This Strange Way of Dying: Stories of Magic, Desire and the Fantastic

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Overview

Spanning a variety of genres—fantasy, science fiction, horror—and time periods, Silvia Moreno-Garcia's exceptional debut collection features short stories infused with Mexican folklore yet firmly rooted in a reality that transforms as the fantastic erodes the rational. This speculative fiction compilation, lyrical and tender, quirky and cutting, weaves the fantastic and the horrific alongside the touchingly human. Perplexing and absorbing, the stories lift the veil of reality to expose the realms of what lies beyond with creatures that shed their skin and roam the night, vampires in Mexico City that struggle with disenchantment, an apocalypse with giant penguins, legends of magic scorpions, and tales of a ceiba tree surrounded by human skulls.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781550963540
Publisher:	Exile Editions
Publication date:	09/01/2013
Pages:	216
Sales rank:	299,292
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a short story writer and editor, and the operator of the micropress Innsmouth Free Press. Her short stories have appeared in Imaginarium 2012: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing, The Book of Cthulhu, ELQ/Exile: The Literary Quarterly, and Shine: An Anthology of Optimistic Science Fiction. She is the editor of Dead North: Canadian Zombie Fiction and Future Lovecraft. She lives in Vancouver.

Editorial Reviews

05/19/2014
In this haunting collection, Innsmouth Free Press publisher and editor Moreno-Garcia weaves 15 tales of weirdness, beauty, magic and longing. Shifting effortlessly among science fiction, magic realism, and horror, she toys with emotions and expectations. Her unsettling tales, often inconclusive or ambiguous, linger in the imagination. Some of the most memorable include the Lovecraftian "Flash Frame," about a cult obsessed with an old movie; the title romance about a woman who becomes engaged to Death; "Stories with Happy Endings," which features a disappointingly mundane vampire; and "The Doppelgangers," about a girl whose embarrassing parents spawn eerie yet possibly improved duplicates. Moreno-Garcia draws on her Mexican heritage to infuse her work with folklore and myth as well as local flavor, with several stories set in Mexico City. Even the less satisfying offerings have a special appeal in their emotional resonance and blurring of genre boundaries. Agent: Eddie Schneider, JABberwocky Literary Agency. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"Silvia Moreno-Garcia's stories are sensitive and haunting portraits of worlds where the impossible and the real live side by side. Hers is a rare and wonderful talent."  —Lavie Tidhar, World Fantasy Award–winning author, Osama

From the Publisher