Dark Breakers
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- ¥1,000
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- ¥1,000
発行者による作品情報
World Fantasy Award finalist for Best Story Collection
Locus Award finalist for Best Story Collection
"Welcome to a Gilded Era like you've never before known and will never be able to forget … If Titania herself were to commission a book, it would be this one."
—Fran Wilde, two-time Nebula Award-winning author of Updraft and Riverland
"Cooney's lush follow-up to Desdemona and the Deep offers five stories linked by an intricate shared world … Throughout, Cooney's descriptions are extravagant and gorgeous, and the musical cadence of her prose makes it exceptionally easy to be drawn into the worlds she weaves … Romantic fantasy readers will find a lot to love."
—Publishers Weekly
A young human painter and an ageless gentry queen fall in love over spilled wine-at the risk of his life and her immortality. Pulled into the Veil Between Worlds, two feuding neighbors (and a living statue) get swept up in a brutal war of succession. An investigative reporter infiltrates the Seafall City Laundries to write the exposé of a lifetime, and uncovers secrets she never believed possible. Returning to an oak grove to scatter her husband's ashes, an elderly widow meets an otherworldly friend, who offers her a momentous choice. Two gentry queens of the Valwode plot to hijack a human rocketship and steal the moon out of the sky.
Dark Breakers gathers three new and two previously uncollected tales from World Fantasy Award-winning writer C. S. E. Cooney that expand on the thrice-enfolded worlds first introduced in her Locus and World Fantasy award-nominated novella Desdemona and the Deep. In her introduction to Dark Breakers, Crawford Award-winning author Sharon Shinn advises those who pick up this book to "settle in for a fantastical read" full of "vivid world-building, with layer upon layer of detail; prose so dense and gorgeous you can scoop up the words like handfuls of jewels; a mischievous sense of humor; and a warm and hopeful heart."
"C. S. E. Cooney's prose is like a cake baked by the fairies—beautifully layered, rich and precise, so delicious that it should be devoured with a silver fork."
—Theodora Goss, World Fantasy and Mythopoeic Award-winning author of The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club series
"Dark Breakers is compounded of voluptuous invention and ferocious structural loves—for new romances and old friends, for the works of hands, for mortality and its gifts, and all the possibilities of worlds bleeding, weeping, wandering into each other's arms."
—Kathleen Jennings, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Flyaway
"Few people create worlds as lavish and sensual as those that spring from Cooney's effervescent imagination . . . gentry-magic spun into pages and paragraphs of glittering, fizzing, jaw-dropping beauty."
—Cassandra Khaw, British Fantasy Award-nominated author of The All-Consuming World
MORE PRAISE FOR C. S. E. COONEY
"C. S. E. Cooney is one of the most moving, daring, and plainly beautiful voices to come out of recent fantasy. She's a powerhouse with a wink in her eye and a song in each pocket."
—Catherynne M. Valente, New York Times-bestselling author of Space Opera
"C. S. E. Cooney's imagination is wild and varied, her stories bawdy, horrific, comic, and moving-frequently all at the same time."
—Delia Sherman, author of The Evil Wizard Smallbone
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cooney's lush follow-up to Desdemona and the Deep offers five stories linked by an intricate shared world. Two members of the royal line of the magical gentry race plan a heist of the moon in a hijacked spacecraft in "Sussura to the Moon." Nyx, the queen of the gentry, falls hopelessly in love with a mortal painter, risking her antlered crown and both their lives in "The Breaker Queen." "The Two Paupers" sees two humans, a sculptor and a novelist, put their charged, contentious relationship to the test as they lock horns with the forces of the gentry. An intrepid journalist uncovers horrors as she investigates a private institution for those too magic adjacent to be allowed in polite society in "Salissay's Laundries." A grieving widow goes to the forest to scatter her husband's ashes and is surprised by an impossible invitation in "Longergreen." Throughout, Cooney's descriptions are extravagant and gorgeous, and the musical cadence of her prose makes it exceptionally easy to be drawn into the worlds she weaves. Though the focus on worldbuilding sometimes eclipses narrative consistency and plot development, the rococo flourishes and delicious sensory description anchor the overarching story nicely as its different strands come together. Romantic fantasy readers will find a lot to love.
