Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart eBook

Cover image 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.

• 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

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."