Bright Dead Star (preorder)

(preorder—to be published in Summer)

Dust jacket illustration for Bright Dead Star by Lee Moyer.

Dust jacket illustration and design for Zoetrope Bizarre by Thomas Canty.

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.

The signed limited edition of Bright Dead Star will be accompanied by Zoetrope Bizarre, a brand new novella. (See below for a full description.)

Limited: 600 signed numbered hardcovers with the bonus volume, Zoetrope Bizarre

Trade: Fully cloth bound hardcover

About Zoetrope Bizarre:

Flickers in a darkened movie house. Half-remembered midnight television. Light and shadow on a screen, whether big or small. A “lost” space odyssey, pretend interplanetary nightmares, a mysterious late-nite horror show hostess who may never have existed. Boojums and Alison Maehl (or Alice Mal). Insanity and rumor. Murder and fandom and Hollywood rabbit holes.

In this taut, enigmatic novella, Caitlín R. Kiernan invites the reader to chase the mystery of things that may never have existed or may only have been misplaced—perhaps on purpose and perhaps for the best. Zoetrope Bizarre unfolds like frames of film discarded on a cutting room floor, Kiernan's most ambitious tale of weird cinema since the World Fantasy Award-winning “The Prayer of Ninety Cats.”

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
  
  
• Zoetrope Bizarre (bonus volume, to accompany the signed limited edition only)

Note: The dust jacket images for Zoetrope Bizarre are not final.

From Publishers Weekly:

“Impressive in terms of both scope and lyricism, this collection from prolific fantasy horror author Kiernan (Bradbury Weather) proves a worthy introduction to their shorter works… Many stories, including ‘Threnody for Those Who Die December Deaths,’ merge grounded Southern settings and cultural trappings with surreal imagery and frightening phenomena, providing lingering thrills that feel all too real... It’s an ambitious collection that refuses neat categorization, which is exactly what makes it such a delight.”

Advance Praise for Zoetrope Bizarre:

“Zoetrope Bizarre is one of the best ghost stories to come along in years, if you will agree that a film can be a ghost. This phantom is no apparition on a staircase, but a kind of black hole, invisible except for the disturbing effects it has on the people who encounter it. Eerie, elusive, and genuinely strange, resonant with echoes of Aickman and Ligotti, this story is a refreshing example of Kiernan's refusal to make the easy or obvious narrative choice. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it.”

—Nathan Ballingrud, author of North American Lake Monsters and Crypt of the Moon Spider

Zoetrope Bizarre
(excerpt)

1.

The Fans (1)
(April 1987)

The third Thursday of each and every month, Carson Holly meets up with one or two of the other members of the tiny cabal of horror movie aficionados who call themselves the Groovy Ghoulies, after the early seventies cartoon series. The meeting place is almost always Rae’s Restaurant in Santa Monica, because Carson swears they have the best vanilla milkshakes in the Greater Los Angeles area. And he almost always manages to get the same red vinyl booth, up front near the big plate-glass windows looking out on Pico Boulevard. This afternoon, Carson is right there in his favorite booth, already halfway through his first milkshake, and the waitress has just brought him a big plate of fries when Johnny Frankenstein shows up.

That’s not his real name, of course. Johnny Frankenstein has never yet told any of them his real name, and no one’s ever pressed him very hard. He wears the pseudonym well. Carson Holly, he’s a rail-thin dude, the “before” in those old Charles Atlas ads on the backs of comic books, the skinny, bespectacled geek who’s always getting sand kicked in his face, but Johnny Frankenstein is a big guy, six foot five and two hundred pounds if he’s an ounce, with an ugly scar across his forehead (the likely source of the nickname). He wears T-shirts emblazoned with Big Daddy Ross’ Rat Fink and listens to surfer music and rockabilly bands. Carson Holly has a thing for jazz and turtlenecks.