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Holly Sherwin has been a struggling playwright for years, but now, after receiving a grant to develop her play Witching Night, she may finally be close to her big break. All she needs is time and space to bring her vision to life. When she stumbles across Hill House on a weekend getaway upstate, she is immediately taken in by the mansion, nearly hidden outside a remote village. It's enormous, old, and ever-so eerie--the perfect place to develop and rehearse her play.

Despite her own hesitations, Holly's girlfriend, Nisa, agrees to join Holly in renting the house for a month, and soon a troupe of actors, each with ghosts of their own, arrive. Yet as they settle in, the house's peculiarities are made known: strange creatures stalk the grounds, disturbing sounds echo throughout the halls, and time itself seems to shift. All too soon, Holly and her friends find themselves at odds not just with one another, but with the house itself. It seems something has been waiting in Hill House all these years, and it no longer intends to walk alone...

From Elizabeth Hand, one of America's leading literary fantasists, comes a collection of extraordinary novellas of damnation and dark revelation, epiphany and redemption. Written in the author's characteristic poetic prose, and rich with the detail of lives traumatic yet luminously transformed, these stories form a remarkable tapestry interweaving the supernatural and the mundane.

Contents:

• Introduction by Lucius Shepard
• Cleopatra Brimstone
• Pavane for a Prince of the Air
• Chip Crockett's Christmas Carol
• The Least Trumps
• Story Notes

The privileged daughter of famous television actors, Charlotte, "Lit," Moylan is ready to enjoy one last wild fling before college and adulthood. In fact, the whole idyllic hamlet of Kamensic, New York, is ready to party, for legendary avant-garde film director--and Lit's godfather--Alex Kern is coming back to reopen his fabulous mansion, Bolerium. But it won't be just any party. It'll be the event of all time.

The whole town is invited, young and old, famous and obscure. But other, more disturbing guests are arriving, too--seen at the edges of the forest, at the margins of the night. Kern's connections extend far beyond Hollywood, beyond even the modern age... and in Bolerium's echoing halls a fearsome confrontation is gathering, between ancient powers of the darkness and those sworn to stop them at any cost, no matter what--or who--the sacrifice... even an innocent girl.

WFA nominated novella.

The father of an autistic child dreams of a Christmas miracle in this moving short novel nominated for the World Fantasy Award--proceeds to be donated to Autism Speaks

When Brendan touches his four-year-old son, Peter screams and pulls away. He suffers from a form of autism known as Pervasive Developmental Disorder and has no idea how much his father wants to make him smile. Their relationship is tortured, but Christmas is coming, and a miracle might come with it.

An unlikely harbinger of the holidays arrives in the form of Tony Kemper, Brendan's childhood friend who's never quite gotten over his glory days as a 1970s punk sensation. Broke, unemployed, and homeless, Tony has recently become obsessed with the long-canceled Chip Crockett television show, a beloved memory from when they were kids. Not a minute of footage remains of Chip, but these three boys are about to discover that when an entertainer is truly great, his magic will last forever.

Previously serialized online, this is the first time Chip Crockett's Christmas Carol has been published in ebook form. Elizabeth Hand will donate all proceeds from this book to Autism Speaks in honor of special education teacher Anne Marie Murphy, who was killed in the Sandy Hook shooting. The two attended the same high school, where Murphy was a friend of Hand's younger sister.

The novella originally appeared on Sci Fiction, December 6, 2000, it can also be found in the collection Bibliomancy (2003).

WFA nominated novella. It originally appeared in the anthology Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction (2001), edited by Al Sarrantonio, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, March 2012. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Fifteenth Annual Collection (2002), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 13 (2002), edited by Stephen Jones, and Poe's Children: The New Horror: An Anthology (2008), edited by Peter Straub. It is included in the collections Bibliomancy (2003), Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories (2006), and The Best of Elizabeth Hand (2021).

An intrepid young woman stalks a murderer through turn-of-the-century Chicago in "this rich, spooky, and atmospheric thriller that will appeal to fans of Henry Darger and Erik Larson alike." (Sarah McCarry)

In the sweltering summer of 1915, Pin, the fourteen-year-old daughter of a carnival fortune-teller, dresses as a boy and joins a teenage gang that roams the famous Riverview amusement park, looking for trouble.

Unbeknownst to the well-heeled city-dwellers and visitors who come to enjoy the midway, the park is also host to a ruthless killer who uses the shadows of the dark carnival attractions to conduct his crimes. When Pin sees a man enter the Hell Gate ride with a young girl, and emerge alone, she knows that something horrific has occurred.

The crime will lead her to the iconic outsider artist Henry Darger, a brilliant but seemingly mad man. Together, the two navigate the seedy underbelly of a changing city to uncover a murderer few even know to look for.

Nebula Award winning short story. It was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October-November 2005. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction: Volume 2 (2014), edited by Gordon Van Gelder and the Nebula Awards Showcase 2008, edited by Ben Bova, as well as the collections Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories (2006) and The Best of Elizabeth Hand (2021).

No one is innocent, no one unexamined in Shirley Jackson award-winning author Elizabeth Hand's new collection of stories. From the mysterious people next door to the odd guy in the next office over, Hand teases apart the dark strangenesses of everyday life to show us the impossibilities, broken dreams, and improbable dreams that surely can never come true.

Table of Contents:

• The Maiden Flight of McCauley's Bellerophon - (2010) - novella
• Near Zennor - (2011) - novella
• Hungerford Bridge - (2009) - shortstory
• The Far Shore - (2009) - novelette
• Winter's Wife - (2007) - novelette
• Cruel Up North - (2008) - shortstory
• Summerteeth - shortstory
• The Return of the Fire Witch - (2009) - novelette
• Uncle Lou - (2011) - shortstory
• Errantry - (2007) - novelette

It is 1999. The Last Days, or some say, the First. The climate has warmed dramatically, the cities have imploded into riotous shards, and the sky is a glimmering array of reds and greens and golds.

In fin de siecle New York, a millionaire publisher, a jaded rock star and the girl who, in her own way, loves them both are watching the waters rise as the cults begin the frenzies of the Night of the Thousand Years.

On a whim, Grady Kendall applies to work as a live-in caretaker for a luxury property in Hawai?i, as far from his small-town Maine life as he can imagine. Within days he's flying out to an estate on remote Hokuloa Road, where he quickly uncovers a dark side to the island's idyllic reputation: it has long been a place where people vanish without a trace.

When a young woman from his flight becomes the next to disappear, Grady is determined--and soon desperate--to figure out what's happened to Jessie, and to all those staring out of the island's "missing" posters. But working with Raina, Jessie's fiercely protective best friend, to uncover the truth is anything but easy, and with an inexplicable and sinister presence stalking his every step, Grady can only hope he'll find the answer before it's too late.

Perfect for fans of Peter Heller and The White Lotus, and from award-winning writer Elizabeth Hand, a master of crime fiction known for her magnetic characters, seductive prose, and fearless excavations into the darkest corners of our world, comes a chilling and illuminating new novel about a place unlike any other--and the deadly cost of keeping it so.

This story originally appeared in Conjunctions 52: Betwixt the Between: Impossible Realities (2009), edited by Brian Evenson and Bradford Morrow, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, May 2016. The story is included in the collection Errantry: Strange Stories (2012).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Madeleine and Rogan are first cousins, best friends, twinned souls, each other's first love. Even within their large, disorderly family — all descendants of a famous actress — their intensity and passion for theater sets them apart. It makes them a little dangerous. When they are cast in their school's production of Twelfth Night, they are forced to face their separate talents and futures, and their future together.

This stunning short novel, winner of the World Fantasy Award, is the perfect introduction to Elizabeth Hand's singular voice. Her many novels offer a window into what it means to create art, to experience it, to feel passionately about the world. Illyria throws her talent into high relief — it is magic on paper.

This novella was subsequently included in the collection The Best of Elizabeth Hand.

WFA and Nebula Award winning novella. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 1994. The story can also be found in the anthologies Nebula Awards 31 (1997), edited by Pamela Sargent and The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction: The Fiftieth Anniversary Anthology (1999), edited by Gordon Van Gelder and Edward L. Ferman. It is included in the collection Last Summer at Mars Hill: and Other Short Stories (1998).

Mars Hill spiritualist community, founded 1883

It's nothing fancy. Just a faded resort on the rocky Maine Coast, inhabited by aging hippies, their rebellious children--and the elusive, shimmering spirits known as "the Golden Ones."

They are the reason Mars Hill exists. Not everyone can see Them, but everyone can feel their healing presence. Even fetching, skeptical, young Moony Rising, who has come to say farewell to everything she ever loved. And to learn a secret more wondrous than love itself...

Table of Contents:

• Last Summer at Mars Hill - (1994)
• The Erl-King - (1993)
• Justice - (1993)
• Dionysus Dendrites - (1993)
• The Have-Nots - (1992)
• In the Month of Athyr - (1992)
• Engels Unaware - (1992)
• The Bacchae - (1991)
• Snow on Sugar Mountain - (1991)
• On the Town Route - (1989)
• The Boy in the Tree - (1989)
• Prince of Flowers - (1988)

Lush, thrilling, and erotically charged, a triumph of suspense and dazzling imagination, Elizabeth Hand's Mortal Love is an extraordinary work that spans more than a century, uniting genius past and present with strange, tensile strands of inspiration, obsession, and lust.

A tragedy that occurs in a hospital for the insane in Frankfurt, Germany, will have repercussions across decades and eras. Several weeks after the death of a female patient in a terrible fire, the poet Algernon Swinburne follows a mysterious woman through the shadows toward a remarkable event at once enthralling, stimulating, and terrifying beneath the streets of London. Years later, at the start of a new century, a struggling young artist, Radborne Comstock, is introduced to a ravishing beauty who immediately becomes his muse, his desire, and his greatest torment. It is a legacy of pleasure and madness that will be passed down to his grandson, the dilettante actor Valentine Comstock, who is plagued by disturbing and increasingly erotic visions. And in the present day a journalist named Daniel Rowlands is seduced by the bewitching and mercurial Larkin Meade, who holds the key to lost artistic masterpieces, and to secrets too devastating to imagine.

What connects these men -- and others whose grand destinies are to imagine and create -- is one woman. Eternal, unknowable, the very ideal of beauty and desirability, she exists somewhere beyond the boundaries of time, a sensuous dream of flesh and fantasy to inspire or destroy, an immortal lover ... or an angel of death.

Shirley Jackson Award winning and WFA nominated novella. It originally appeared in the anthology A Book of Horrors (2011), edited by Stephen Jones, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, September 2017. The story can als be found in the anthology The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2012, edited by Paula Guran. It is included in the collections Errantry: Strange Stories (2012) and The Best of Elizabeth Hand (2021).

Eight lyrical and provocative tales from one of the world's premier literary fantasists

America boasts no finer, more acclaimed or accomplished literary fantasist than Elizabeth Hand. Poetry, magic, and love intermingle as she tears down the walls that separate the mundane from faerie and fancy. In this stunning collection of eight "strange stories," the multiple Nebula Award- and World Fantasy Award-winning author weaves spells that enrapture her readers, ranging freely from Greek mythology to the contemporary nightmares of AIDS and 9/11.

The celebrated chiller "Cleopatra Brimstone" chronicles the aftermath of a brutal rape and the bizarre transformation of a young entomology student into a vengeful angel of death. An emotionally unmoored tattoo artist discovers an unusual deck of tarot cards that enables her to profoundly alter bare skin and her personal reality in the mind-expanding masterwork "The Least Trumps." An artist attempts to capture her wayward modern-day Odysseus in oils and otherwise; a woman tragically in love isolates herself from a catastrophe-prone world; the death of a dear friend inspires profound personal reflections and strange pagan rituals; and in the brilliant concluding story, an artifact from a lost world reveals the inescapable vulnerability of our own. Odd and touching, provocative and disturbing, the selections in this magnificent collection showcase a master of the fantastic at the very peak of her storytelling powers.

Table of Contents:

• Cleopatra Brimstone - (2001) - novella
• Pavane for a Prince of the Air - (2002) - novelette
• The Least Trumps - (2002) - novella
• Wonderwall - (2004) - shortstory
• Kronia - (2005) - shortstory
• Calypso in Berlin - (2005) - shortstory
• Echo - (2005) - shortstory
• The Saffron Gatherers - shortstory
• Afterword - essay

In novels such as Mortal Love, Glimmering and Curious Toys, Elizabeth Hand has established herself as one of the most gifted, unclassifiable writers working in America today. Her equally brilliant short fiction has received numerous awards, setting a standard that few contemporary writers can match. The best of that fiction can be found in this generous, career-spanning volume that no one with an interest in imaginative fiction at its finest can afford to ignore.

The Best of Elizabeth Hand contains sixteen stories and novellas, along with an illuminating set of story notes. The collection opens with the World Fantasy Award-winning "Last Summer at Mars Hill," a moving account of mortality and miracles set in a "spiritualist community" in Maine. It closes with another World Fantasy winner: Illyria, an achingly beautiful short novel that deals with family, youthful sexuality, the enduring love of theater, and the infinite vulnerability of magic in all its forms. In between these bookended moments lies a virtual treasure trove of Story.

"Pavane for a Prince of the Air" recounts, in unflinching detail, the gradual, painful dissolution of a human life. "The Bacchae" combines Greek myth with a dystopian world view that J.G. Ballard would have recognized and admired. The much anthologized "Cleopatra Brimstone" is a darkly brilliant account of trauma, revenge, and astonishing transformations. "The Have-Nots" is a charming departure in which a small-town Southern waitress receives an unexpected gift from the King himself, Elvis Presley.

Ten more memorable stories, four of them previously uncollected, round out this masterful collection. The Best of Elizabeth Hand delivers exactly what the title promises. The result is a veritable showcase by a uniquely gifted writer whose talent, commitment and singular vision are evident on every page. If you're not yet a fan of Elizabeth Hand, this book will make you one. If you're already a fan, then you know what to expect: strange, beautiful, sometimes terrifying stories that will linger in your mind for a very long time to come.

Table of Contents:

• Last Summer at Mars Hill - (1994) - novella
• Pavane for a Prince of the Air - (2002) - novelette
• The Bacchae - (1991) - short story
• Cleopatra Brimstone - (2001) - novella
• Ghost Light - (2018) - short story
• The Have-Nots - (1992) - short story
• The Maiden Flight of McCauley's Bellerophon - (2010) - novella
• Eat the Wyrm - (2017) - short story
• Fire - (2017) - short story
• Echo - (2005) - short story
• The Saffron Gatherers - (2006) - short story
• Kronia - (2005) - short story
• Near Zennor - (2011) - novella
• The Owl Count - (2020) - novelette
• The Least Trumps - (2002) - novella
• Illyria - (2007) - novella
• Story Notes - essay by Elizabeth Hand

WFA nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology Full Spectrum 4 (1993), edited by Lou Aronica, Amy Stout and Betsy Mitchell. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Seventh Annual Collection (1994), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror (2010). It is included in the collection Last Summer at Mars Hill: and Other Short Stories (1998).

WFA nominated novella. It originally appeared in Conjunctions 39: The New Wave Fabulists (2002), edited by Peter Straub and Bradford Morrow, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, November 2015. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Sixteenth Annual Collection (2003), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. It is included in the collections Bibliomancy (2003), Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories (2006) and The Best of Elizabeth Hand (2021).

World Fantasy Award winning and Hugo and Sturgeon Award nominated novella. The story originally appeared in the anthology Stories: All-New Tales (2010), edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Five (2011), edited by Jonathan Strahan and The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011, edited by Rich Horton. It is included in the collections Errantry: Strange Stories (2012) and The Best of Elizabeth Hand (2021).

This short story originally appeared in the collection Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories (2006). It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume One (2007), edited by Jonathan Strahan, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18 (2007), edited by Stephen Jones, and Best American Fantasy (2007), edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. The story is included in the collections Fire. (2017) and The Best of Elizabeth Hand (2021).

Beginning her first year at the University of the Archangels, Katherine Sweeney Cassidy accidentally discovers the existence of the Benandanti, a clandestine order that has been secretly manipulating the world's governments and institutions.

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Wizards: Magical Tales from the Masters of Modern Fantasy (2007), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld, Issue 115, April 2016. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Two (2008), edited by Jonathan Strahan, Year's Best Fantasy 8 (2008), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Kramer, and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Twenty-First Annual Collection (2008), edited by Kelly Link, Gavin J. Grant and Ellen Datlow. The story is included in the collection Errantry: Strange Stories (2012).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

When the young members of a British acid-folk band are compelled by their manager to record their unique music, they hole up at Wylding Hall, an ancient country house with dark secrets. There they create the album that will make their reputation, but at a terrifying cost: Julian Blake, the group's lead singer, disappears within the mansion and is never seen or heard from again.

Now, years later, the surviving musicians, along with their friends and lovers – including a psychic, a photographer, and the band's manager – meet with a young documentary filmmaker to tell their own versions of what happened that summer. But whose story is true? And what really happened to Julian Blake?

This is a short novel of approximately 43,500 words.

Cass Neary made her name in the seventies as a photographer embedded in the burgeoning punk movement in New York City. Her pictures of the musicians and the hangers-on, the infamous, the damned, and the dead, earned her a brief moment of fame.

Thirty years later she is adrift, on her way down, and almost out when an old acquaintance sends her on a mercy gig to interview a famously reclusive photographer who lives on an island in Maine. When she arrives Down East, Cass stumbles across a decades-old mystery that is still claiming victims, and she finds one final shot at redemption.

Patricia Highsmith meets Patti Smith in this mesmerizing literary thriller.

As this riveting tour-de-force opens, the police already want to talk to the photographer Cass Neary about a mysterious death she was involved with previously, but before they can bring her in, Cass accepts a job offer from overseas and hops on a plane.

In Helsinki, she authenticates a series of disturbing but stunning images taken by a famous fashion photographer who has cut himself off from the violent Nordic music scene where he first made his reputation. Paid off by her shady employer, she buys a one-way ticket to Reykjavik, in search of a lover from her own dark past.

But when the fashion photographer's mutilated corpse is discovered back in Finland, Cass finds herself sucked into a vortex of ancient myth and betrayal, vengeance and serial murder, set against a bone-splintering soundtrack of black metal and the terrifying beauty of the sunless Icelandic wilderness.

In this eagerly awaited sequel to the award-winning Generation Loss, Cass Neary finds her own worst fears confirmed: it's always darkest before it turns completely black.

Punk photographer Cass Neary, "one of noir's great anti-heroes" (Katherine Dunn, author of Geek Love), rages back in the series that began with the award-winning novels Generation Loss and Available Dark. Fleeing Reykjavik and a cluster of cult murders, Cass lands in London to rendezvous with her longtime lover Quinn, a person of interest to both Interpol and the Russian mob.

Only Quinn doesn't show up. Alone in London and fearing the worst, Cass hooks up with a singer-songwriter with her own dark past, who brings her to the wrong party. Cass becomes entangled with the party's host, Mallo Tierney, an eccentric gangster with a penchant for cigar cutters and neatly-wrapped packages, and a trio of dissolute groupies connected to a notorious underground filmmaker.

Forced to run Mallo's contraband, Cass is suddenly enmeshed in a web of murder, betrayal, and artistic and sexual obsession that extends from London to the stark beauty of England's Land's End Peninsula, where she uncovers an archeological enigma that could change our view of human history?if she survives.

Cass Neary needs cash to get home to New York, and she's already sold her camera-like losing a limb, for a photographer of her experience. Her best chance is to get in on the deal that Griffin, an old flame, is about cut with a notoriously particular bookseller for a gorgeous, ancient illuminated manuscript: The Book of Lamps and Banners. This Book is more than just a beautiful object-its text and images are said to have a powerful magic capable of life-changing effects on anyone who reads it.

But before the sale can be completed, an intruder brazenly steals the Book out from under the dealer's nose. Cass and Griff are the only suspects. To clear their names, and keep the missing text out of dangerous hands, Cass plunges into a curious underworld at the intersection of antiquarian books, cutting-edge software, and modern nationalist politics.

The title story, "Fire." written especially for this volume, is a harrowing postapocalyptic adventure in a world threatened by global conflagration. Based on Hand's real-life experience as a participant in a governmental climate change think tank, it follows a ragtag cadre of scientists and artists racing to save both civilization and themselves from fast-moving global fires.

"The Woman Men Didn't See" is an expansion of Hand's acclaimed critical assessment of author Alice Sheldon, who wrote award-winning SF as "James Tiptree, Jr." in order to conceal identity from both the SF community and her CIA overlords. Another nonfiction piece, "Beyond Belief," recounts her difficult passage from alienated teen to serious artist.

Also included are "Kronia," a poignant time-travel romance, and "The Saffron Gatherers," two of Hand's favorite and less familiar stories. Plus: a bibliography and our candid and illuminating Outspoken Interview with one of today's most inventive authors.

Table of Contents:

• The Saffron Gatherers - (2006) - short story
• Fire. - short story
• Beyond Belief: On Becoming a Writer - (2004) - essay
• Coda (Beyond Belief: On Becoming a Writer) - essay
• Kronia - (2005) - short story
• "Flying Squirrels in the Rafters" - interview of Elizabeth Hand by Terry Bisson
• The Woman Men Didn't See - essay
• Tom Disch - (2008) - essay

Amid the ruins of a once great city, a girl and her beautiful long-lost twin brother are drawn to the seductive voice of a green-eyed boy whose name is Death. Together they must journey through a poisoned garden filled with children who kill and beasts that speak--all the while resisting the evil that compels them to join in a nightmare ritual of blood that will unleash the power of the ancients and signal the end of humanity.

One hundred years after the Third Shining, Hobi, Reive, Tast'annin, and Nefertity prepare for the prophesied collapse of Araboth, the domed city-state presumably protecting its citizens from the alleged horrors of the Outside.

The energumens, creatures who are the result of centuries of genetic engineering, threaten to come to Earth to lead the other bioengineered slave races in a war against humanity.