SPEAKING TO SKULL KINGS AND OTHER STORIES
“You’ll want to stop and savor each and every one. This is unique fantasy, fresh, gripping and brilliantly realized.” — Jack Ketchum
A ballet dancer can’t escape an unwanted suitor—even after death. Three sisters live by a strict etiquette book in an abandoned house, until one of them starts to question why. Two children venture into the treacherous forest to find their missing bird-guardian. A magician struggles to find a cure for the plague descending on her city before it’s too late.
Emily B. Cataneo’s debut fiction collection is rife with the decayed grandeur of old Europe, girls who love and loathe ghosts, and magic that comes with a price. These stories, many of which have appeared on year’s best longlists, span the gamut from soft science fiction to noir, to high fantasy and everything in between. They unfold in settings rendered both beautiful and sinister: a wintry post-Revolution Russia, a gossipy New England town, a lonely bathhouse where robots go to die.
As the characters in these tales live out their lives, from childhood to death and beyond, they search for meaning, connection, and safety, struggling to transcend their circumstances and ultimately grappling with the question: how far will they go to escape?
“Very rarely will you meet an imagination as potent and far-reaching as Emily Cataneo’s. It startles and amazes. Yet every fine-cut gem of a story presented here is firmly grounded in the human experience, in tenderness and yearning, in humor and heartache. You’ll want to stop and savor each and every one. This is unique fantasy, fresh, gripping and brilliantly realized.” — Jack Ketchum, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Girl Next Door and The Box
“This fine collection fits into the weird places in my skull and the dark places in my heart. I adore it. Fans of modern dark fairy tales of the sort that Neil Gaiman and Kelly Link write will enjoy this, as will readers of classic weird fiction who prefer the work of Robert Chambers and Charlotte Perkins Gilman over that of Lovecraft. Cataneo has filtered the classics through her own sensibilities to create vivid stories of ghosts and other lost souls.” — Lucy A. Snyder, Bram Stoker Award-winning author
“Elegantly composed, Speaking to Skull Kings and Other Stories is a literary dance. Cataneo pulls you in close, whispering song in your ear, twirling you round one story to the next in an embrace as tight as her prose. Not until you finish the final dance and she pulls away with her words do you realize you’d left the ground awhile, that she’d ripped the wings off your back in order to bring you back down, to let you go. This debut fiction collection is magical, enticing, and leaves you wanting those bloodied hands to lead just one more time.” — Michael Bailey, Bram Stoker Award-winning editor of The Library of the Dead, and author of Psychotropic Dragon
The paperback version of this book includes a free electronic copy. You will be provided with the download link once you have completed the purchase process.
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Product Details:
Author: Emily B. Cataneo
Publication Date: May 19, 2017
Price:
Paperback: $15.95 plus $3.00 shipping, handling and sales tax. Total Price $18.95
Electronic: $3.95
Print Length: 204 Pages
Publisher: Trepidatio Publishing – JournalStone