6/26/26
Mary and I will be at North Mountain Inn in Carlisle, PA next Wednesday, July 1st to see country/roots/folk artist and your fellow Brian Keene reader W. D. Miller in concert. I hear Stephen Kozeniewski and John Boden will be there, too. It’s a free show, so come on out and join the fun.
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Earlier this past week, we received advance reader copies of Bryan Smith’s long-awaited forthcoming cosmic horror novel, Monstrous. Mary started it yesterday and is flying through it, with praise. And since I’ll put Mary’s knowledge and critical eye for cosmic horror up against anyone else in this genre, that’s some pretty high praise indeed. I hope to start it this weekend. (I just finished Paul Tremblay’s latest, which I’ll review in Sunday’s newsletter, and am on the last chapter of Noel Monk’s autobiography about his time spent as Van Halen’s manager).
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Women In Horror Year: Day 66
Engines of Desire: Tales of Love and Other Horrors by Livia Llewellyn
Death and pleasure. Freud's Todestrieb, his statement that "libido has the task of making the destroying instinct innocuous, and it fulfills the task by diverting that instinct to a great extent outwards.... The instinct is then called the destructive instinct, the instinct for mastery, or the will to power." Few authors have spun stories of Thanatos and Eros as skillfully and powerfully as Livia Llewellyn. In his introduction to this volume, Laird Barron writes, "Scant difference exists between exquisite pleasure and pain." An orphan girl with a mind for anthracite falls into the hands of a cult worshipping an entombed god. In the Pacific Northwest, evergreens lull prepubescent girls into their trunks to serve as wombs. A suburban housewife troubled by her present encounters the sixteen-year-old girl she ached to touch in her dreams. These ten stories promise to indulge a reader's sensibilities, fears, and desires. A finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award in two categories: Best Novella and Best Collection!
Over the years, Livia Llwellyn has built a well-earned reputation as a masterful writer of erotic horror and weird fiction, often in conjunction with cosmic horror. And given the tiele of this collection, and particularly the cover, one might think they were getting just that under the covers. But if you come to this book expecting to be titillated or turned on, it’s going to hit you between the eyes that much harder, because the sex herein is part of the horror itself — and in many cases, the genesis of it. As one reviewer wrote at the time of its release back in 2011: “As much as these stories appear to be erotic, in fact, they aren’t really about sex at all. They are about the fear of sex, of what it causes and what it inspires. The heroines are either consumed by their sexual desires to the detriment and destruction of all others, are pitted against the fruits of their sexual labors, or are forced to confront the savage nature of those their sexual energy attracts.”
Livia is not a name one hears in conjunction with Splatterpunk, but I’ve long made the argument that much of her work is, in fact, Splatterpunk adjacent. I’m not talking about Splatterpunk’s sibling Extreme Horror, but the O.G. Splatterpunk of transgressive and boundary-shattering fiction that imbued the horror genre with fresh life and new directions in the late 1980s and early 1990s. There is much of that here, coupled with beautiful, evocative descriptions and an easy, almost lulling prose style that allows for vivid imagery in the mind of the reader. A deft combination of “squick” factor and utter desolation and heartbreak, Engines of Desire: Tales of Love and Other Horrors is an important, milestone collection. Available in paperback, eBook, and audiobook from Lethe Press.
