Table of Contents

  • Panopticon
  • Stabilimentum
  • Wasp & Snake
  • Cinereous
  • Yours Is the Right to Begin
  • In the Court of King Cupressaceae, 1982 (original to collection)
  • It Feels Better Biting Down
  • Allochthon
  • Furnace
  • The Mysteries
  • The Last, Clean, Bright Summer
  • and Love shall have no Dominion
  • The Unattainable

Reviews

“Livia Llewellyn is a master of the horror genre. Her stories (often featuring strongly female viewpoints and heavy sexual elements) are hard-hitting and personal, brutal stories that haunt their reader long after they have finished the tale. Her second collection, Furnace… features an impressive oeuvre of stories to toy with the reader’s psyche.” – Brian O’Connell, The Conqueror Weird

“Eschewing the typical tropes of horror, her stories nonetheless generate an almost visceral sense of unease due to her combination of a very personal sense of the uncanny and her assured and astute characterisation. Tensions between her characters– whether erotic, familial or more ambiguous–are reflected in the outer landscape, which is frequently less stable than it first appears. With a fantastic cover that perfectly captures the strange and idiosyncratic atmosphere of the stories within, Furnaces is highly recommended.” – This is Horror

 

Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors

Introduction by Laird Barron

Nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Single-Author Collection, 2011

 

  • Horses
  • At the Edge of Ellensburg
  • Teslated Salishan Evergreen
  • The Engine of Desire
  • Jetsam
  • The Four Hundred Thousand
  • Brimstone Orange
  • Take Your Daughters to Work
  • Omphalos (original to the collection)
  • Her Deepness

Reviews

“There are more than a few echoes of Alien in Llewellyn’s visual imagery, a baroque splendour that bloats and burns and rusts and that can most deservedly be called Gigeresque. But it is in the measured way her stories unfold that we sense the advent of classics in the making. Hers is a language that glows with a sense of the forbidden, that resonates with the heartbeat of the darkly divine. …Engines of Desire is the bravest and most exciting collection of dark fantasy I’ve read in some years…” – Nina Allan, Starburst Magazine

“This collection…is brutal and disturbing, nightmare inducing. Some of the darkest, hardest hitting work I’ve read.” – Laird Barron

“…a collection full of effective, distressing, individual horror, utilizing a female perspective which gives its women agency and depth, and dealing with female reproductive biology in a way that is more complex and less depersonalized than standard body horror tropes. …fans of horror in which supernatural and human elements uneasily coexist, and in which there is more evil inside the human heart than out of it, should take note of this as a noteworthy debut by an up and coming talent.” – Lila Garrott, Strange Horizons

“These 10 powerful stories mark relative newcomer Llewellyn as a writer to watch in the genres of dark fantasy, horror, and erotica.” – Publishers Weekly

“Livia Llewellyn is a criminally under-rated writer of horror and dark fantasy. Her stories are about as bleak and uncompromising as any I’ve read, the characters fully formed, conflicted, beautifully flawed. I read “Horses” in manuscript form years ago and was amazed by its equal portion of compassion and brutality. The end is devastating, and masterfully earned. I am looking forward to this book perhaps more than any other this year.” – Nathan Ballingrud

“…a collection of ten short fantastical and erotic horror stories that seems inspired by a feverish nightmare where O, in a fit of hatred and rage at René and Sir Stephen, turns their BDSM tactics into torture. It is a fine book written with such personal and illustrative prose that you often feel as if you’re viewing the action through the harried eyes of the narrator. It is dark, engaging, and stirring in all the right ways.” – Tor.com

“The inclusion of desire…is what separates the author from her peers, as it is a common element in most of Llewellyn’s stories. If the topic was Lovecraft’s bane, the author incorporates it into her narrative and channels it into something primal that triggers our collective lizard-brain… the image that springs to mind when describing this collection is that of an Ouroboros: the narrative is engaging, but it also fuel for what comes next, thus creating this cycle of satisfaction and hunger.” – Charles Tan, Bibliophile Stalker

“Muscular, precise, violent, and agonizingly truthful, her fiction takes no prisoners and makes you wonder why you bothered reading all those other writers, the ones who ramble and whine about life while she delivers it, bloody and screaming, into your arms.” – S. P. Miskowski, Seattle P-I