quirkyIn her fourth short-story collection, Kiernan revisits a quirky character from her acclaimed horror novel Threshold (2001). Dancy Flammarian is a haunted albino teenager receiving guidance from an invisible guardian angel to track down and eliminate primordial, hellish monsters. Five previously uncollected stories follow Dancy's macabre questing from her childhood in the swamplands of Northern Florida to her hitchhiking travels across the red dirt backroads of Georgia, everywhere confronting evil face-to-face. In "The Well of Stars and Shadow," Dancy encounters her first demon, living in a bayou ghost town, and absorbs the uneasy revelation that every creature seems to know her name. In "Waycross," Dancy is abducted by a growling beast known as the Gynander, which disguises itself in the crinkled skins of its victims. "Les Fleurs Empoisonnees" introduces Dancy to perhaps her most ghoulish adversaries yet, the group of Savannah vivisectionist matriarchs called the Stephens Ward Tea League. Kiernan's richly evocative prose vividly portrays her twisted characters as well as it illustrates their eerie, kudzu-infested, Deep South surroundings
Quirky?
Anyway...at this point, less than 25 copies of the limited edition of Alabaster now remain, and, as I said the other day, if you mean to order it, you may wish to do so very soon. The limited is signed by me and Ted and comes with an extra Dancy story, "Highway 95," in the form of a chapbook.