…WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
…LAIRD BARRON
… Table of Contents:
………..o..Horses
………..o..the Edge of Ellensburg
………..o..Teslated Salishan Evergreen
………..o..The Engine of Desire
………..o..Jetsam
………..o..The Four Hundred Thousand
………..o..Brimstone Orange
………..o..Take Your Daughters to Work
………..o..Omphalos (original to the collection)
………..o..Her Deepness
….Publisher: Steve Berman, Lethe Press
….Design: Alex Jeffers
….Cover photo: Katharina Fosel
….Pub Date: March 15, 2011
….Format: Trade Paperback, 214 pages
….ISBN: 978-59021-324-7
….Price: $18.00
….Contact: Steve Berman – lethepress@aol.com
….
….Available at:
….Amazon.com
….Angus & Robertson
….Smashwords
….All Romance
….Wizard’s Tower Bookstore
….Weightless Books
….
….
Jacket cover (various sizes) can be downloaded here.
High-res jacket cover (various sizes) can be downloaded here.
ENGINES has been nominated for the SHIRLEY JACKSON AWARD FOR BEST SINGLE-AUTHOR COLLECTION 2011, and “Omphalos” has been nominated for BEST NOVELETTE – see the full nomination list here.
JACKET COPY
“Death and pleasure. Freud’s Todestrieb, his statement that ”libido has the task of making the destroying instinct innocuous, and it fulfils 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, their fears and desires.”
BLURBS
“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
“This collection…is brutal and disturbing, nightmare inducing. Some of the darkest, hardest hitting work I’ve read.” – Laird Barron
“Livia Llewellyn’s short story collection is equal parts dark, erotic, and always challenging in the best way possible. Smart and weird and so damned different than everything else out there.” — Paul Tremblay
“…a brave book of dangerous language. These unique nightmares of sci-fi, dark fantasy, and horror, will compel and provoke you as all uncompromising books by original voices must. Prepare yourself, these tales burn.” — Joseph S. Pulver
“… a powerful, lyrical collection of stories that are by turns dark, fantastical, and erotic. [Laird Barron] wrote the introduction, which seems more than fitting, given the horrifyingly hallucinatory paths she travels.” — J.T. Glover
REVIEWS
“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 gifted new author, who can write disturbing and fascinating stories, which are difficult to forget. She isn’t afraid to shock her readers with imaginative, but brutally realistic visions about death, sex and love – in her stories these three ingredients go hand in hand and wondrous and horrifying things happen. I think it’s fair to say that this collection is pure ecstasy for all lovers of dark, disturbing and challenging speculative fiction.” – Rising Shadow
“Her work is simultaneously erotic and grotesque, titillating and terrifying. With an effortless complexity that consciously confuses predator and prey, Llewellyn’s stories touch on the dark side of sexuality with a fearless voice.” – Stomping on Yeti
“…an original voice that records the unusual and painful without second guessing.” – Grim Reviews
“Llewellyn’s ability to combine the erotic and the horrific has helped her to quickly carve out her own niche, and her settings (regardless of genre) always have a sense of impending doom and mystery that’ll surely resonate well with fans of dark fiction. A very impressive first collection you won’t soon forget.” — The Horror Fiction Review
“…a deliciously nasty little book. …The constant here is that each of these stories is elegantly written and deeply disturbing – a winning combination, if ever there was one. The worlds Llewellyn exhumes here are so fully realized and nuanced that one wonders just how the hell she’s able to do in ten or twenty pages what many authors fail to accomplish in five hundred.” — Jesse Bullington for Innsmouth Free Press
“A strange, deviantly satisfying collection of stories that draws you into its velvety grasp, touches you in ways that feel so very nice, and then rips out your heart. Brutally erotic, uncompromising, and absolutely addictive.” — Morpheus Tales Supplement (registration required) – PDF can be opened at this link.
“…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
“Llewellyn indulges her considerable powers of description and setting, her ability to craft hard-edged characters who might not often be likable but are all the more fully real for that, her abundant and fresh imagination, her ability to generate an atmosphere heavy with a true sense of doom, and a prose voice full of glittering black poetry. …I think Livia Llewellyn can hold her own alongside a China Mieville or a Jeff VanderMeer.” — Jeffrey Thomas for Cosmicomicon
“It’s stunning enough even without the knowledge that it is Livia Llewellyn’s debut book. Engines of Desire is an excellent introduction to a fine, relatively new, author who is sure to develop a rabid following in years to come.” — Lincoln Crisler for Shroud Magazine
“…those who enjoy a writer with a vibrant, poetic approach to putting words together will love it …one of the best single author short story collections I’ve come across in recent years.” — Mike Griffin
“…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 for Strange Horizons
“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 for Shock Room, Seattle P-I
“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
“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 for Starburst Magazine