Carmen Maria Machado

The Definitive Edition of CARMILLA -Includes the original illustrations and other vintage pictures -Complete, unabridged, and formatted for kindle to improve your reading experience -Linked table of contents to reach your chapter quickly CARMILLA the world’s first female vampire

In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming. And it’s that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope―the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman―through which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships. Machado’s dire narrative is leavened with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and openness to inquiry. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek, and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction. The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.

In this electric and provocative debut, Carmen Maria Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store's prom dresses. One woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella 'Especially Heinous,' Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show naively assumeded had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgangers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes.

Bestselling editor Ellen Datlow (Lovecraft's Monsters) presents body horror at its most wide-ranging and shocking best. Discover twenty-nine intricate, twisted tales of the human body, soul, and psyche, as told by storytelling legends including Carmen Maria Machado, Richard Kadrey, Seanan McGuire, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Nathan Ballingrud, Tananarive Due, Cassandra Khaw, Christopher Fowler, and many more. The most terrifying thing that you can possibly imagine is your own body in the hands of a monster. Or worse, in the hands of another human being. In this definitive anthology of body horror selected by a World Horror Grandmaster, you'll find the unthinkable and the shocking: a couture designer preparing for an exquisitely grotesque runway show; a vengeful son seeking the parent who bred him as plasma donor; a celebrity-kink brothel that inflicts plastic surgery on sex workers; and organ-harvesting doctors who dissect a living man without anesthetic.

Contains: "Final Blackouts," an Introduction / Harlan Ellison -- The End of the World (1872) / Eugene Mouton -- The Comet (1920) / W.E.B. DuBois -- The Pedestrian (1951) / Ray Bradbury -- No Morning After (1954) / Arthur C. Clarke -- Upon the Dull Earth (1954) / Philip K. Dick -- 2 B R 0 2 B (1962) / Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. -- I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (1967) / Harlan Ellison -- The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (1973) / Ursula K. LeGuin -- The Engineer and the Executioner (1976) / Brian M. Stableford -- [The End of the Whole Mess (1986) / Stephen King]( Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man's Back (1992) / Joe R. Lansdale -- Judgment Engine (1995) / Greg Bear -- Automatic (2007) / Erika T. Satifka -- The Black Mould (2011) / Mark Samuels -- The Pretence (2013) /Ramsey Campbell -- Inventory (2013) / Carmen Maria Machado.

In a cruel twist of irony, Texas-born Patricia Highsmith is only now, six years after her death, being recognized for her inestimable genius in her native land. With the savage humor of Evelyn Waugh and the macabre sensibility of Edgar Allan Poe, she brought a distinct twentieth-century acuity to her prolific body of noir fiction. Called "the poet of apprehension" by Graham Greene, Highsmith was unrivaled in capturing the ways in which our seemingly benign neighbors can become the psychopaths next door. Now, five of her classic short story collections are combined in a single volume, The selected stories of Patricia Highsmith, with a foreword by Graham Greene.