"One of our essential writers of dark fiction."—New York Times"Lyrically compelling tales that are nearly impossible to stop reading...fans of weird writers like Carmen Maria Machado, Jeff VanderMeer, and China Mieville will be glad to find this volume and thereby discover a writer who inspired them all."—BooklistCaitlín R. Kiernan is one of dark fantasy and horror's most acclaimed and influential short fiction writers. Her powerful, unexpected stories shatter morality, gender, and sexuality: a reporter is goaded by her toxic girlfriend into visiting sadistic art exhibits; a countess in a decaying movie theater is sated by her servants; a collector offers his greatest achievement to ensnare a musician who grieves for her missing sister.In this retrospective collection of her finest work—previously only available in limited editions—Kiernan cuts straight to the heart of the emotional truths we cannot ignore.

In this remarkable collection the author has selected over two dozen of her best Lovecraftian tales ranging from 2000s “Valentia” to her more recent classic “A Mountain Walked” as well as including the complete Dandridge Cycle, as well as a new story, “M Is for Mars.”

The Signalman returns in The Tindalos Asset."Her stories saturate the mind with color... There is simply nothing out there quite like her."—The New York Times on Caitlín R. KiernanA rundown apartment in Koreatown. A Los Angeles winter. A strung out, worn out, wrecked and used government agent is scraped up off the pavement, cleaned up, and reluctantly sent out into battle one last time. Ellison Nicodemo has seen and done terrible things. She thought her only remaining quest was for oblivion. Then the Signalman comes calling. He wants to learn if she can stop the latest apocalypse. Ellison, once a unique and valuable asset, can barely remember why she ever fought the good fight.Still, you don't say no to the Signalman, and the time has come to face her fears and the nightmare forces that almost destroyed her. Only Ellison can unleash the hound of Tindalos. . .At the Publisher's request, this title is...

An albino girl wanders the sun-scorched back roads of a south Georgia summer, following the bidding of an angel or perhaps only voices in her head, searching out and slaying ancient monsters who have hidden themselves away in the lonely places of the world. * Caitlín R. Kiernan is an International Horror Guild Award–winning author! * A complete collection of the Alabaster prose short stories. "Caitlín R. Kiernan is the poet and the bard of the wasted and the lost."—Neil Gaiman

Who will come to the aid of beleaguered King Hrothgar, whose warriors have become the prey of the vengeful outcast monster Grendel?A grand and glorious story that has endured for centuries, the ageless classic adventure takes on a breathtaking new life in a remarkable new version for a modern era. Brilliantly reimagined by acclaimed, award-winning author Caitlín R. Kiernan, based on the screenplay by #1 New York Times bestseller Neil Gaiman and Academy Award®-winning screenwriter Roger Avary, it is the tale of a noble liege and a terrible creature who has cursed his kingdom with death, blood, and destruction—and of the great hero, Beowulf, who is called to a land of monsters to triumph where so many have failed . . . or to die as so many of the brave before him.

A collection of stories An albino girl wanders the sun-scorched backroads of a south Georgia summer, following the bidding of an angel or perhaps only voices in her head, searching out and slaying ancient monsters who have hidden themselves away in the lonely places of the world. Caitlín R. Kiernan first introduced Dancy in the pages of her award-winning second novel, Threshold (2001), then went on to write several more short stories and a novella about this unlikely heroine, each a piece of what has become an epic dark fantasy narrative. Alabaster finally collects all these tales into one volume, illustrated by Ted Naifeh (Gloomcookie, How Loathsome, Courtney Crumrin, Polly and the Pirates, etc.).

A dark jewel of a novella, this definitive edition of Caitlín R. Kiernan's Black Helicopters is the expanded and completed version of the World Fantasy Award-nominated original. Just as the Signalman stood and faced the void in Agents of Dreamland, so it falls to Ptolema, a chess piece in her agency's world-spanning game, to unravel what has become tangled and unknowable.Something strange is happening on the shores of New England. Something stranger still is happening to the world itself, chaos unleashed, rational explanation slipped loose from the moorings of the known. Two rival agencies stare across the Void at one another. Two sisters, the deadly, sickened products of experiments going back decades, desperately evade their hunters. An invisible war rages at the fringes of our world, with unimaginable consequences and Lovecraftian horrors that ripple centuries into the future.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital...

Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart is the follow-up to Caitlín R. Kiernan's World-Fantasy Award nominated The Ammonite Violin & Others, a collection that drew comparisons to the writings of such luminaries of the macabre and surreal as Angela Carter, Thomas Ligotti, Shirley Jackson, and Harlan Ellison. Here, again, in her eighth collection, we visit the borderlands where the weird, horrific, mythic, and erotic intersect. Once again, Kiernan sets her masterful, intoxicating prose to the task of retelling fairy tales, spinning sensual post-Lovecraftian yarns, and blurring the lines between pain and pleasure. Here is a celebration of the bizarre and beautiful, and a marriage of unlikely worlds. From a reverence of the dead to the sacrifices the living make to unspeakable gods, from clockwork dreams to tales of merciless revenge, Kiernan blurs the artificial lines of genre, and shows us a world where there is no division between the light and dark.

The best of Caitlin R. Kiernan

A government special agent known only as the Signalman gets off a train on a stunningly hot morning in Winslow, Arizona. Later that day he meets a woman in a diner to exchange information about an event that happened a week earlier for which neither has an explanation, but which haunts the Signalman.In a ranch house near the shore of the Salton Sea a cult leader gathers up the weak and susceptible — the Children of the Next Level — and offers them something to believe in and a chance for transcendence. The future is coming and they will help to usher it in.A day after the events at the ranch house which disturbed the Signalman so deeply that he and his government sought out help from 'other' sources, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory abruptly loses contact with NASA's interplanetary probe New Horizons. Something out beyond the orbit of Pluto has made contact.And a woman floating outside of time looks to the future and the past for answers...

Kiernan’s twelfth collection of short fiction since 2001—she displays the impressive range that characterizes her work. With her usual disregard for genre boundaries, she masterfully navigates the territories that have traditionally been labeled dark fantasy, sword and sorcery, science fiction, steampunk, and neo-noir.

"An extraordinary achievement" (Clive Barker) from the author of the acclaimed novel Threshold-this is the fiction debut that won the International Horror Guild Award for Best First Novel.

From Publishers WeeklyIn this stylish sequel to Kiernan's debut novel, Silk (1998), it's been 10 years since a drug-fueled experiment opened a window on an alternate world of horrors that pushed angst-scarred Spyder Baxter to suicide, and its survivors are still reeling from the aftershocks. Daria Parker has parlayed some of her experience into a successful musical career, but her lover, Niki Ky, is wracked by full-blown schizophrenic episodes in which Spyder beckons her from a dimension beyond death. When Niki follows Spyder's instruction to make a fatal plunge from San Francisco's Bay Bridge, she awakens in a gothic realm of death and darkness where she plays a key role in an intrigue Spyder has engineered to draw out a demonic entity known as "the Dragon." Meanwhile, Daria struggles in the world of the living to retrieve and protect an artifact Niki needs to keep horrors in the Dragon's world from erupting into our own. Though the plot often mystifies, the novel's unusual blend of otherworldly and supernatural horror gives it a uniquely weird cast. Kiernan's true achievement, however, is the careful crafting of her mellifluous prose to sustain an intense atmosphere of dread. Dream and nightmare, hallucination and reality, private fantasy and objective experience all merge seamlessly, making this one of the more relentless horror reads of the year. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Product DescriptionTen years ago, Niki Ky and Daria Parker saw something unspeakable in an old house in Birmingham, Alabama. Daria has denied it, escaping into a frantic music career and various addictions. But Niki has not had so many distractions. Diagnosed schizophrenic, she's lost years in a haze of therapy and anti-psychotics. But now, Niki's dead lover, Spyder Baxter, is calling to her from another world-an alien, impossible place where Niki is known as a Hierophant, a feared prophesied sorceress who can open a portal between worlds. And Daria will finally have to face what really happened ten years ago, if she's to help Niki save a world...or destroy it.