Winner of the Nebula and WSFA Short Fiction Awards. Includes "The Tomato Thief" winner of 2017 Hugo Award - Best Novelette From award-winning author T. Kingfisher comes a collection of short stories, including "Jackalope Wives," "The Tomato Thief," "Pocosin," and many others. By turns funny, lyrical, angry and beautiful, this anthology includes two all-new stories, "Origin Story" and "Let Pass The Horses Black," appearing for the first time in print.
"Summer is a perfectly ordinary 11 year old girl with a perfectly ordinary, needy, over protective single mother. Summer loves her mother and would never dream of running away, but wonders deep down if it wouldn't be nice to escape for a little while and do something adventurous...maybe? Baba Yaga comes along in her magical walking house and offers Summer her heart's desire. Summer has no idea what this might be, but with the lighting of a frog-shaped beeswax candle she finds herself transported to the strange would of Orcus with nothing but a weasel in her pocket. She's read a lot of fantasy books about people thrust into strange lands; but they usually seemed to have has some idea what they were supposed to do there." -- back cover
Oliver was a very minor mage. His familiar reminded him of this several times a day. He only knew three spells, and one of them was to control his allergy to armadillo dander. He was a very minor mage. Unfortunately, he was all they had.
This anthology collects some of the best original short fiction published in Apex Magazine in its first six years. The stories include our numerous award-nominated works, our readers' Story of the Year selections, and personal favorites chosen by Apex Magazine editor-in-chief Jason Sizemore and managing editor Lesley Conner. TABLE OF CONTENTS Jackalope Wives by Ursula Vernon Going Endo by Rich Larson Candy Girl by Chikodili Emelumadu If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love by Rachel Swirsky Advertising at the End of the World Keffy R.M. Kehrli The Performance Artist by Lettie Prell A Matter of Shapespace by Brian Trent Falling Leaves by Liz Argall Blood from Stone by Alethea Kontis Sexagesimal by Katharine E.K. Duckett Keep Talking by Marie Vibbert Remembery Day by Sarah Pinsker Blood on Beacon Hill by Russell Nichols The Green Book by Amal El-Mohtar L’esprit de L’escalier by Peter M. Ball Still Life (A Sexagesimal Fairy Tale) by Ian Tregillis Build a Dolly by Ken Liu Multo by Samuel Marzioli Armless Maidens of the American West by Genevieve Valentine Pocosin by Ursula Vernon She Gave Her Heart, He Took Her Marrow by Sam Fleming Also includes a foreword by Jason Sizemore and afterword by Lesley Conner.
Robert Repino concludes the War with No Name series in an explosive final novel. Over a decade has passed since the ant queen began her apocalyptic war with the humans. In the aftermath, she leaves behind a strange legacy: a race of uplifted animals, the queen’s conscripts in the war effort, now trying to make their way in the world they destroyed. While the conflict has left deep scars, it has also allowed both sides to demonstrate feats of courage and compassion that were never possible before. And now, after years of bloodshed, the survivors have a fleeting chance to build a lasting peace. But peace always comes with a price. The holy city of Hosanna—where animals and humans form a joint government—finds itself surrounded by wolves who are determined to retake the land. A powerful matriarch has united the rival wolf packs, using a terrible power harnessed from the Queen herself. Soon, the looming violence pulls in those who sought to escape. The war hero Mort(e) suspects a plot to destroy Hosanna from within, and recruits a team of unlikely allies to investigate. Falkirk, captain of the airship Vesuvius, must choose between treason and loyalty to save the city. And D’Arc, sailing aboard the al-Rihla, learns that the wolves may have triggered a new cycle of life for the Colony, bringing a final reckoning to animal and human alike. Once reunited, the three outcasts begin a journey into wolf territory to face the last remnant of the queen’s empire. But while destiny has drawn them together, it may destroy them as well, for even love, courage, and honor may not be enough to stop the forces of destruction set to be unleashed on the world.
When Gerta¿s friend Kay is stolen away by the mysterious Snow Queen, it¿s up to Gerta to find him. Her journey will take her through a dangerous land of snow and witchcraft, accompanied only by a bandit and a talking raven. Can she win her friend¿s release, or will following her heart take her to unexpected places? A strange, sly retelling of Hans Christian Andersen¿s "Snow Queen," by T. Kingfisher, author of "Bryony and Roses" and "The Seventh Bride."
An exquisitely eerie and unsettling speculative novel that grapples with questions of trauma, identity, and the workings of memory Months after her sister’s death, Marianne wakes up to find a growth of thick black hairs along her spine. They defy her attempts to remove them, instead proliferating, growing longer. The hairs, Marianne’s doctor tells her, are a reaction to trauma, developed in the wake of the loss of her sister, Marie. Her doctor recommends that Marianne visits Nede, a modern, New Age rehabilitation center in a remote forest in Wales where the patients attend unorthodox therapy sessions and commune with nature. Yet something strange is happening to Marianne and the other patients at Nede: a metamorphosis of a kind. As the hairs on her back continue to grow, the past starts to entangle itself with the present and the borders of her consciousness threaten to disintegrate. She finds herself drawn back compulsively to the memory of Marie, obsessing over the impulse that drew her sister toward death and splintered her family apart. As Marianne’s memories threaten to overwhelm her, Nede offers her release from this cycle of memory and pain—but only at a terrible price: that of identity itself. Haunting, lyrical, and introspective, Garden of Earthly Bodies is a startlingly accomplished and original debut about the bond between two sisters, love and its limits, and our inability to ever truly to know the minds of others. With an intense and precise attention to the internal workings of minds and bodies and a disturbing speculative plot, the novel welcomes an assured new voice to the genre.
When a young woman clears out her deceased grandmother’s home in rural North Carolina, she finds long-hidden secrets about a strange colony of beings in the woods in this chilling novel that reads like The Blair Witch Project meets The Andy Griffith Show. When Mouse’s dad asks her to clean out her dead grandmother's house, she says yes. After all, how bad could it be? Answer: pretty bad. Grandma was a hoarder, and her house is stuffed with useless rubbish. That would be horrific enough, but there’s more—Mouse stumbles across her step-grandfather’s journal, which at first seems to be filled with nonsensical rants…until Mouse encounters some of the terrifying things he described for herself. Alone in the woods with her dog, Mouse finds herself face to face with a series of impossible terrors—because sometimes the things that go bump in the night are real, and they’re looking for you. And if she doesn’t face them head on, she might not survive to tell the tale. From Hugo Award–winning author Ursula Vernon, writing as T. Kingfisher, The Twisted Ones is a gripping, terrifying tale bound to keep you up all night—from both fear and anticipation of what happens next.
A young woman discovers a strange portal in her uncle’s house, leading to madness and terror in this gripping new novel from the author of the “innovative, unexpected, and absolutely chilling” (Mira Grant, Nebula Award–winning author) The Twisted Ones. Pray they are hungry. Kara finds the words in the mysterious bunker that she’s discovered behind a hole in the wall of her uncle’s house. Freshly divorced and living back at home, Kara now becomes obsessed with these cryptic words and starts exploring this peculiar area—only to discover that it holds portals to countless alternate realities. But these places are haunted by creatures that seem to hear thoughts…and the more one fears them, the stronger they become. With her distinctive “delightfully fresh and subversive” (SF Bluestocking) prose and the strange, sinister wonder found in Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, The Hollow Places is another compelling and white-knuckled horror novel that you won’t be able to put down.
The delicious bodyguard romance of From Blood and Ash meets the delightful charm of The Princess Bride in this cozy fantasy romance from New York Times bestselling author T. Kingfisher Halla has unexpectedly inherited the estate of the wealthy distant uncle she's been caring for for the past decade. Unfortunately, she is also saddled with money-hungry relatives full of devious plans for how to wrest the inheritance away from her. While hiding in her bedroom to escape her family, Halla inspects the ancient sword that's been collecting dust on the wall since before she moved in. On a whim, she pulls it down and unsheaths it—and suddenly a man appears in her bedroom. His name is Sarkis, he tells her, and he is an immortal warrior trapped in a prison of enchanted steel. Sarkis is sworn to protect whoever wields the sword, and for Halla—a most unusual wielder—he finds himself not fending off grand armies and deadly assassins but instead everything from kindly-seeming bandits to roving inquisitors to her own in-laws. But as Halla and Sarkis become closer, they overlook the biggest threat of all—the sword itself. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
