Pat Cadigan is a multiple Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author, and recently won a Hugo for her novelette “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out For Sushi.” “It Was the Heat” proves that her talent for gripping horror is evident. Her fiction continues to be both emotionally and intellectually provocative and engaging.
Tom Cardamone is the author of the Lambda Literary Award-winning novella Green Thumb, as well as Pacific Rimming, The Werewolves of Central Park, and the short story collection, Pumpkin Teeth. He is also editor of the anthologies The Lavender Menace: Tales of Queer Villainy! and The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered. His fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, and some of those stories have been collected on his website: pumpkinteeth.net.
A lapsed musician and engineer, Steve Chapman lives with his wife and daughter at the New Jersey shore. Though he spends most days high above Times Square, in the evening he can hear the ocean. His fiction has recently appeared in Penumbra eZine, the Harrow Press anthology Mortis Operandi, and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and Sorceress.
J. T. Glover has published short fiction, articles, and interviews in Fungi, Lightspeed, NewMyths.com, and Underground Voices, among other venues. Diagnosed at the age of three with early-onset bibliophilia, he considers it a happy meeting of fate and constitution that he is an academic reference librarian by day, specializing in the humanities. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, these days he lives in Virginia and can be found online at jtglover.com.
Theodora Goss’s fantastical tales delve into mythology as much as they do cultural and literary history. She won a Rhysling Award for Best Long Poem for “Octavia Is Lost in the Hall of Masks” and a World Fantay Award for Best Short Fiction for her story “Singing of Mount Abora.” She has been a contributor to many publications, including Apex Magazine, Clarkesworld, The Journal of Mythic Arts, and Strange Horizons.
Orrin Grey is a writer, editor, amateur film scholar, and monster expert who was born on the night before Halloween. He’s the author of Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings and the co-editor (with Silvia Moreno-Garcia) of Fungi, an anthology of weird fungus-themed stories for Innsmouth Free Press, where he also writes a regular column on vintage horror cinema. John Langan once referred to him as “the monster guy,” and he’ll never let anyone forget it.
Caren Gussoff is a SF writer living in Seattle, WA. The author of Homecoming and The Wave and Other Stories, Gussoff’s been published in anthologies by Seal Press and Hadley Rille, as well as in Abyss & Apex, Cabinet des Fées, and Fantasy Magazine. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and in 2008, was the Carl Brandon Society’s Octavia E. Butler Scholar at Clarion West. Her new novel, The Birthday Problem, will be published by Pink Narcissus Press in 2014. Find her online at @spitkitten, facebook.com/spitkitten, and at spitkitten.com.
Elizabeth Hand (elizabethhand.com) is the award-winning author of many novels for adults—including the Tiptree Award and Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Waking the Moon, the Shirley Jackson Award for Generation Loss, the World Fantasy Award for Illyria—as well as a widely published reviewer in such venues as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and the Los Angeles Times. She lives in Lincolnville, Maine.
Claire Humphrey writes novels and short stories, mainly about unhappy magicians. She works in the book trade as a buyer for Indigo Books, and she is the reviews editor at Ideomancer. In addition to all things literary, she likes boxing, photography, dark coffee, well-hopped beer, and frivolous shoes.
Alex Jeffers’s stories have appeared in two of Steve Berman’s previous Prime Books anthologies and a bunch of other places. Ten are collected in You Will Meet a Stranger Far from Home. Every second day he believes he will never complete another. Find him online at sentenceandparagraph.com.
E. L. Kemper lives in British Columbia, Canada and in Costa Rica where she writes, walks her dog on the beach, and drinks ridiculous quantities of coconut water. Erinn is a member of the Horror Writers Association and has a column in their monthly newsletter. Visit her blog at erinnkemper.com to read about upcoming publications and chilling on the Caribbean coast.
Nicole Kornher-Stace lives in New Paltz, NY, with one husband, two ferrets, the cutest toddler in the universe, and many many books. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best American Fantasy, Clockwork Phoenix 3, Apex, and Fantasy Magazine. She is the author of one novel, Desideria; the lusciously-illustrated chapbook Demon Lovers and Other Difficulties; and her short book The Winter Triptych.
Ed Kurtz is the author of A Wind of Knives, Dead Trash, Control, and The Deuce. His short fiction has appeared in Needle, Thuglit, Shotgun Honey, and numerous anthologies, including Steve Berman’s Shades of Blue and Gray. Kurtz lives in Texas, where he is at work on his next novel. Visit him online at edkurtz.net.
Carrie Laben is originally from New York and now lives in Missoula, Montana, where she recently obtained her MFA from the University of Montana. Her work has appeared in such venues as Clarkesworld, Apex Digest, Camas, and anthologies including Fantasy: The Best of the Year and Shades of Blue and Gray. When not writing, she can usually be found staring at birds or enjoying the local microbrews—although to the best of her knowledge, she has never shared one with Satan.
Tanith Lee was born in 1947 in London, England. She received a grammar-school education, and thereafter worked in various jobs, including restaurants and libraries. The publication, in 1975, of her first fantasy novel, The Birthgrave, liberated her into full-time professional writing. Since then she has produced ninety-four novels and collections, and over three hundred short stories; written for TV, and BBC Radio. She is married to the artist and writer John Kaiine. They live with cats on the south coast. Lee has won several fantasy awards.
Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including Bullettime and Love is the Law. His short fiction has appeared in Shades of Blue and Gray, Asimov’s Science Fiction, New Haven Review, and Best American Mystery Stories. As an anthologist, he has won the Bram Stoker Award for Haunted Legends (with Ellen Datlow) and was nominated for the Locus Award for The Future Is Japanese (with Masumi Washington). A native New Yorker, Nick now lives in California.
Mexican by birth, Canadian by inclination. Silvia Moreno-Garcia is an author and editor of all things speculative. Her fiction appears in the collection This Strange Way of Dying and various and sundry places. She has edited the Dead North and Fungi anthologies, among others. She blogs at silviamoreno-garcia.com/ and Tweets @silviamg. You can also find her hanging out around innsmouthfreepress.com.
Stephen Pope is the guy who sees all those old, abandoned buildings in the city and closed, broken-down gas stations along the highway and wonders, “What goes on in there when no one is around?” He resides in Texas, which has more than its fair share of horror writers. He says that anyone who reads his blog at stephenbpope.blogspot.com will eventually find wealth and perfect happiness, and he says it with a straight face.
Martin Rose writes a range of fiction from the fantastic to the macabre, holds a degree in graphic design, and resides in New Jersey where he is concluding work on a zombie detective novel, Bring Me Flesh, I’ll Bring Hell. More details are available at www.martinrose.org.
Michelle Sagara is an author, bookseller, and lover of literature based in Toronto. She writes fantasy novels as both Michelle Sagara and Michelle West (and sometimes as Michelle Sagara West).
J. Daniel Stone is a twenty-six-year-old writer born and raised in New York City, the place that he predominantly writes about. The stories of the five boroughs are endless. He does not eat meat, believes in equal rights, and absorbs as much art and science as he can. His debut novel, The Absence of Light, was published by Villipede Publications and features characters from “Unveiled.”
Brad Strickland is a professor of English at Gainesville State College in Oakwood, Georgia. Since his first novel, To Stand Beneath the Sun, was published in 1985, he has written or co-writ
ten sixty-plus novels and more than a hundred short stories. He is an active member of the Atlanta Radio Theatre Company.
Nicole M. Taylor is a freelance writer, ghostwriter, and manuscript consultant. She has worked on everything from graphic novels to historical non-fiction and she’s currently wrapping up her first novel, The Witches Knot. She lives in San Jose, CA with her husband and a snorty gargoyle monster named Magoo. She bloggerates here: www.nicolemtaylor.com.
Halli Villegas is the author of three collections of poetry (Red Promises, In the Silence Absence Makes, and The Human Cannonball), a book of short ghost stories (The Hairwreath and Other Stories), and was the co-editor of the anthologies Imaginarium and In The Dark. Her work has appeared in many anthologies including Chilling Tales 2, The White Collar Anthology, Bad Seeds, and Girls Who Bite Back. She has also appeared in numerous magazines such as CNQ, The LRC and Variety Crossings. Halli is also the publisher of Tightrope Books, which has published sixty-one books to date, including the acclaimed yearly anthologies The Best Canadian Poetry in English, and The Best Canadian Essays. The gentleman in “Sleep of Reason” is based lookswise on Robson Green, who can haunt her dreams anytime.
Our Aging Ingenue
Steve Berman was first seduced by books as a child and by a man at age twenty. Literature was the more gentle lover. He is the editor of numerous anthologies. He resides in southern New Jersey, the only state in the Union that has an official devil, who may or may not be handsome depending on eyewitnesses.
Other Books by Steve Berman
So Fey: Queer Fairy Fiction
Magic in the Mirrorstone
Wilde Stories: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction
Heiresses of Russ: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction
The Touch of the Sea
Where Thy Dark Eye Glances: Queering Edgar Allan Poe
Bad Seeds: Evil Progeny
Zombies: Shambling Through the Ages
Shades of Blue and Gray: Ghosts of the Civil War
Publication History
“The Queen and the Cambion” Copyright © 2012 by Richard Bowes. Originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Mar/Apr 2012. Reprinted with permission by the Author.
“It Was the Heat” Copyright © 1988 by Pat Cadigan. Originally appeared in Tropic Chills. Reprinted with permission by the Author.
“The Love of the Emperor Is Divine” Copyright © 2014 by Tom Cardamone. Original to this volume.
“The Wedding Guest” Copyright © 2014 by Steve Chapman. Original to this volume.
“Her Sweet Solace” Copyright © 2008, 2014 by J. T. Glover. An earlier version of this story originally appeared in 2008 in Beneath the Surface: 13 Shocking Tales of Terror, ed. by Tim Deal, Shroud Publishing LLC. Reprinted with permission by the Author.
“Catherine and the Satyr” Copyright © 2007 by Theodora Goss. Originally appeared in Strange Horizons, October 1, 2007. Reprinted with permission by the Author.
“The White Prince” Copyright © 2014 by Orrin Grey. Original to this volume.
“The Cure” Copyright © 2014 by Caren Gussoff. Original to this volume.
“Prince of Flowers” Copyright © 1988 by Elizabeth Hand. First published in Twilight Zone, February 1988.
“Lilac Season” Copyright © 2014 by Claire Humphrey. Original to this volume.
“The Oily Man” Copyright © 2014 by Alex Jeffers. Original to this volume.
“Given to the Sea” Copyright © 2014 by E. L. Kemper. Original to this volume.
“This is Not a Love Story” Copyright © 2009 by Nicole Kornher-Stace. Originally appeared in Goblin Fruit, Summer 2009. Reprinted with permission by the Author.
“The Queen of Them All” Copyright © 2014 by Ed Kurtz. Original to this volume.
“A Shot of Fireball” Copyright © 2014 by Carrie Laben. Original to this volume.
“Cain” Copyright © 1997 by Tanith Lee. Originally appeared in Dying for It. Reprinted with permission by the Author.
“Please Do Me: An Oral History” Copyright © 2014 by Nick Mamatas. Original to this volume.
“Man in Blue Overcoat” Copyright © 2014 by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Original to this volume.
“Dirty” Copyright © 2014 by Stephen Pope. Original to this volume.
“Tears for Lilu” Copyright © 2014 by Martin Rose. Original to this volume.
“Winter” Copyright © 1994 by Michelle Sagara. Originally appeared in Deals with the Devil. Reprinted with permission by the Author.
“Unveiled” Copyright © 2014 by J. Daniel Stone. Original to this volume.
“Pira” Copyright © 1985 by Brad Strickland. Originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 1985. Reprinted with permission by the Author.
“A Spoonful of Salt” Copyright © 2011 by Nicole M. Taylor. Originally appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Issue 106, October 2011. Reprinted with permission by the Author.
“Sleep of Reason” Copyright © 2014 by Halli Villegas. Original to this volume.
Handsome Devil: Stories of Sin and Seduction Page 37
