Dear Sweet Filthy World
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
What exactly is the difference between a love letter and a suicide note? Is there really any difference at all? These might be the questions posed by Dear Sweet Filthy World, Caitlin R. Kiernan's fourteenth collection of short fiction, comprised of twenty-eight uncollected and impossible-to-find stories.
Treading the grim places where desire and destruction, longing and horror intersect, the author rises once again to meet the high expectations she set with such celebrated collections as Tales of Pain and Wonder, To Charles Fort, With Love, and the World Fantasy Award-winning The Ape's Wife and Other Stories. In these pages you'll meet a dragon's lover, a drowned vampire cursed always to ride the tides, a wardrobe that grants wishes, and a lunatic artist's marriage of the Black Dahlia and the Beast of Gévaudan. You'll visit a ruined post-industrial Faerie, travel back to tropical Paleozoic seas and ahead to the far-flung future, and you'll meet a desperate writer forced to sell her memories for new ideas. Here are twenty-eight tales of apocalypse and rebirth, of miraculous transformation and utter annihilation. Here is the place where professing your undying devotion might be precisely the same thing as signing your own death warrant or worse.
The stories in Dear Sweet Filthy World were first published in the subscription-only Sirenia Digest, run by Caitlin for her most devoted readers. This publication marks the first availability to the general public for most of these rare tales.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The 28 stories (most previously available only in her e-zine, Sirenia Digest) in Kiernan's newest collection of dark fiction (after Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea) explore the human and inhuman conditions in all their filthy glory, and bravely wallow in the effluvia of mythology, murder, and depravity. The Red Riding Hood esque, downright scary "Werewolf Smile" is about a woman whose flighty lover becomes a muse for an artist obsessed with the murder of Elizabeth Short (aka the Black Dahlia); the tale explores the intersection of violence and art. Kiernan puts her paleontology roots to good use in the atmospheric "Paleozoic Annunciation," about a paleontologist who travels half a billion years back to a vast ocean as an ambassador to another species, and comes back dramatically changed. The grotesque underground carny attraction in "The Eighth Veil" isn't for the "squeams," and "Another Tale of Two Cities" is about a woman who surrenders to the "builders" inside of her. Perfectly bookending the collection is the disturbing "Interstate Love Song (Murder Ballad #8)," in which incestuous twins murder and torture their way through the American South until the tables are turned on them. Unflinching, raw sexuality and grim imagery pervade the collection. Kiernan's dense, meandering style may not appeal to everyone, but her many fans will be overjoyed to have these works collected.
