Still So Strange

The World Fantasy Award Finalist: “It’s Clive Barker crossed with Tanith Lee set to a Siouxsie and the Banshees beat, and I loved every second of it.” —Gemma Files, Shirley Jackson Award–winning author of Experimental Film Welcome to a world of monsters, ghosts, and witches, both seductive and terrifying. In the first collection of short fiction from the author of the Necromancer Chronicles, reality shifts and shimmers with potent magic. More than twenty works, including two poems, feature characters who will steal your heart just as easily as your soul. In “Wrack,” a fisherman becomes so enchanted by a mermaid that the call of the waves becomes impossible to resist. When a killer comes to “Dogtown,” he learns that his bark isn’t worse than the bites of the locals. A dying artist returns to Ireland, where the faerie she has always loved tempts her with eternal life, as long as she leaves her humanity on the shore like so much “Flotsam.” And in “Smoke & Mirrors,” the circus comes to a town strangely bereft of ghosts, thanks to a demonic being conducting a train to the netherworld. With prose that is “gently pulling, promising beautifully cold oblivion in smothering darkness,” Amanda Downum transports you to sweltering southern swamps and the labyrinthine streets of Old World cities, proving without a doubt that “she’s one of the very best dark fantastical writers working today” (Bracken MacLeod, author of Closing Costs). “Ethereal, atmospheric, and mysterious.” —Elizabeth Bear, Hugo Award–winning author of Machine “These stories range from the melancholic to the downright chilling, and deftly evoke both the truly strange and the very human.” —Liz Bourke, author and reviewer for Tor.com and Locus

Elizabeth Bear, author of Karen Memory and Shoggoths in Bloom, and winner of the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Campbell Awards

“Ethereal, atmospheric, and mysterious.”

Liz Bourke, reviewer for Tor.com and Locus Magazine

“Amanda Downum’s work is always atmospheric and full of character. These stories range from the melancholic to the downright chilling, and deftly evoke both the truly strange and the very human. I enjoyed them.”

Gemma Files, Shirley Jackson Award-winning author of Experimental Film

“Amanda Downum’s prose is intoxicating, sensual, layered―both addictive and poisonous, a shot of absinthe with an opium smoke chaser. The stories in Still So Strange run the full pleasure/pain gamut of the dark fantastic, offering a bastard cornucopia of gods, monsters and monster-gods, gorgeous terrors etched in salt and blood and gold. It’s Clive Barker crossed with Tanith Lee set to a Siouxsie and the Banshees beat, and I loved every second of it.”

Bracken MacLeod, author of Come to Dust and 13 Views of the Suicide Woods

“Amanda Downum’s prose is the undertow, gently pulling, promising beautifully cold oblivion in smothering darkness. She makes me shiver and want to lean back and let that pull whisk me away to unimagined places. Downum’s not just one of my favorite writers, she’s one of the very best dark fantastical writers working today.”

About the Author

Amanda Downum is an author of fantasy and horror based out of Austin, Texas. Her short fiction and poetry has appeared in The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu, Dreams from the Witch House, Strange Horizons, and more. Her novels include Dreams of Shreds and Tatters (Solaris) and The Necromancer Chronicles (The Drowning City, The Bone Palace, and Kingdom of Dust) from Orbit.

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