I may have a sweet tooth but I’m not delicate.
18 June 2018
We’re continuing our Kickstarter campaign features with “A Lie You Give, And Thus I Take†by Damien Angelica Walters, the source of our title, and which was first published in Lightspeed in December 2014, along with an author spotlight, in which she says:
The only things that surprised me were all the other story references that occur throughout. It makes a strange sort of sense because it’s fiction about a fiction, but I initially thought the story was nothing more than a strange retelling of Hansel and Gretel, minus the familial relation and the witch, of course. . . . I was thinking about the nature of liars, how they often get away with it by spoon-feeding people stories a little at a time, and the lengths they’ll go to to preserve that fiction as truth. Some of the best liars use sweet words as a lure; they tell people what they want to hear and believe, and they do it in such a way that their sincerity is never doubted. (At least not until it begins to fall apart, as all lies eventually do.)
Also exploring the horrific side of familiar stories is Rachael Sterling in “Alice Underground,†in which Alice has grown up and runs a bakery with Wonderland-inspired goods, and discovers to her horror that she has been serving cakes she didn’t know she had.
Laura E. Price’s “Mary in the Looking Glass†takes a woman struggling with the grief of miscarriage and adds Mary Whales (or Mary Worth, in other versions of the folktale, who is sometimes a teenager killed in the Salem witch trials), who will come visit—or murder—you if you chant “I believe in Mary Whales†in front of a mirror in a room lit only by a single candle. Price writes:
“Mary In the Looking Glass†is partly the product of my adolescent fascination with creepy, bloody stories—Bloody Mary, of course, but also the Headless Lady who supposedly walks the north end of Gasparilla Island, where my mother grew up, looking for the head she lost when Jose Gaspar, her lover, murdered her. It’s also partly due to those short paperback romance novels both my grandmothers read: the ones where, say, the newly-divorced woman heads back home and meets up with her old high school flame, who is still single, carrying a torch for her, and probably, like, breaks horses or something for a living. I have the sort of brain that puts those things together and wonders . . . who lives in the center of that story, and how did she get there?
About the Authors
Laura E. Price lives in southwestern Florida with her husband and son. Her work has appeared in On Spec, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, GigaNotoSaurus, Penumbra eMag, and Betwixt. She also blogs at seldnei.wordpress.com.
Rachael Sterling lives in sunny Santa Monica, California, staying indoors or else seeking shade. She teaches music to preschoolers most mornings and writes most afternoons. You can find her talking about books on YouTube under the name Rae Sterling.
Damien Angelica Walters is the author of Sing Me Your Scars, Paper Tigers, and Cry Your Way Home. Her short fiction has been nominated twice for a Bram Stoker Award, reprinted in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror and The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, and published in various anthologies and magazines, including the 2016 World Fantasy Award Finalist Cassilda’s Song, Cemetery Dance, Nightmare Magazine, and Black Static. She lives in Maryland with her husband and two rescued pit bulls. Find her on Twitter @DamienAWalters or on the web at damienangelicawalters.com.
Entry filed under: Anthology, Fiction, News. Tags: Damien Angelica Walters, Laura E. Price, Rachael Sterling, women up to no good.