"Provocative, insightful dark fiction for discerning readers." Lee Murray, Shirley Jackson and Bram Stoker Award winner.
"Beautiful and thoughtful. This collection needs to be on every woman's bookshelf. Some of the gorgeous lines in here absolutely stole my breath." -Mercedes M. Yardley, Two-Time Bram Stoker Award Winner
Sample the dark imagination of Donna J. W. Munro as she serves up the awful challenges women experience, the changes and the madness that comes with womanhood, and how every monster must have her day.
Inside you will find....
Maidens
"I keep my thoughts in the clay head I fashioned after Daddy threw me down the stairs."
Mothers
"I ain't fit to be their mama. Not even a human. Goddesses don't love."
Crones
"Nothing is given unless a price is paid. Nature isn't kind, and neither am I. So many little bones buried in my garden, I hear them clacking together at night."
Badasses
"Her hands are always the kindness I look to. Not her face. She'd been the enemy of heroes. The scourge of the righteous. She and her sisters had been a curse. Cursed by us. Yet she'd become our savior. Our liberator. Maybe she'd always been and the humans had been the villains all along. Who knows?"
Mad Women
People. The thought of them made her skin bubble up and her eyes water. She bit her tongue again to drive out the weakness. Mother taught her that.
Monsters
"It had been inside me minutes before, and now I smeared it against the petri dish of my sink bowl, looking at the pieces. A red circle striated with a sickly dark yellow. A black coned chunk. A flattened orb with oozing tendrils trailing from it like roots. An eye."
