Dark Mondays

Kage Baker, celebrated creator of the Company novels and the standout collection Mother Aegypt, now brings together pirates, primates, eldritch horrors, maritime ghosts, and much more in Dark Mondays. This captivating new collection of fantastic short fiction is sure to cement her reputation as one of the most original storytellers working in the fantasy and speculative fiction genres today. Whether spinning tales of the mysterious young woman and the dreadful pirate captain Henry Morgan in the original novella “The Maid on the Shore,”or the tiny California beach community assaulted by Lovecraftian terrors in “Calamari Curls,” or the girl menaced by a haunting photograph and a trio of aspiring vampires at the heart of “Portrait, With Flames,” Kage Baker distinguishes herself throughout Dark Mondays as a storyteller extraordinaire, crafting intricately woven plots, compelling characters, and captivating settings filled with convincing detail. As likely to shock and surprise as it is to fill you with a sense of weird wonder and delight, Dark Mondays will entrance you with its inventive prose, astound you with its action, and seduce you with its style. Dark Mondays features five never-before-published stories, including the forty-one-thousand-word pirate novel, “The Maid on the Shore,” which chronicles the lesser known aspects of Captain Henry Morgan’s infamous sacking of Panama City.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In this enchanting, if melancholy, story collection from Hugo– and Nebula Award–nominee Baker (Mother Aegypt), the supernatural matter-of-factly touches the shabby lives of people in small, isolated towns, providing resolution and revelation. In "Calamari Curls," a legless war veteran who owns a divey chowder house sees his clientele dwindle with the opening of the titular upscale restaurant until a supernatural solution eliminates the competition and forestalls gentrification of his run-down coastal California town. "Events are only as real as we make them," realizes a Catholic priest in "Monkey Day" (also set in California), which pits him and an imaginative boy against an elementary school teacher whose nonbelief protects her from fantastical violence. In "The Maid on the Shore," a sprawling novella set in the 17th-century West Indies, English pirates are helped to bloody victory against the Spanish by a beautiful girl who embodies the fury of war. Though Baker's uncanny plot-turns often feel inorganic to her stories, she grapples vigorously with moral and philosophical conundrums. (July) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Born in Hollywood, Kage Baker has been an artist, actor, and director at the Living History Centre, and has taught Elizabethan English as a Second Language. Sky Coyote is her second novel. Ms. Baker lives in Pismo Beach, California.

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