Dust jacket illustration by Lee Moyer

Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart is the follow-up to Caitlín R. Kiernan’s World-Fantasy Award nominated The Ammonite Violin & Others, a collection that drew comparisons to the writings of such luminaries of the macabre and surreal as Angela Carter, Thomas Ligotti, Shirley Jackson, and Harlan Ellison. Here, again, in her eighth collection, we visit the borderlands where the weird, horrific, mythic, and erotic intersect. Once again, Kiernan sets her masterful, intoxicating prose to the task of retelling fairy tales, spinning sensual post-Lovecraftian yarns, and blurring the lines between pain and pleasure. Here is a celebration of the bizarre and beautiful, and a marriage of unlikely worlds. From a reverence of the dead to the sacrifices the living make to unspeakable gods, from clockwork dreams to tales of merciless revenge, Kiernan blurs the artificial lines of genre, and shows us a world where there is no division between the light and dark.

The signed limited edition of Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart includes not only the collection proper, it’s accompanied by an entirely separate bonus hardcover collection (approximately 80-100 pages). If you’d like the same numbered copy as for the limited edition of Two Worlds and in Between, please send us an email letting us know your number after you order.

Trade: Fully cloth bound hardcover edition
Limited: 600 signed numbered leatherbound copies, including the bonus hardcover collection, The Yellow Book

Introduction: Sexing the Weird
The Wolf Who Cried Girl
The Bed of Appetite
Subterraneous
The Collector of Bones
Beatification
Untitled Grotesque
Flotsam
Regarding Attrition and Severance
Rappaccini’s Dragon (Murder Ballad No. 5)
Unter den Augen des Mondes
The Melusine (1898)
Fecunditatum
I Am the Abyss and I Am the Light
Dancing With the Eight of Swords
Murder Ballad No. 6
Lullaby of Partition and Reunion
Derma Sutra (1891)
The Thousand-and-Third Tale of Scheherazade
The Belated Burial
The Bone’s Prayer
A Canvas for Incoherent Arts
The Peril of Liberated Objects, or the Voyeur’s Seduction
Pickman’s Other Model (1929)
At the Gate of Deeper Slumber
Fish Bride
Afterword

The Yellow Book (Limited Edition Only)

Ex Libris
The Yellow Alphabet

From Publishers Weekly:
"This impressive collection of 25 'weird romance' stories...is laden with dark little gems that blur the boundaries between pleasure and pain and between reality and fantasy. The stories are intensely and often graphically erotic, and explore transgression, transformation, and transcendence. The seductively dark lyricism and thematic profundity of this collection will appeal to anyone who shares Kiernan's longing for 'desire without boundaries.'"

From SFRevu:
"This collection is an incredible accomplishment by one of the best horror writers our there. There is not a single disappointing story, and they never feel repetitive or familiar. Each tale is unique, a difficult feat in a genre often drawn to reusing familiar tropes. Kiernan's stories get under your skin; the emotions she conjures up refuse to stay constrained to the page. Reading this book might lead to a few sleepless nights; but readers willing to take the risk won't be disappointed."