The Ape's Wife and Other Stories

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “The Steam Dancer (1896)” ~ I strongly suspect this is the most reprinted of the recent crop of “steampunk” stories. Fortunately, I’m extremely fond of it. “The Steam Dancer (1896)” originally appeared in the June 2007 (#19) issue of my monthly e-zine, Sirenia Digest, and has since been reprinted in Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy (2008), Steampunk Reloaded (2010), The Mammoth Book of Steampunk (2012), and Lightspeed Magazine (2012) where it can be found as in both prose and audio format. Frankly, I think this story deserved a Nebula. Or a Hugo. Either one. Probably not both, though; I’m not greedy. It was written in June 2007.

  “The Maltese Unicorn” ~ Here’s a story that began as a joke. Ellen Datlow had invited me to write a story for Supernatural Noir, an anthology of, well, supernatural noir. I’m a huge fan of noir – film and prose – but had a lot of trouble coming up with a story I wanted to write. In my blog (5/6/10), I wrote, “Last night, trying to sleep, thinking about potential stories, the title ‘The Maltese Unicorn’ popped into my head. Gagh. No, I will not be writing a story called ‘The Maltese Unicorn.’ I wanted to punch myself in the face just for thinking of it.” But then, the next day, the title lingered, and a plot involving a dildo carved from a unicorn’s horn began to take shape. I sheepishly pitched it to Ellen. She said, “Go for it!” So, I did. The homages to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler are, of course, obvious. The story was written in May and June of 2010.

  “One Tree Hill (The World As Cataclysm)” ~ This is the newest of the stories included in this collection, written in July 2012 for Issue #80 of Sirenia Digest. It has a sort of quiet wrongness – weirdness – about it that I’m almost always striving for, but rarely achieve.

  “The Collier’s Venus (1898)” ~ Few short stories have given me as much trouble as this one did. I’m pretty sure it actually did not want to be written. But it was, in October and November 2008, for Ellen Datlow’s Naked City anthology. It’s one of five stories I’ve set in the fictional frontier town of Cherry Creek, Colorado. I wanted the title to be “The Automatic Mastodon,” but the story, it had other plans.

  “Galápagos” ~ Jonathan Strahan asked me to write a story for Eclipse Three, but I can’t recall much about this story’s genesis. I do, however, recall the title had originally been intended for a different story entirely, and that “Galápagos” was a bitch to get started. It earned a place on the Honor List for the 2009 James Tiptree, Jr. Award, for its exploration of gender, and of that I am very, very proud.

  “Tall Bodies” ~ Another story from Sirenia Digest #80, and like “One Tree Hill,” this one went right where I wanted it to go. The feat of capturing the inexplicable and knowing that it must remain inexplicable, or there was no point in writing the damned thing. I suspect this story was, at least in part, inspired by Richard A. Kirk’s beautiful, disarming endpapers to mine and Poppy Z. Brite’s 2001 collaboration, Wrong Things.

  “As Red As Red” ~ Written in March and April of 2009, for Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas’ Haunted Legends anthology, it was inspired in part by a couple of miserably cold, slushy days in Newport. And, too, by pretty much everything that inspired The Red Tree, which I’d finished the previous October. In a sense, “As Red As Red” is a sideways footnote to the novel, exploring a few bits of Rhode Island folklore that didn’t make the final cut. But it also presages some of the major themes of The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, and so acts as a sort of bridge between those two novels. The story was nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award.

  “Hydraguros” ~ This story originally appeared in Sirenia Digest #50 (January 2010), and was then reprinted in Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy 2. It’s a prime example of the sort of science fiction story that I most enjoy writing. I’m not sure what to call it, though. Near future neo-noir? David Bowie’s Outside (1995) first led me to discovering this voice, this approach, which I have also employed in tales like “In View of Nothing” and “A Season of Broken Dolls.” Two years on, “Hydraguros” remains a personal favorite.

  “Slouching Towards the House of Glass Coffins” ~ And here’s another sort of science fiction entirely. This story was written in August 2011, for Sirenia Digest #69. I keep going back to Mars. This story bears the mark of my frustration with the way that almost all science fiction ignores the reality of linguistic evolution, largely, I suspect because working out and employing the results of such phenomena as unidirectional short-term drift and cyclic long-term drift is simply to much trouble. Add to that my suspicion that most readers don’t want to have to work that hard, and, unfortunately, the end product is a lopsided undertaking. Writers imagine radically new technologies and cultures, but ignore that most fundamental aspect of story: the language by which it is conveyed. With “Slouching Towards the House of Glass Coffins,” I only begin to superficially address the problem; I’ve done so to much greater degrees in some of my (not surprisingly) more obscure sf. Also, I should probably mention this story shares quite a bit in common with an earlier piece, “Bradbury Weather.”

  “Tidal Forces” ~ Another story that first appeared in Sirenia Digest (#55). It was later reprinted in Jonathan Strahan’s Eclipse Four. I wanted to write something about individual dissolution, something about a personal apocalypse, and about intimacy and the lengths that may be necessary to save the ones we love. It’s an odd tale, as mine go, in that it has, I think, a “happy ending.” Also, only after finishing “Tidal Forces” did I realize that I’d already written almost the exact story twice before: “Sanderlings” (2010) and “The Bone’s Prayer” (2009). It was an eerie realization. Regardless, I finally got it right with “Tidal Forces,” which was written in June 2010, and was chosen for Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Six (Jonathan really liked this story!).

  “The Sea Troll’s Daughter” ~ I was approached by Lou Anders and Jonathan Strahan to write a sword and sorcery story, which was a thing I’d never even attempted. After a bit of dithering, a sort of feminist retelling of Beowulf occurred to me (I very rarely consider my stories to have any sort of sociopolitical slant, so this one is also unusual in that respect). The original title was “Wormchild,” though I discarded that almost immediately. Written in June and July of 2009, it first appeared in Swords and Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery (2010), and was later reprinted in The Sword and Sorcery Anthology (2012). Truthfully, this is a story that I believe deserved a lot more attention than it received. Yeah, I do say so myself. And, while I’m at it, “The Sea Troll’s Daughter” should have at least been nominated for a World Fantasy Award.

  “Random Thoughts Before a Fatal Crash” ~ Anyone familiar with my work should also be familiar with one of my recurring characters, a fairy-tale obsessed artist named Albert Perrault, who first appeared in “The Road of Pins,” written way back in 2001. Though the story included his death, he subsequently played a crucial role in several stories, culminating with his pivotal part in my novel The Drowning Girl: A Memoir (2012). The narrator concludes with a section labeled “Back Pages” (thank you, Bob Dylan), and though “Random Notes Before a Fatal Crash” was written in March and April 2011 for Sirenia Digest #64, and subsequently reprinted in Subterranean Magazine (Spring 2012), I got it in my head that this rather long piece belonged in “Back Pages.” Peter Straub quickly and firmly pointed out that it didn’t, and it was removed from the manuscript before publication. Thank you again, Peter, for stopping me from breaking the book. Also, “The Magdalene of Gévaudan” was written by Sonya Taaffe, and is the only part of “Random Notes Before a Fatal Crash” that was included in The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. The title Last Drink Bird Heard, blame Jeff VanderMeer for that.

  “The Ape’s Wife” ~ This story was written in April 2007 for Clarkesworld Magazine, and was voted “readers’ favorite” for that year. It was also chosen for Stephen Jones’ The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (Volume 19). As with “Emptiness Spoke Eloquent” and “From Cabinet 34, Drawn 6” before it, “The Ape’s Wife” is the result of my occasional
desire to play around with how stories might have ended in some alternate universe or another. King Kong was one of the many things that, as a child, fostered my love of paleontology, and it was wonderful repaying that debt.

  Black Helicopters (included only with the limited edition) ~ Having just finished the only genuinely wretched novel of my career (title tactfully withheld), I needed to write something I would love, something that would allow me to sink back into the dense and slippery language that is natural to me. That and a nonlinear narrative. A nonlinear narrative that preserved the inexplicable, instead of making it explicable. That said, Black Helicopters doesn’t feel finished. I suspect I could easily expand it to 50,000 words. However, this would be an unfurling of events (earlier and later events) within story that remain currently unspoken, not the elucidation of that which has been written. I can’t help believe it should be a short novel, not a novella. There’s too much of it still rattling about my head.

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to the editors who solicited and bought the tales that first appeared in anthologies and magazines, and to the editors who published reprints; to the many subscribers to Sirenia Digest, for they keep the lights on (literally and metaphorically); to William K. Schafer of Subterranean Press, who not only published this collection, but who suggested its title (and insisted I write Black Helicopters) and is an amazingly patient man; to Vincent Locke for his illustrations and Vincent Chong for his cover; to Kyle Cassidy for the author’s photo; to Merrilee Heifetz and Sarah Nagel at Writers House, saviors, the both of them; to Sonya Taaffe for “The Magdalene of Gévaudan”; to Denise Davis of Brown University for French translation on Black Helicopters (8); to Lee Moyer; and to my partner, Kathryn A. Pollnac, who hasn’t yet murdered me in my sleep, though I certainly have it coming.

  Author’s Biography

  Caitlín R. Kiernan is the author of several novels, including The Red Tree (nominated for the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards) and, most recently, The Drowning Girl: A Memoir (winner of the Bram Stoker and James Tiptree, Jr. awards, nominated for the Nebula, British Fantasy, Mythopoeic, Locus, Shirley Jackson, and World Fantasy awards). Her tales of the weird, fantastic, and macabre have been collected in several volumes, including Tales of Pain and Wonder; From Weird and Distant Shores; To Charles Fort, With Love; Alabaster; A is for Alien; The Ammonite Violin & Others; Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart; and Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One). Her early erotica has been collected in two volumes: Frog Toes and Tentacles and Tales from the Woeful Platypus. From 1996 to 2001, she scripted The Dreaming for DC/Vertigo, and has recently returned to graphic novels with her critically acclaimed series, Alabaster (Dark Horse Comics). Trained as a vertebrate paleontologist, her research has appeared in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, Journal of Paleontology, The Mosasaur, and the International Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island with her partner Kathryn and two Siamese cats.

  Table of Contents

  Author’s Introduction

  “The Steam Dancer (1896)”

  “The Maltese Unicorn”

  “One Tree Hill (The World as Cataclysm)”

  “The Collier’s Venus (1898)”

  “Galápagos”

  “Tall Bodies”

  “As Red As Red”

  “Hydraguros”

  “Slouching Towards the House of Glass Coffins”

  “Tidal Forces”

  “The Sea Troll’s Daughter”

  “Random Thoughts Before a Fatal Crash”

  “The Ape’s Wife”

  Notes

  Author’s Biography