the Devil and His Minions, Fallen Angels, and the Possessed. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“You Go Where It Takes You” by Nathan Ballingrud. Copyright © 2003 Nathan Ballingrud. First published in Sci Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife” by A.C Wise. Copyright © 2014 A.C. Wise. First published in Shimmer #21. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Theories of Pain” by Rose Lemberg. Copyright © 2013 Rose Lemberg. First published in Daily Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Terrible Lizards” by Meghan McCarron. Copyright © 2014 Meghan McCarron. First published in The Collagist #54. Reprinted by permission of the author.
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