Caitlín R. Kiernan Book order

In Vile Affections, Caitlín R. Kiernan's seventeenth short fiction collection, the boundaries of desire, fascination, passion, and dread collide. That which is beautiful may easily be profane. Those who love us may devour us alive. A shadow may shine like a supernova. The eye of the beholder is God. In these twenty-two stories, Kiernan's trademark range is on display, taking us from submerged and monster-haunted dreamscapes to quiet bedroom conversation between lovers, from unexpected and uncanny roadkill to an object lesson on the perils of picking up hitchhikers on rainy Appalachian nights. Moving deftly between such disparate genres as cyberpunk, fairy tales, and Southern Gothic, this is Kiernan at their eerie best.

“Her stories saturate the mind with color... There is simply nothing out there quite like her.”—The New York Times on Caitlín R. Kiernan A 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. . .

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 to what can save humanity. Agents of Dreamland is a new Lovecraftian horror novella from award-winning author Caitlín R. Kiernan.

A complex, haunting novel that explores a schizophrenic young artist’s struggles with her perception of reality… including an intriguing ghostly woman who appears to her in the most mysterious ways. India Morgan Phelps—Imp to her friends—is trying to write her memoir, but she struggles with the unreliability of her own mind. Suffering from schizophrenia, as well as comorbid anxiety and OCD, Imp has a difficult time separating fantasy from reality. But for her, it’s most important to tell her “truth.” And for Imp, that truth comes through a stream-of-consciousness tale of her love story with her transgender girlfriend, as well as Imp’s obsession with a mysterious woman whom she finds naked and mute at the side of the road. Imp must push past her mental illness—or work with it—to piece together her memories and tell her story. A rich exploration of mental illness, gender identity, and creative process, The Drowning Girl delivers an eerie and powerful story of a woman’s efforts to discover the truth that’s locked away in her own head. “Caitlín R. Kiernan moves firmly into the new vanguard […] of our best and most artful authors of the gothic and fantastic—those capable of writing fiction of deep moral and artistic seriousness.”—Peter Straub

Chance Silvey grew up in her grandparents’ house on the side of Red Mountain, high above the urban sprawl of Birmingham, Alabama. Now married, with a baby on the way, she wants to move on and leave the house—and the tragic history of her family—in the past. But her future is already tainted. Chance is hallucinating, seeing blood everywhere, and is afraid to uncover what it means. Her husband, Deacon, a gifted psychic, fears being drawn into a police investigation after having a vision of a serial killer’s brutality. And it all leads to a woman with a thirst for violence, hiding from something that haunts her day and night. Something even more terrible than herself…

Recounts the story of a young Scandinavian warrior, Beowulf, who pledges to protect King Hrothgar's people from the monstrous creature Grendel that has been terrorising his kingdom. In the ensuing fight, Beowulf rips off Grendel's arm and the now-mortally wounded monster flees back to his home beneath a mysterious lake.

A strange girl speaks of being charged by an angel to battle monsters and claims she cannot do it alone. She needs Chance’s help. Chance Matthews has suffered enough tragedies. The latest—her grandfather’s death—has left her shaken, convinced that she will always be alone. What she needs now is time—time to recover, time to determine what her future will be. What she doesn’t need is a strange girl with alabaster skin who knows things about Chance she can’t possibly know. Chance doesn’t believe in angels. Or monsters. But among the artifacts left by her geologist grandparents, there lies a fossil of a creature that couldn’t possibly have ever existed. But it did. And still does…