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![Fearful Symmetries by [Ellen Datlow, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Garth Nix, Laird Barron, Nathan Ballingrud, Michael Marshall Smith, Gemma Files, Bruce McAllister, Gary McMahon, Pat Cadigan, Helen Marshall, Terry Dowling, Stephen Graham Jones, Brian Evenson, Jeffrey Ford, Robert Shearman, Kaaron Warren, Catherine MacLeod, Siobhan Carroll, John Langan, Carole Johnstone]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41OqJy95NWL._SY346_.jpg)
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A World Fantasy Award nominee, “this anthology . . . is a collection of some of the most talented horror and speculative fiction authors writing today” (BuzzFeed). It includes all-new stories by Laird Barron, Pat Cadigan, Brian Evenson, Jeffrey Ford, Caítlin R. Kiernan, Garth Nix, Michael Marshall Smith, Kaaron Warren, and other masters of all things spooky and suspenseful.
In tales that crisscross the boundaries of fear and imagination—from a haunted courtyard in New Orleans to a remote Arctic research station—swamp monsters, pool-cleaning robots, and cannibalistic spirits wreak chaos and terror across the pages. You’ll be invited to a prom where a psycho hides inside a sparkly dress or rented tux; on a trip aboard a train to a destination that teems with ghosts; and into the darkest recesses of a human mind, the most fertile ground for the blossoming of true evil.
“Datlow’s ‘experimental’ crowdfunded horror anthology is nicely unthemed. . . . This is an excellent anthology for horror fans, with a nice range of tones and styles and some intriguing new voices.” —Publishers Weekly
“[Fearful Symmetries] not only goes beyond expectations, it raises the bar high above into the horror heavens. . . . A melting pot of distinct voices and styles that leave you wanting more.” —Hellnotes
“One of the best horror anthologies I’ve ever read.” —Thirteen O’Clock
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherOpen Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy
- Publication dateJuly 21, 2020
- File size6192 KB
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Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Review
More anthologies like Inferno, and its predecessor of a few years ago, The Dark, should be urgent priorities. It's very clear that horror at short length is poised for a major revival, and the commercial stimulus must, as here, be applied, and on a large scale...
---Nick Gevers, Locus Magazine
"...one of the best recent collections of horror as literature."
-- Carl Hays, Book List
Inferno will undoubtedly stand the test of time to become a classic in the field. ...Inferno is a monument to all that horror fiction is capable of.
--Nicholas Kaufmann for Fearzone
About Fearful Symmetries
"I ...cannot say enough good things about the exceptional talent and overall quality that comes to life within the pages of Fearful Symmetries."
--Jess Landry for Hellnotes
"One of the best horror anthologies I've ever read." --Alan Baxter for
Thirteen O'Clock
"...Datlow has assembled an eclectic mix of horror, fantasy, and quasi-science fiction stories, with a good measure of selections that fall between and just outside of those distinctions. About the only thing the tales have in common are their exceptional quality of storytelling."
Stefan Dziemianowicz for Locus --This text refers to the paperback edition.
From the Author
From my introduction: Introduction
Fearful Symmetries was funded by Kickstarter, a crowd funding mechanism that has in the last few years increased in popularity. Why did I do this rather than use a traditional approach to publishing an anthology? I've rarely had problems selling theme anthologies to book publishers. Before a publisher commits to buying a book (novel, single-author collection, or anthology) the publisher must sell the book to its marketing and sales people, who in turn have to sell it to bookstores. But non-theme anthologies have always been a hard sell, and it's even more difficult it today's publishing climate.
Using Kickstarter was an experiment. I've donated to several Kickstarter projects, but had never been involved with one before. I approached Brett Alexander Savory and Sandra Kasturi, owners of the Canadian ChiZine Publications, to partner with me on the project. I thought they'd be a good match for what I had in mind because I enjoy what they publish and I love their production values and commitment to good-looking books. They also have excellent distribution, which means their books are available in most bookstores. This is important, so that the book is available to the general reading public, not only our several hundred backers. I was delighted (and relieved) when we reached our goal, and shocked when we went above it. The one thing we'd forgotten to factor in to our financial estimates was the percentage paid out to Amazon, who handled our payments, and to Kickstarter itself. So the money that went over our initial requirements went for that.
I solicited some of the writers I've worked with in the past and also a few whose work I've admired but never published before. And in a break from my usual working method, Brett, Sandra, and I decided to hold a month-long open reading period. We promised to keep at least a couple of slots open for unsolicited stories submitted during that period. We received 1,080 submissions. There were several readers, including Sandra and a prominent Australian publisher/editor. Of those 1080 submissions, 119 were passed on to me. I ended up buying four.
Every anthology is a balancing act, be it reprint or original, theme or unthemed. While I love editing themed anthologies, there's something especially challenging and fun molding an anthology with fewer boundaries. The editor has to be even more aware of varying tones, themes, voice, and locale in the stories she acquires.
So what can you look forward to in Fearful Symmetries? There are monsters--human and non-human. There are children -those who victimize, and those who are victims. There are supernatural horrors, psychological terrors, nourish dark fantasies, and downright weird fictions.
Come on in, and make yourself a cozy little nook in the dark, and enjoy. --This text refers to the paperback edition.
Product details
- ASIN : B088K2J9ZZ
- Publisher : Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy (July 21, 2020)
- Publication date : July 21, 2020
- Language : English
- File size : 6192 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 465 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #168,740 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Praised by Peter Straub for going “furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrative precipice,” Brian Evenson is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes and has been a finalist for the Edgar Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the World Fantasy Award. He is also the winner of the International Horror Guild Award and the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel, and his work has been named in Time Out New York’s top books.
Novelist, short story writer and screenwriter, writing under the names Michael Marshall Smith and Michael Marshall. As the former, author of ONLY FORWARD, SPARES, ONE OF US, THE SERVANTS and the upcoming HANNAH GREEN AND HER UNFEASIBLY MUNDANE EXISTENCE. Also winner of the August Derleth, International Horror Guild and Philip K Dick Award — in addition to winning the British Fantasy Award for best short story more times than any other author in history.
As Michael Marshall, an internationally-bestselling writer of thrillers including the STRAW MEN trilogy and THE INTRUDERS — recently televised starring John Simm, Mira Sorvino and Millie Bobby Brown.
www.michaelmarshallsmith.com
Twitter @ememess
Insta @ememess
Garth Nix has worked as a bookseller, book sales representative, publicist, editor, marketing consultant and literary agent. He also spent five years as a part-time soldier in the Australian Army Reserve. A full-time writer since 2001, more than five million copies of his books have been sold around the world and his work has been translated into 40 languages. Garth's books have appeared on the bestseller lists of The New York Times, Publishers Weekly (US), The Bookseller(UK), The Australian and The Sunday Times (UK). He lives in Sydney, Australia, with his wife and two children.
I've been a short story editor for over forty years, starting with OMNI Magazine and webzine for 17 years, then EVENT HORIZON, a webzine, and SCIFICTION, the fiction area of SCIFI.COM. I currently acquire and edit short fiction and novellas for Tor.com and I edit original and reprint anthologies. I've lived in NYC most of my life, although I travel a lot.
Bruce McAllister is a writer of literary fiction and of fantasy, science fiction and thriller fiction, which he's been publishing professionally since he was sixteen. He was born in 1946 in Baltimore, MD, to a peripatetic Navy family with an Annapolis-graduate father who served with NATO during the Cold War and an underdog-championing anthropologist/archaeologist mother whose specialties were Early Man and Native American studies. As children, he and his brother Jack lived in Florida, Washington D.C., California and Italy. From l974 to l997 he taught at the University of Redlands in southern California, where he helped establish and direct writing programs. Since l998 he has worked as a writing coach and book and screenplay consultant. His short fiction has appeared in literary quarterlies, national magazines, original anthologies, "year's best" anthologies and college readers; won awards from Glimmer Train magazine and the National Endowment for the Arts; and been a finalist for Hugo, Nebula, Shirley Jackson, New Letters, and Narrative magazine awards. His non-fiction articles on sports, popular science and writing have appeared in a variety of magazines and newspapers. A number of his short stories have been optioned for film, and his fans over the years have included Stephen King, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Bloch (PSYCHO) and Philip K. Dick. He has three wonderful grown children--Annie, Ben and Elizabeth--and lives in Orange, California, with his wife, choreographer Amelie Hunter.
Born and raised in Texas. In Boulder, Colorado now. Forty-nine. Blackfeet. Into werewolves and slashers, zombies and vampires, haunted houses and good stories. Would wear pirate shirts a lot if I could find them. And probably carry some kind of sword. More over at http://demontheory.net or http://twitter.com/@SGJ72
Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels, Vanitas, The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, and The Shadow Year, The Twilight Pariah, Ahab's Return, Or The Last Voyage, and Out of Body. His story collections are The Fantasy Writer's Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, Crackpot Palace, A Natural History of Hell, and The Best of Jeffrey Ford from PS, Big Dark Hole, 2021, from Small Beer Press. Ford has published well over 100 short stories, which have appeared in numerous journals, magazines and anthologies, from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction to The Oxford Book of American Short Stories. He is the recipient of the World Fantasy Award, Nebula, Shirley Jackson Award, Edgar Allan Poe Award, Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire (France), Hayakawa Award (Japan). His fiction has been translated into about 20 languages. In addition to writing, he’s been a professor of literature and writing for 30 years and has been a guest lecturer at Clarion Writing Workshop, The Stone Coast MFA Program, The Richard Hugo House in Seattle, and the Antioch University Writing Workshop. He lives in Ohio and currently teaches part time at Ohio Wesleyan University.
Link to Ford's homepage -- http://www.well-builtcity.com/
Carole Johnstone grew up in Lanarkshire, Scotland. She has been writing as long as she can remember, and is an award-winning short story writer whose work has been reprinted and translated worldwide. She has been published by HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and Titan Books, and has written Sherlock Holmes stories for Constable & Robinson.
MIRRORLAND, her debut novel, has sold in 13 territories, and has been optioned by Heyday TV and NBC Universal.
Her second novel, THE BLACKHOUSE, is a gothic thriller and unusual whodunnit set on an isolated Scottish island where nothing is as it seems, and shocking twists lie around every corner. Out Aug 4 2022 in the UK and Jan 3 2023 in the US and CAN.
Carole now writes full-time, and lives with her husband in the Highlands of Scotland, though her heart belongs to the sea and wild islands of the Outer Hebrides.
See carolejohnstone.com for more information and giveaways.
Agent: Hellie Ogden at Janklow & Nesbit UK.
More information on the author can be found at carolejohnstone.com.
Laird Barron is an expat Alaskan. Currently, Barron lives in the Rondout Valley and is at work on tales about the evil that men do.
(photo courtesy Ardi Alspach)
“I swear they told me I was terminal...but that was back in December 2014. What can I say? Heaven doesn’t want me and Hell’s afraid I’ll take over.”
Pat Cadigan won the Arthur C. Clarke Award twice for her novels Synners and Fools, and most recently, the Scribe Award for Best Novelisation for Alita Battle Angel. She has also won three Locus Awards––best short story for "Angel," best collection for Patterns, and best novelette for "The Girl-Thing Who Went Out For Sushi,", which also won the Hugo Award and Japan's Seiun Award; it can be found in Edge of Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Most often identified as one of the original cyberpunk writers––the Guardian called her The Queen of Cyberpunk––her work includes fantasy, horror, young adult, and nonfiction.
Born in New York, she grew up in Massachusetts but spent most of her adult life in the Kansas City area, where she worked for ten years at Hallmark Cards, Inc., writing greeting cards, often in perfect iambic pentameter. She now lives in gritty, urban north London with her husband, the Original Chris Fowler, and takes pride in the accomplishments of her son, musician, composer, and nonfiction writer Robert Fenner.
Along with her media tie-in writing, Cadigan is working on two new original novels––working titles: See You When You Get There and Truth & Bone––while she makes terminal cancer her bitch. Diagnosed in late 2014 with an inoperable and incurable form of recurrent endometrial cancer, she was given at most two years to live. After she underwent what was supposed to have been strictly palliative chemotherapy in early 2015, however, doctors were forced to revise their estimates from 'two years or less' to 'Someday, maybe––hey, we just work here'.
When asked for comment, Cadigan, who has already returned from the dead after a severe case of anaphylactic shock, said, “Each of us was put on this earth to accomplish a certain number of things. I’m now so far behind that I can never die.”
She has been keeping a blog called 'Ceci N'est Pas Une Blog––Dispatches From Cancerland' at patcadigan.wordpress.com about her adventures as a cancer patient; she promises that it's not a bummer. In fact, some of it is even funny. She can also be found on Facebook and tweets as @cadigan and just about everything there is funny, too.
Cadigan’s latest work is the novelisation of William Gibson’s unproduced screenplay for what would have been the third Aliens movie, published 31 August 2021. (Spoiler Alert: it’s not the third Aliens movie that you saw in the theatre, on video, or in your nightmares.) In fact, Gibson did two drafts of the screenplay; this novelisation is his first draft. The second draft was very different and was adapted as a graphic novel by Dark Horse, starring the fabulous artwork of Johnny Christmas. Cadigan thinks you should own both, because.
Thanks to Gollancz’s high successful Gateway eBook program, all of Cadigan’s original novels are available electronically. Other books, such the two making-of movie books she was commissioned to write—The Making of Lost in Space and The Resurrection of the Mummy—are available through third-party sellers. Support independent and second-hand book-dealers whenever possible. You can’t get everything in electronic format. Also, before eBooks came along, second-hand book dealers prevented many good writers from disappearing altogether. Ebooks are great because you can take hundreds of them with you on an airplane without worrying about the weight allowance but it’s still great to have a book signed by your favourite author.
As a cancer patient (remember, she’s not in remission, just stubborn), Cadigan spent 2020 at home, thanks to the inconvenience of a global pandemic. She got a lot of writing done, but not a lot of housework, because seriously? Are you kidding? Sightings continued to be scarce during 2021. Cadigan hoped to get around more in 2022 but didn’t. Maybe 2023 will be more fortuitous.
In 2020, she was nominated for the Scribe Award for Alita Battle Angel, and was delighted when she won. She says that her editor, Ella J Chappell was crucial in helping her produce her best work possible. Like Ellen Datlow and Gardner Dozois, Ms Chappell has become a lasting influence on Cadigan’s work in general.
In 2022, she was again nominated for the Scribe Award for Alien 3, the novelisation of William Gibson’s unproduced screenplay. Nominees and winners were announced at the San Diego Comic Con and to her even greater delight, she won again. A full list of winners is available here: https://iamtw.org/2022-scribe-award-winners/ along with a link to the full list of nominees for 2022 as well as results from previous years.
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Helen Marshall is an author, editor, and self-confessed bibliophile.
Marshall completed an Bachelor's Degree in English at the University of Guelph, followed by a Masters in Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. Her current research as a Doctoral Candidate in Medieval Studies investigates the scrappy fragments of medieval books that survive from the early fourteenth century when scribes were just beginning to experiment with composing in English after the Norman Conquest obliterated the native writing culture in 1066.
In 2011, Marshall published a collection of poetry, Skeleton Leaves, that "[took] the children's classic, [stripped] away the flesh, and [revealed] the dark heart of Peter Pan beating beneath." The collection was jury-selected for the Preliminary Ballot of the Bram Stoker Award for excellence in Horror, nominated for a Rhysling Award for Science Fiction Poetry and won an Aurora Award for best Canadian speculative poem. Her poetry and fiction have been published a range of magazines including Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, The Chiaroscuro, Paper Crow, Abyss & Apex, and Tor.com.
Born April 4, 1968, in London, England, Gemma Files is the child of two actors (Elva Mai Hoover and Gary Files), and has lived most of her life in Toronto, Canada. Previously best-known as a film critic, teacher and screenwriter, she first broke onto the horror scene when her short story "The Emperor's Old Bones" won the International Horror Guild's 1999 award for Best Short Fiction. Her current bibliography includes two collections of short work (Kissing Carrion and The Worm in Every Heart, both Prime Books) and two chapbooks of poetry (Bent Under Night, from Sinnersphere Productions, and Dust Radio, from Kelp Queen Press). Her first novel, A Book of Tongues: Volume One in the Hexslinger Series (CZP), was published in April 2010. The trilogy is now complete, including sequels A Rope of Thorns (2011) and A Tree of Bones (2012), and she is hard at work on her first stand-alone novel. Files is married to fellow author Stephen J. Barringer, with whom she co-wrote the story "each thing i show you is a piece of my death" for Clockwork Phoenix 2 (Norilana Books). They have one son.
I'm Nathan Ballingrud. I live in Asheville, NC. I write dark fantasy and horror. I think the world is pretty dark and unforgiving, but I think it's beautiful too. That's what I like to write about.
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Highly recommended for horror fans who favor a literary bent.
Not quite as far as I’d hoped.
While the 18 tales that follow are mostly readable (save for a couple of duds), they rarely measure up to expectations sync’ed to the openers, and my inner editor kept making mental margin notes.
Happily, there are exceptions. Robert Shearman’s “Suffer Little Children” comes closest to honest-to-goodness dread -- though it doesn’t quite get there, possibly because its protagonist is a distant figure. (It’s rare to find dread without intimacy.) And Michael Marshall Smith’s “Power” is a riveting take on Silicon Valley obsessiveness.
But, that said, many of the other stories seemed slight or somehow burdened. Laird Barron’s breezy “The Worms Crawl In” flew out of my head as quickly as it entered. Brian Evenson’s “The Window” felt more like an intro to a story than a story in itself. Terry Dowling’s “The Four Darks” seemed unnecessarily complicated. The out-of-order conceit in “Wendigo Nights” is a dated effect without persuasive justification. John Langan had a wonderful core idea for the afterlife in “Episode Three: On the Great Plains, in the Snow,” but made the mistake of crowbarring an actual monster into the tale, which almost instantly turns pedestrian. (Sometimes monsters are better suggested than seen.) And while most of Carole Johnstons “Catching Flies” is a lovely blend of attachment and detachment, the child-like and precocious, the vague and the specific, the appended afterword has the effect of defusing it.
I take great pleasure in losing myself in the ebb and flow, the subject variety and emotional ferocity, and the ever-changing tone, voice, and conceptualization from a variety of authors or authors' works.
I've read many anthologies that Ellen Datlow has helped to midwife into existence. Every one is absolutely greater than the sum of its parts, as they should be. Every one has also lead me to finding at least one new author whose works I happily and voraciously consume upon finishing the anthology in which they featured. Hope anyone considering finds as much joy here as I did.
One Star: Couldn't finish it.
Two Stars: Finished it and didn't like it.
Three Stars: It was worth reading.
Four Stars: It was very good.
Five Stars: It was unforgettable.
I COULD NOT get into this collection. Gave up at 25%.
Others- well, I am not usually a horror reader, and I am probably missing something of modern horror conventions- but several of the stories struck me as being so oblique that they did not actually make sense to me.
Most, though, were very good, and some were excellent.
Generally recommended, even for non-horror fans.
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