Search Worlds Without End

@expectations is a fabulous work of women's fiction by a writer who has made a career of delving deep into women's hearts and finding the truth of their feelings and their lives. Reed's fiction has always examined the female and familial conditions with a sharp eye, a truthful insight, and a unique style that leaves her readers breathless and wanting more.

Jenny is living a typical suburban life, one she's no longer sure she really wants and doesn't know how to change. When she stumbles upon an online community where people create their own lives through words, she dives in headfirst, eager for something new.

But soon Jenny becomes so far removed from her life that she can no longer even see the line between reality and fantasy; she's even got an online lover who insists that he will leave his own family, take her away from it all, and make their virtual life a reality. Eventually Jenny will have to make a choice: return to her husband, her children, her home, her "real life"--or escape into the arms of a fantasy world that may never become truly real.

Warfare is institutionalized as a means of social control and a product of technological imperatives . Reed's forte is the production of SF fabulations in which characters struggle to retain and assert their humanity in a mechanized and devalued world ." - Anatomy of Wonder (204) II-891.

The Dogs of Truth contains 17 new or previously uncollected short stories. Included are "High Rise High," about a student revolt at the ultimate "secure" high school; "Focus Group," where a star-struck fan dictates the fate of soap opera characters through a biochip implant; "Escape from Shark Island," which looks at an extreme version of today's trendy "family bed;" and "Precautions," where germ-phobia reigns supreme.

The new stories tell of the "Grand Opening" of the world's largest mega-mall, study the relationship of a writer and his muse in "Getting It Back," and, in "The Shop of Little Horrors," take a dark look at the child-free lifestyle.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - (2005) - essay by Kit Reed
• Grand Opening - short story
• Visiting the Dead - (2003) - short story
• High Rise High - (2004) - novelette
• Incursions - (2003) - short story
• Focus Group - (2003) - short story
• Yard Sale - (2004) - short story
• Into the Jungle - (2003) - short story
• Escape from Shark Island - (2004) - short story (variant of Family Bed)
• Old Soldiers - (2001) - short story
• Playmate - (2001) - short story
• No Two Alike - (2003) - short story
• Getting It Back - short story
• Precautions - (2000) - short story
• The Shop of Little Horrors - short story
• The Zombie Prince - (2004) - short story
• Captive Kong - (2001) - short story
• Perpetua - (2004) - short story

The world is in chaos: war, plague, global ecological collapse. Seeking sanctuary for their children, parents enrol them in the elite Clothos Academy. Run by a mysterious man known only as Sarge, set in a former monastery atop a sheer cliff on a tiny island, Clothos will admit only 100 children before it is sealed off--perhaps permanently--from the terrors outside.

These precious, protected children are hardly the best and the brightest: empty-headed, anorexia-thin "starlets;" troublemakers barely one step ahead of the law; cast-off junior royals too embarrassing to be let out in public. The staff isn't much better, from the alcoholic doctor and lovelorn guidance counselor to a teacher with a lust for power and an ancient monk with secrets of his own.

And the dangers from which these castaways are being protected? Stored on hundreds of DVDs, ready to be trotted out whenever Sarge needs to terrify his little flock.

And yet...

Two boys discover there are real dangers beyond Clothos' thick stone walls when they hack the Academy's self-contained computer network and connect, for a brief but disastrous moment, to the outside world. Worse, a stranger has penetrated the Academy's defenses. And he has brought Death.

A motorcycle gang of nuns rides out on a mysterious rescue mission in this dazzling work of metaphysical science fiction by Kit Reed. This scarifying trip into the near future provides an extraordinary look at women in the contemporary world. Marooned on Schell Isle in a pre-apocalyptic near future, the women are waiting. The men have all gone to war - the ultimate sexist act. When he comes back will he be welcomed? It's an open question. But today is the day everything begins to change. What unknown force is rushing towards the island? What do the women have to fear? Is it the murderous Outlaw family, riding their way and bent on revenge, or the men, or an enemy within? But the bikers are coming: sixteen in all, in black helmets emblazoned with a silver cross, metaphysical infonauts who run computer programs in a ceaseless search for the name of God. They pray for the dead and when they have to, they ride out on their bikes to defend the living. Until they lift the face plates you will not know who they are. Watch out for them. The Little Sisters of the Apocalypse.

MORMAMA is a riveting supernatural, southern gothic tale from Kit Reed, the author of Where.

Dell Duval has been living on the street since his accident. He can't remember who he was or where he came from. All he has is a tattered note in his pocket with an address for the Ellis house, a sprawling, ancient residence in Jacksonville. He doesn't know why he's been sent here.

In the house, Lane and her son Theo have returned to the ancient family home--their last resort. The old house is ruled by an equally ancient trio of tyrannical aunts, who want to preserve everything. Nothing should ever leave the house, including Lane.

Something about the house isn't right. Things happen to the men and boys living there. There are forces at work one of which visits Theo each night--Mormama, one mama too many.

Table of Contents:

• Winter - (1969)
• The Vine - (1967)
• Winston - (1969)
• The Food Farm - (1967)
• Songs of War - (1974)
• Pilots of the Purple Twilight - (1981)
• The Thing at Wedgerley - (1976)
• Gran - (1970)
• Death of a Monster - (1970)
• Cynosure - (1964)
• Across the Bar - (1971)
• Empty Nest - (1959)
• In Behalf of the Product - (1973)
• The Attack of the Giant Baby - (1975)
• The Wandering Gentile - (1976)
• Moon - (1981)

The baby business is booming. Billions of dollars are spent each year on strollers, cribs, and clothing, not to mention assisted reproduction and adoption. With fertility rates dropping precipitously in the US and babies becoming ever more valuable as a combination of status symbol and perfect accessory, there's clearly a developing market for someone like Tom Starbird. Tom is The Baby Merchant -- though he'd never think of himself in such terms. In his mind, Tom creates perfect families by matching famous couples with prime--but neglected -- newborns. Tom's a master of surveillance and secret "pickups". His small staff is extremely well-paid, especially the doctor who implants the government-required tracking chip into each infant's developing skull.

Sasha Egan is a talented artist feeling trapped by an accidental pregnancy. Determined to place her child with a loving family, Sasha is jolted by the arrival, at her chosen home for unwed mothers, of the unborn baby's father. Behind Gary's insincere protestations of love, Sasha detects the hand of her powerful, wealthy grandmother. Nearly nine months pregnant, Sasha disappears, going to ground at a seedy motel.

Jake Zorn is a crusading TV journalist who has broken some of the biggest scandals of the day. His life is perfect--except that he and his rainmaker attorney wife, Maury, cannot have children. They've tried everything; repeated miscarriages drove Maury to a terrible act that makes adoption agencies turn them away.

Tom Starbird is Jake's last chance, but it's too late--Tom wants out of the baby business. Jake Zorn knows more than a few hard truths about Tom Starbird, and he's not afraid to expose them to the nation.

Desperate to find a baby for the Zorns, Tom Starbird settles on Sasha Egan as the perfect supplier.

Soon Sasha's baby will be born. And many lives will be forever altered.

Tiptree nominated story first published in Asimov's July 1984, later in Weird Women, Wired Women (1998).

Inside the Castertown MegaMall, the biggest mall in the world, live the night children--runaways, abandoned kids, kids who got lost and were never found. They only come out at night, after all the shoppers are gone.

When thirteen-year-old Jule Devereaux visits the mall after the mysterious disappearance of her aunt, she becomes a pawn in the war between two gangs of night children: the Castertown Crazies, led by the stalwart Tick Stiles, and the Dingos, whose leader is the batty Burt Arno. What the night children don't realize is that the megalomaniacal owner of the MegaMall, billionaire Amos Zozz, knows all about them. To him, they are vermin--"rats" living in his beautiful mall--and he has plans to exterminate them. Julie, Tick, and Burt must join forces if they want to survive....

WFA nominated short story. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October-November 1995. The story is included in the collections Seven for the Apocalypse (1999) and The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories (2013).

Called "one of our brightest cultural commentators" by Publishers Weekly, Kit Reed draws from life--with a difference. This new collection brings together thirty-four of her strong, original stories, from early classics like "The Wait" and "Winter" to six never-before-collected short stories, including "The Legend of Troop 13" and "Wherein We Enter the Museum." An early favorite, "Automatic Tiger," is the first in a series of Reed's stories about animals. There's a monkey who grinds out bestsellers with the help of a "creative writing" app. Her uncanny black dog can enter a crowded room and sit down at the feet of the next man to die. Her characters confront war in various arenas: mother/daughter battles, the war of the sexes, the struggles of men scarred by war. Kit Reed's self-described "transgenred" fiction is confirmation of an "extraordinary talent" (The Financial Times). The range and complexity of her work speaks for itself in The Story Until Now.

Table of Contents

• Introduction - (2013) - essay by Gary K. Wolfe
• Denny - (2009)
• The Attack of the Giant Baby - (1975)
• What Wolves Know - (2007)
• Automatic Tiger - (1964)
• Wherein We Enter the Museum - (2013)
• High Rise High - (2004)
• Piggy - (1961)
• Song of the Black Dog - (2005)
• Weston Walks - (2011)
• How It Works - (2013)
• Precautions - (2000)
• Journey to the Center of the Earth - (1992)
• Family Bed - (2004)
• The Singing Marine - (1995)
• In the Squalus - (1972)
• Perpetua - (2004)
• Pilots of the Purple Twilight - (1981)
• Sisohpromatem - (1967)
• On the Penal Colony - (1998)
• The Food Farm - (1967)
• In Behalf of the Product - (1973)
• Songs of War - (1974)
• Winter - (1969)
• The Weremother - (1979)
• Voyager - (1996)
• Old Soldiers - (2001)
• Incursions - (2003)
• The Bride of Bigfoot - (1984)
• The Zombie Prince - (2004)
• Grand Opening - (2005)
• Special - (2009)
• Monkey Do - (2010)
• The Outside Event - (2011)
• The Legend of Troop 13 - (2013)
• The Wait - (1958)

TV says it. Magazines say it. American society commands it. You must be thin. You must be young. Fad diets. Fat-purging pills. Fitness clubs. Liposuction. Breast implants. Steroids.

In the tomorrow of Thinner Than Thou, the cult of the body has become the one true religion. The Dedicated Sisters are a religious order sworn to help anorexic, bulimic, and morbidly obese youth. Throughout the land, houses of worship have been replaced by the health clubs of the Crossed Triceps. And through hypnotically powerful evangelical infomercials, the Reverend Earl preaches the heaven of the Afterfat, where you will look like a Greek god and eat anything you want. Just sign over your life savings and come to Sylphania, the most luxurious weight-loss spa in the world, where the Reverend himself will personally supervise your attainment of physical perfection.

But the glory of youth and thinness that America worships conceals a hidden world where teens train for the competitive eating circuit, where fat porn and obese strippers feed people's dark desires, and where an underground railroad of rebellious religions remember when people worshipped God instead of the Afterfat.

As Annie, an anorexic, and her friend Kelly, who is so massive she can barely walk, find out, the tender promises of the Dedicated Sisters are fulfilled by forced feedings and enforced starvation in hidden prisons.

As middle-aged Jeremy discovers, Sylphania is a concentration camp where failure to lose weight and tone up leads to brutal punishment.

The Rev. Earl's public sympathy for the overweight conceals a private contempt... and, beneath that, a terrible longing known only to a select few.

The inevitable decay of old age is the only thing keeping mankind from reaching perfection. Luckily, Reverend Earl has a plan that will take care of that....

Kit Reed has been delighting and terrifying readers for over thirty years with her darkly comic speculative fiction. This collection of short stories, drawn from a lifetime's work, shows Reed at the top of her form. First published in venues ranging from The Missouri Review to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction, these twenty stories deal with women's lives and feminist issues from the kitchen sink and pink dishmop era through the warlike years of the women's movement to the uneasy accommodation of the present.

Contents:

• Foreword by Connie Willis
• Introduction: Where I'm Coming From by Kit Reed
• The Bride of Bigfoot
• The Food Farm
• The Hall of New Faces
• Songs of War
• The Wait
• Whoever
• Like My Dress
• Frontiers
• The New You
• In Behalf of the Product
• Winter
• Chicken Soup
• Cynosure
• Pilots of the Purple Twilight
• Mommy Nearest
• Unlimited
• The Mothers of Shark Island
• Last Fridays
• The Weremother

In a coastal town on the Outer Carolina Banks, David Ribault and Merrill Poulnot are trying to revive their stale relationship and commit to marriage, and a slick developer claiming to be related to a historic town hero, Rawson Steele, has come to town and is buying up property. Steele makes a romantic advance on Merrill and an unusual 5 a.m appointment outside of town with David. But Steele is a no-show, and at the time of the appointment everyone in the town disappears, removed entirely from our space and time to a featureless isolated village--including Merrill and her young son. David searches desperately but all seems lost for Steele is in the other village with Merrill.

Kit Reed's Where is a spooky, unsettling speculative fiction.

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, August 2004, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, December 2013. It is included in the collection Dogs of Truth: New and Uncollected Stories (2005).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.