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A collection of science fiction and fantasy stories.

Publishers Weekly Review:

[Starred] This emotionally moving collection of Dozois’s recent writing and a selection of his best earlier pieces–including his two Nebula winners, “The Peacemaker” and “Morning Child”–is a valuable reminder that the renowned Asimov’s editor and anthologist also continues, if sporadically, to write significant fiction. Concentrating on the dilemma of how a rational species deals with its irrational urges, Dozois investigates the value and limits of forgiveness (“Dinner Party”), atonement (“Solace”), and religious belief (“Community,” “Disciples”). Humans struggle to communicate with alien colonists (“Chains of the Sea”), rebellious computers (“Recidivist”), and animals (“A Cat Horror Story”). What redeems us are empathy (“A Special Kind of Morning”) and the evergreen possibilities of life (“A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows”). Dozois demonstrates his range with classic fantasy, alternate history, and golden age–style horror as well as hard SF.

Read more about the author, Gardner Dozois

“My generation of science fiction writers has produced relatively few authentic masters of the short form. Gardner Dozois is one of them."
—William Gibson

“One of the most gifted writers in the United States.”
—Robert Silverberg

“Dozois has been so conspicuously and justifiably honored as an editor during the past decades that his excellence as a writer has tended to be forgotten.”
—Booklist

"Gardner Dozois is one of the pre-eminent authors in the history of science fiction and fantasy. One of the strongest talents to enter the field in the last half of the century, Dozois’s stories, be they set in a wildly imaginative future or the recent past, are never less than supremely literate, and profoundly human.”
—Lucius Shepard

“Gardner Dozois’s ear for dialogue never falters, nor does his ability to capture the essence of character in diverse situations. His vision is bleak, yet his words, in contrast, sing. Dozois is a great, neglected American writer.”
—Ellen Datlow

“A story from Gardner—all too rare an event—is cause for celebration. A whole collection is a literary milestone. Gardner Dozois is one of the best writers we have. His range and power are astonishing.”
—Nancy Kress

“His work is bitter, subtle, exotic, unique: science fiction for the true connoisseur.”
—Joe Haldeman

“Intense, well-rendered and colorfully done . . . a careful sculptor of ideas, a sensitive observer of human responses and a narrator who cares about the way things are said.”
—Roger Zelazny

“Dozois is a writer who prowls the terrain of nightmare, bringing back strange loves and horrors you will not soon forget. Included here are some of the most imaginative and poignant concepts in recent fiction, incarnated in a sustained, almost tangible realness that holds your eyes to the page.”
—James Tiptree, Jr.

Contents

Introduction by Robert Silverberg
Counterfactual
The Hanging Curve
Recidivist
When the Great Days Came
The Peacemaker
Fairy Tale
Chains of the Sea
Solace
A Cat Horror Story
Disciples
Ancestral Voices (with Michael Swanwick)
Dinner Party
A Dream at Noonday
A Special Kind of Morning
Morning Child
A Kingdom by the Sea
Community
A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

Introduction by Laird Barron

Author's Web Site

Nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award
Nominated for the Bram Stoker Award

These thirteen stories are our own lives, inside out. A boy's summer romance doesn't end in that good kind of heartbreak, but in blood. A girl on a fishing trip makes a friend in the woods who's exactly what she needs, except then that friend follows her back to the city. A father hears a voice through his baby monitor that shouldn't be possible, but now he can't stop listening. A woman finds out that the shipwreck wasn't the disaster, but who she's shipwrecked with. A big brother learns just what he will, and won't, trade for one night of sleep. From prison guards making unholy alliances to snake-oil men in the Old West doling out justice, these stories carve down into the body of the mind, into our most base fears and certainties, and there's no anesthetic. Turn the light on if you want, but that just makes for more shadows.

Contents

• Introduction: No Escape, Laird Barron
• Father, Son, Holy Rabbit
• Till the Morning Comes
• The Sons of Billy Clay
• So Perfect
• Lonegan’s Luck
• Monsters
• Wolf Island
• Teeth
• Raphael
• Captain’s Lament
• The Meat Tree
• The Ones Who Got Away
• Crawlspace

"The twisty endings, villainous characters, and truly shocking scenarios make several of these disturbing stories truly unforgettable."—Publishers Weekly

"...What I’d really like to say, in reviewing this book, is something like:
READ THIS BOOK
Yep. All caps. Maybe even throw a little something underneath like:
before it devours you...
Once you begin The Ones That Got Away, you won’t want to put it down. You’ll want to stay up all night, call in sick to work the next day, and know that you can live through this. But no worries if the only reason you don’t stop is you’re too scared to close your eyes and sleep. I won’t tell."—OWC

"From the very first story, there is no hesitation, no easing into these tales, these dark fables....Expect the unexpected. In this collection of short stories, Stephen Graham Jones does all of the things that have come to be expected of him, and more. There are moments of terror, tension built up over time, an uneasy feeling creeping over you, your gut in knots, hesitating to turn the page. There are gestures of kindness and love, loss built on sacrifice, families protecting each other. There are histories from childhood that are buried deep, but sometimes not deep enough. And there are myths and legends that turn out to be true, awe paired with knowledge turned to fear. Be prepared for the nightfall, I’m warning you now. Laugh if you want to, it’s okay. Maybe you’re one of the lucky ones, your imagination held in check. Or maybe you’ll stare at the ceiling, listening to the scratching while you try to convince yourself that it’s just the squirrels in the attic. When the shadows slip across your bedroom walls, it’s from a car passing by, for sure. Just close your eyes, and drift off to sleep, there’s no weight sinking into the bed. It’s probably just the cat...You do have a cat, don’t you?"—The Nervous Breakdown

"Jones is really a maverick among today’s dark fiction writers, his writing style brilliantly nonconformist while remaining engagingly accessible. The Ones That Got Away is the perfect showcase for his wide-array of literary acrobatics and eccentricities that often fall just outside genre boundaries yet always seem firmly entrenched in darkness, each story in this exceptional collection a cerebral Ritz cracker to feed the farthest corners of the darkest mind."— Dark Scribe

Introduction by Charles de Lint

Author's Blog

On the Banks of the River of Heaven presents fourteen stories by Richard Parks, an "unrepentant storyteller," according to Locus Magazine. In his third collection, you'll find stories about a ghoul with an identity crisis; a girl who can be anyone she wants except herself; a woman from heaven and a man very much from earth; gardening tips from hell; ten aspects of a goddess all searching for one wayward husband, and many other thrilling wonders. With his light touch and imaginative storytelling, Parks takes readers into the past as well as the future, to lands foreign as well as nearby, and from matters sublime to ones familiar (but never trivial or predictable). One of the most versatile fantasists of his generation, for Parks it is never style over the substance (or the other way around)—it is always a seamless melding of both.

"Gods, mortals, and entities somewhere in between provide provocative reflections on human nature in this breezy collection of 14 fantasy stories.... Parks relates these tales in a lyrical style that is sympathetic without being sentimental, straddling the boundary between the realistic and the romantic."—Publishers Weekly

"In a superb third collection, On the Banks of the River of Heaven, fantasist Richard Parks offers a series of powerful, timeless tales leavened with gentle humor."—Locus, Liza Trombi

"With three originals as good as the reprints, there’s something new here even for longtime fans. If you aren’t already familiar with Parks, be prepared to have your mind turned inside-out."—Locus,Faren Miller

"On the Banks of the River of Heaven" is, in one word, lovely. It is a collection of short stories, some related by time, place, and character, others unique in all three. Each story is a gem, a small jewel of Scheherezade-like story telling—compelling, fascinating, alive."— A Momentary Taste of Being

Contents

• Introduction by Charles de Lint
• On the Banks of the River of Heaven
• The Finer Points of Destruction
• A Pinch of Salt
• A Garden in Hell
• The Twa Corbies, Revisited
• Lord Goji’s Wedding
• The feather cloak
• Skin Deep
• Brillig
• On the Wheel
• Soft as Spider Silk
• Courting the Lady Scythe
• The Man Who Carved Skulls
• Moon Viewing at Shijo Bridge

About the Author

Free Fiction: "Northwest Passage" by Barbara Roden

Nominated for a World Fantasy Award

"Roden's Northwest Passages is an altogether masterly collection, proof that a writer with truly scary talent is at work in Ashcroft, British Columbia."--from Michael Dirda's "Introduction"

CONTENTS:

• Introduction by Michael Dirda
• The Appointed Time
• Endless Night
• The Palace
• Out and Back
• The Wide, Wide Sea
• The Brink of Eternity
• Tourist Trap
• Northwest Passage
• The Hiding Place

"First books are almost never this unsettling, this lively, this good. With NORTHWEST PASSAGES, Barbara Roden has placed herself among the ranks of the most telling, most effective, most readable living writers of the strange and fantastic tale. 'Endless Night' alone is worth the price of the book, but every story here is related with effortless-seeming skill and mastery. A wonderful and significant debut." --Peter Straub

"A voyage of fascinating discoveries...She is indeed a master storyteller." --World Fantasy Award Winner Zoran Zivkovic

"Barbara Roden invokes the ghosts of M. R. James and Algernon Blackwood in a collection that will put a touch of winter in your bones and have you glancing over your shoulder when lights are low. Northwest Passages demonstrates Roden's talent for distilling the ineffable, for transferring our universal fears of darkness and isolation to the page." --Laird Barron, Author of The Imago Sequence

"Barbara Roden, who has done so much to preserve the legacy of ghostly fiction, now adds to that legacy herself with Northwest Passages. But don't assume that the ten stories in this volume are arid pastiches of old-time writers. Beyond the elegance of diction, the crisply realized characters, the gradual but inexorable build-up of horrific atmosphere, there are enough moments of clutching terror in these tales to satisfy the most jaded sensibilities. This is Barbara Roden's first collection, but I for one fervently hope it will not be her last." --S.T. Joshi

"Barbara Roden's elegant tales share much with classical horror literature; a deceptively civilized sense of rhythm, pregnant and alluring spectral locations, and--best of all--a serious mean streak. These are subtle stories, but not always gentle, and definitely not safe." --Glen Hirshberg, Author of The Two Sams

"Sensitively and stylishly written, these tales convey that frisson of spectral terror that the aficionado always seeks but too seldom finds. They have all the strengths of their tradition, which Barbara Roden brings gracefully up to date." --Ramsey Campbell

Publishers Weekly: "Readers with a taste for deftly executed tales of subtle horror will welcome Roden's fine debut story collection. 'Out and Back' tells of an abandoned amusement park whose attractions are sinister snares set to entrap unwary thrill seekers. In 'The Palace', a skeleton crew working the night shift at a luxury hotel finds the premises haunted by the ghosts of a serial killer's victims. Both the title story and 'The Wide, Wide Sea' are set in Canadian wildernesses, where the alienated mingle freely with the ghostly. Roden is a co-publisher of the classic ghost story imprint Ash Tree Press, and her fiction resonates with echoes of Poe, Conan Doyle, Coleridge, Dickens and other masters of antiquarian horror. This yields powerful expressions of the supernatural in the book's two tales of 19th-century Antarctic exploration, 'Endless Night' and 'The Brink of Eternity', whose carefully crafted old-fashioned style lends atmosphere to depictions of a terra incognita rich with awe and terror."

"As a native of Canada's British Columbia province, Barbara Roden is familiar with wild, unspoiled places, and it shows...In reading these stories, it is clear to see that the soul of the Pacific Northwest and the Canadian prairies has seeped into her consciousness. That kind of terrain has become the inevitable setting for the human issues that concern her and the stories she is bound to tell. In Barbara Roden's fictions, the environment is a character itself. It draws in and nurtures her human characters and then overwhelms them or lures them into the comforts of emptiness and anonymity. This special sense of place, this exploration of the profound synergy between humans and their environment, and the persistent theme of humans enveloped by the wilderness, distinguishes her work...[P]eople who have disappeared never to be heard from again concern Roden mightily, and she expounds beautifully on this is passages that read like prose poems....Not all of Roden's settings are wilderness or country estates, but the same theme of finding a way of escape is very common in this collection. In 'The Hiding Place', a short, moody tale with a Shirley Jackson feel, a young girl seeks escape from the fallout of family tragedy. She finds it in a situation outwardly mundane, but full of suggestion. The settings for this story--suburban house and hospital--are more confined than Roden's more typical outdoors, but she still transforms the ordinary into the eerie. The 'bright little house with its three bedrooms, and finished basement, and neatly kept lawn' effectively suggests the surreality of suburban sameness, of neighborhoods with their clusters of Monopoly board houses. Other stories in Northwest Passages take place in haunted bookstores, hotels, and abandoned amusement parks. They are all engaging jaunts into strange worlds well worth visiting." --Sherry Austin for Dead Reckonings

"Ten very elegant ghost tales and gothic fictions make up Barbara Roden's first book. The stories gain considerable strength from being long enough to create believable characters and a strong sense of place. Some settings reflect the author's home in British Columbia. Others show her interest in polar exploration.'The Palace' is about the small crew on the overnight shift at a downtown Vancouver hotel. It's a bad part of town, once the hunting ground for a notorious serial killer. Night auditor Raymond is quiet and withdrawn. He spends an unnecessarily long time getting his nightly report from the register in the bar and seeming to talk to someone in the darkest corner of the room. 'The Brink of Eternity' is a man's lone quest for the hollow earth and an Arctic passageway. It's brilliantly told with passages from a history book I wouldn't know had been invented if the author's note didn't tell us. English tour buses and abandoned amusement parks are some of the other settings in this varied and very satisfying collection." --The Denver Post

"For the last of my dozen books [of the one's I've read this year], I'm picking a personal favorite, the first collection of eerie, unsettling stories by a wonderful Canadian writer. After all, what would Christmas be like without a few spooky tales? I'm not an unbiased judge of Barbara Roden's work, however, since I wrote the introduction to Northwest Passages. But if you enjoy uncanny tales, or the dark fantasies of Ray Bradbury, or brilliant pastiches of Victorian prose, or even the classic episodes of Rod Serling's "Twilight Zone," you will certainly devour these 10 stories. In one, the members of a 19th-century polar expedition discover that a member of their crew isn't quite what or who they think he is; in another, a modern young couple decide to explore an abandoned amusement park. This, I can tell you, is never a good idea." --Michael Dirda, Barnes & Noble Review [full review]

Edited and selected by noted scholar Gregg Rickman, The Early Work of Philip K. Dick, Volume One: 1952-1953, and Volume Two: 1953-1954, encompasses a total of twenty-six stories from the early years of Philip K. Dick. With extensive story notes and introductions by Rickman, and packaged to belong on any shelf, The Early Work of Philip K. Dick promises an early peek into the many worlds created by one of the acclaimed masters of science fiction and fantasy.

Booklist:
More than 25 years after his death, Dick's legacy is very much alive and thriving, thanks to continuing interest from Hollywood in his more marketable ideas and a steady stream of reissued novels and collections. The latest pair of Dick anthologies, gathering his earliest short fiction, cover the prolific years 1952/54, when Dick s first taste of publication fed his appetite for writing full time. Although Dick later dismissed his early work as bad science fiction, there are many gems here, including stories touching on themes he would explore more meticulously in his classic novels. His first published tale, Beyond Lies the Wub, for example, demystifies space explorers during their encounter with edible aliens that invade their hosts when consumed. The first volume's title story features a recurring Dick protagonist, a mechanic who outwits a dystopian ruling class; the second showcases Dick's fascination with time-and-space anomalies. Together, the books constitute an indispensable treasure for Dick fans and anyone curious about the formative years of a true twentieth-century literary genius.

Edited and selected by noted scholar Gregg Rickman, The Early Work of Philip K. Dick, Volume One: 1952-1953, and Volume Two: 1953-1954, encompasses a total of twenty-six stories from the early years of Philip K. Dick. With extensive story notes and introductions by Rickman, and packaged to belong on any shelf, The Early Work of Philip K. Dick promises an early peek into the many worlds created by one of the acclaimed masters of science fiction and fantasy.

Publishers Weekly:
This volume collects 15 of the earliest short publications by Philip K. Dick (1928–1982), all from 1952–1953. Though the young author is clearly finding his footing in these stories, many of the elements he developed in later works are present in embryonic form. The nature of reality is held up to question in Adjustment Team, while self-repairing and replicating robots populate James P. Crow, The Gun and Jon's World. The weak must prevail against seemingly invincible opponents in Beyond Lies the Wub, Piper in the Woods and Souvenir, and the prospect of total destruction looms in The Variable Man. Rickman provides an informative introduction and detailed endnotes on each story, which alone would make this volume worth acquiring. This collection is a must-have for PKD fans.

Booklist:
More than 25 years after his death, Dick’s legacy is very much alive and thriving, thanks to continuing interest from Hollywood in his more marketable ideas and a steady stream of reissued novels and collections. The latest pair of Dick anthologies, gathering his earliest short fiction, cover the prolific years 1952–54, when Dick’s first taste of publication fed his appetite for writing full time. Although Dick later dismissed his early work as “bad science fiction,” there are many gems here, including stories touching on themes he would explore more meticulously in his classic novels. His first published tale, “Beyond Lies the Wub,” for example, demystifies space explorers during their encounter with edible aliens that invade their hosts when consumed. The first volume’s title story features a recurring Dick protagonist, a mechanic who outwits a dystopian ruling class; the second’s showcases Dick’s fascination with time-and-space anomalies. Together, the books constitute an indispensable treasure for Dick fans and anyone curious about the formative years of a true twentieth-century literary genius. --Carl Hays