Fearful Symmetries (42 page)

Shirley Jackson Award winner and World Fantasy nominee
Kaaron Warren
has lived in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra, and Fiji. She’s sold many short stories, three novels (the multi-award-winning
Slights
,
Walking the Tree
, and
Mistification
) and four short story collections. Three of her collections have won the ACT Publishers’ and Writers’ Award for fiction including her most recent,
Through Splintered Walls
, which also won a Canberra Critic’s Circle Award for Fiction, two Ditmar Awards, two Australian Shadows Awards and a Shirley Jackson Award. Her stories have appeared in Australia, the US, the UK, and elsewhere in Europe, and have been selected for both Ellen Datlow’s and Paula Guran’s
Year’s Best
Anthologies. She was shortlisted for a Bram Stoker Award for “All You Can Do is Breathe,” and was Special Guest at the Australian National Science Fiction Convention in Canberra 2013. You can find her at
http://kaaronwarren.wordpress.com/
and on Twitter: @KaaronWarren.

A Whisper of Blood

Alien Sex

Blood is Not Enough: 17 Stories of Vampirism

Blood and Other Cravings

Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror

Digital Domains: A Decade of Science Fiction and Fantasy

Hauntings

Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural

Lethal Kisses: 19 Stories of Sex, Death and Revenge

Little Deaths

Lovecraft Unbound

Lovecraft’s Monsters

Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

Nebula Awards Showcase 2009

Off Limits: Tales of Alien Sex

Omni Best Science Fiction: Volumes One
through
Three

Omni Books of Science Fiction: Volumes One
through
Seven

OmniVisions One
and
Two

Poe: 19 New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe

Supernatural Noir

Tails of Wonder and Imagination: Cat Stories

Telling Tales: The Clarion West 30
th
Anniversary Anthology

The Best Horror of the Year: Volumes One
through
Five

The Dark: New Ghost Stories

The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy

Twists of the Tale: An Anthology of Cat Horror

Vanishing Acts: A Science Fiction Anthology

After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells

Salon Fantastique: Fifteen Original Tales of Fantasy

Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

Teeth: Vampire Tales

The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: First through Sixteenth Annual Collections

The Adult Fairy Tale Series

Black Heart, Ivory Bones

Black Swan, White Raven

Black Thorn, White Rose

Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears

Silver Birch, Blood Moon

Snow White, Blood Red

Children’s Fairy Tale Series

A Wolf at the Door: And Other Retold Fairy Tales

Swan Sister: Fairy Tales Retold

Troll’s Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales

The Mythic Series

The Beastly Bride: Tales of the Animal People

The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales

The Faery Reel: Tales from the Twilight Realm

The Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest

The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Seventeenth through Twenty-First Annual Collections

Haunted Legends

Introduction copyright © 2014 by Ellen Datlow

“A Wish from a Bone” copyright © 2014 by Gemma Files

“The Atlas of Hell” copyright © 2014 by Nathan Ballingrud

“The Witch Moth” copyright © 2014 by Bruce McAllister

“Kaiju” copyright © 2014 by Gary McMahon

“Will The Real Psycho in This Story Please Stand Up?” copyright © 2014 by Pat Cadigan

“In the Year of Omens” copyright © 2014 by Helen Marshall

“The Four Darks” copyright © 2014 by Terry Dowling

“The Spindly Man” copyright © 2014 by Stephen Graham Jones

“The Window” copyright © 2014 by Brian Evenson

“Mount Chary Galore” copyright © 2014 by Jeffrey Ford

“Ballad of An Echo Whisperer” copyright © 2014 by Caitlín R. Kiernan

“Suffer Little Children” copyright © 2014 by Robert Shearman

“Power” copyright © 2014 by Michael Marshall Smith

“Bridge of Sighs” copyright © 2014 by Kaaron Warren

“the worms crawl in,” copyright © 2014 by Laird Barron

“The Attic” copyright © 2014 by Catherine MacLeod

“Wendigo Nights” copyright © 2014 by Siobhan Carroll

“Episode Three: On the Great Plains, In the Snow” copyright © 2014 by John Langan

“Catching Flies” copyright © 2014 by Carole Johnstone

“Shay Corsham Worsted” copyright © 2014 by Garth Nix

Fearful Symmetries
© 2014 by Ellen Datlow
Cover artwork © 2014 by Erik Mohr
Interior design © 2014 by Vince Haig

All rights reserved.

Published by ChiZine Publications

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

EPub Edition MAY 2014 ISBN: 978-1-77148-194-6

All rights reserved under all applicable International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen.

No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS
Toronto, Canada
www.chizinepub.com
[email protected]

Edited by Ellen Datlow
Copyedited and proofread by Michael Matheson and Sandra Kasturi

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.

We are tremendously grateful to everyone who backed the
Fearful Symmetries
project on Kickstarter. We would never have been able to produce this wonderful anthology of original horror fiction without your support.

A couple of notes:

1. We have attempted to contact all backers with regard to our acknowledgement of their generosity but could not track down a few people.
   
2. We would also like to thank those backers who asked not to be named, for their generosity.
   

Thank you!

ChiZine Publications & Ellen Datlow

@solardepths

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