Bright Dead Star eBook

Cover illustration by Lee Moyer.

From tales of bizarre violence and murder, haunted photographs and films, through reflections on the flexible borders of sanity and the perverse, to alien horrors from deep time, deep space, and the deep sea, Bright Dead Star is a veritable supernova of the weird and uncanny as only master fantasist Caitlín R. Kiernan can deliver.

Among the collection’s twenty-five tales are a dying woman’s communion with the dying sea (“Strandling”), childhood recollections of a sky filled with rattlesnakes (“Crotalus”), to a loathsome couple with a far more loathsome secret (“L’homme et la femme terribles”), these are stories that pull no punches and demand that your preconceptions of genre should be checked before the book’s covers are even cracked.

In short, this is Kiernan doing what Kiernan does best.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• A Travelogue for Oneironautics
• In Utero, In Tenebris
• Bright Dead Star [101 Richard Arrington Blvd. South]
• Still[er] Life, From Hunger
• The Man Who Loved What Was
• L’homme et la femme terribles
• Untitled Psychiatrist No. 5
• The Woman Who Blew Down Houses
• Threnody for Those Who Die December Deaths
• Heart-Shaped Hole
• The Jar
• Crotalus (Murder Ballad No. 13)
• Untitled Psychiatrist No. 6
• Two Monsters Walk Into a Bar
• Discord in Anthracite
• Build Your Houses With Their Backs to the Sea
• The Moment Under the Moment (1994)
• A Buyer’s Guide to Commonplace Bizarreness
• Neither From Nor Towards
• Metamorphosis D (Imago)
• Passage of Venus in Front of the Sun
• Ovid Under Glass
• Ulysses and the Sirens
• Strandling
• Night Fishing