Bright Dead Star

Dust jacket illustration for Bright Dead Star by Lee Moyer.

Dust jacket illustration and design for Zoetrope Bizarre by Thomas Canty.

From tales of bizarre violence and murder, haunted photographs and films, through reflections on the flexible borders of sanity and the perverse, to alien horrors from deep time, deep space, and the deep sea, Bright Dead Star is a veritable supernova of the weird and uncanny as only master fantasist Caitlín R. Kiernan can deliver.

Among the collection’s twenty-five tales are a dying woman’s communion with the dying sea (“Strandling”), childhood recollections of a sky filled with rattlesnakes (“Crotalus”), to a loathsome couple with a far more loathsome secret (“L’homme et la femme terribles”), these are stories that pull no punches and demand that your preconceptions of genre should be checked before the book’s covers are even cracked.

In short, this is Kiernan doing what Kiernan does best.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• A Travelogue for Oneironautics
• In Utero, In Tenebris
• Bright Dead Star [101 Richard Arrington Blvd. South]
• Still[er] Life, From Hunger
• The Man Who Loved What Was
• L’homme et la femme terribles
• Untitled Psychiatrist No. 5
• The Woman Who Blew Down Houses
• Threnody for Those Who Die December Deaths
• Heart-Shaped Hole
• The Jar
• Crotalus (Murder Ballad No. 13)
• Untitled Psychiatrist No. 6
• Two Monsters Walk Into a Bar
• Discord in Anthracite
• Build Your Houses With Their Backs to the Sea
• The Moment Under the Moment (1994)
• A Buyer’s Guide to Commonplace Bizarreness
• Neither From Nor Towards
• Metamorphosis D (Imago)
• Passage of Venus in Front of the Sun
• Ovid Under Glass
• Ulysses and the Sirens
• Strandling
• Night Fishing

Trade: Fully cloth bound hardcover

Limited: 600 signed numbered hardcovers with the bonus volume, Zoetrope Bizarre. The signed limited edition of Bright Dead Star will be accompanied by Zoetrope Bizarre, a brand new novella. (See below for a full description.)

About Zoetrope Bizarre:

Flickers in a darkened movie house. Half-remembered midnight television. Light and shadow on a screen, whether big or small. A “lost” space odyssey, pretend interplanetary nightmares, a mysterious late-nite horror show hostess who may never have existed. Boojums and Alison Maehl (or Alice Mal). Insanity and rumor. Murder and fandom and Hollywood rabbit holes.

In this taut, enigmatic novella, Caitlín R. Kiernan invites the reader to chase the mystery of things that may never have existed or may only have been misplaced—perhaps on purpose and perhaps for the best. Zoetrope Bizarre unfolds like frames of film discarded on a cutting room floor, Kiernan's most ambitious tale of weird cinema since the World Fantasy Award-winning “The Prayer of Ninety Cats.”