Love and Darker Passions

Love and Darker Passions is a collection of provocative short stories by today's up-and-coming authors of dark, urban and Gothic fantasy. Award-winning author Karen Duvall sends a Millennial Alice through a very different looking glass, and acclaimed author Lee Barwood sends the Sight-gifted bard of her upcoming series into the passionate world of faerie to hunt for a child - and find her own destiny. Bestseller C.E. Murphy reworks a favorite fairytale into a stunning perspective on what draws us into the arms of those we think we love.

And new fantasy voices offer their disturbing visions.

One man becomes enchanted by a fabled monster, another by a voice that drives him to a frenzy of self-punishing acts, and a third by the increasingly bizarre demands of his changeling girlfriend. A household appliance adores its new family and only wants to be needed - just a little more than is good for its owners, and a hexed man trusts his butler more than he does his wife. An Edenic society of loving innocents is confronted by jealous rage, and a woman too long taken for granted develops a fatal persona for whom she can at last demand her family's affection.

And these lovers! They fight curses - new, historical and ancient - to be united. They undertake epic quests to find each other. And they discover, again and again, that the shadowy third figure distorting their relationships into a triangle isn't quite what they thought it would be. For in this collection love proves to be that bloody splatter across the eons that moves at the edges of our lives, in our silences and secrets, drawing yearning hearts to hear what they were always listening for, in its indecipherable whispers in the dark.
In Love and Darker Passions, a host of edgy and cult fantasy authors combine their talents to make us question what inspires love, why we crave revenge against those who've stolen love from us, and what is it that makes us despair in the event of love's loss.