A blackly funny, gloriously queer coming-of-age fantasy with love, beauty and necromancy by World Fantasy Award-winning author C.S.E. Cooney.

WINNER OF THE 2023 WORLD FANTASY AWAY FOR BEST NOVEL

Nothing complicates life like Death.

Lanie Stones, the daughter of crown-appointed killers, was born with a gift for necromancy--and a literal allergy to violence. For her own safety, she was raised in isolation in a crumbling mansion by the family's mouldering revenant.

When Lanie's parents are murdered, she and her psychotic sister Nita must settle their extensive debts or lose their ancestral home. When Liriat's ruler, too, is murdered, it throws the whole nation's future into doubt.

Hunted by Liriat's enemies, terrorised by family ghosts and tortured by a forbidden love for a childhood friend, Lanie will need more than luck to get through the next few months--but when the goddess of Death is on your side, anything is possible.

Much-anticipated follow-up to the whimsical, joyous, zombie-packed World Fantasy Award-winning Saint Death's Daughter

Lanie Stones is the necromancer that Death has been praying for.

Heartbroken, exiled from her homeland as a traitor, Lanie Stones would rather take refuge in good books and delicate pastries than hunt a deathless abomination, but that is the duty she has chosen.

The abomination in question happens to be her own great-grandfather, the powerful necromancer Irradiant Stones. Grandpa Rad has escaped from his prison and stolen a body, and is heading to the icy country of Skakhmat where he died, to finish the genocide he started. Fortunately for her, Lanie has her powerful death magic, including the power to sing the restless dead to their eternal slumber; and she has her new family by her side.

Grandpa Rad may have finally met his match.

2020 Locus Recommended Reading List, Best AnthologyContains The Twice-Drowned Saint by C.S.E. Cooney, 2020 Locus Recommended Reading List, Best First Novel

With fiction from C.S.E Cooney, Jessica P. Wick, Amanda J. McGee, and Mike Allen, Mythic Delirium's excellent new anthology, A Sinister Quartet, provides further evidence that long-form genre fiction is not just alive and well but thriving.

-Locus, Ian Mond

Mythic Delirium is one of the smaller presses which sustains our field . . . This is lovely and fascinating . . . Really fine work.

-Locus, Rich Horton

Easily one of the best things I've read this year . . . 'The Twice Drowned Saint' alone is worth five times the cost of the collection.

-The Little Red Reviewer

Behind the walls of an invulnerable city ruled by angels, old movies provide balm for the soul and a plan to escape risks grisly retribution. A princess discovers a passage to a nightmarish world of deception and blood-sealed enchantment. A woman who has lost everything meets a man of great wealth and ominous secrets. In a town haunted by tragedy, malevolent supernatural entities converge, and the conflict that ensues unleashes chaos.

A Sinister Quartet gathers original long-form wonders and horrors composed in unusual keys, with a short novel by World Fantasy Award winner C. S. E. Cooney and a new novella from two-time World Fantasy Award finalist Mike Allen joined by debut novellas from rising talents Amanda J. McGee and Jessica P. Wick. All four offer immersions into strange, beautiful and frightening milieus.

World Fantasy Award finalist for Best Story Collection

Locus Award finalist for Best Story Collection

Welcome to a Gilded Era like you've never before known and will never be able to forget ... If Titania herself were to commission a book, it would be this one.

-Fran Wilde, two-time Nebula Award-winning author of Updraft and Riverland

Cooney's lush follow-up to Desdemona and the Deep offers five stories linked by an intricate shared world ... Throughout, Cooney's descriptions are extravagant and gorgeous, and the musical cadence of her prose makes it exceptionally easy to be drawn into the worlds she weaves ... Romantic fantasy readers will find a lot to love.

-Publishers Weekly

A young human painter and an ageless gentry queen fall in love over spilled wine-at the risk of his life and her immortality. Pulled into the Veil Between Worlds, two feuding neighbors (and a living statue) get swept up in a brutal war of succession. An investigative reporter infiltrates the Seafall City Laundries to write the exposé of a lifetime, and uncovers secrets she never believed possible. Returning to an oak grove to scatter her husband's ashes, an elderly widow meets an otherworldly friend, who offers her a momentous choice. Two gentry queens of the Valwode plot to hijack a human rocketship and steal the moon out of the sky.

Dark Breakers gathers three new and two previously uncollected tales from World Fantasy Award-winning writer C. S. E. Cooney that expand on the thrice-enfolded worlds first introduced in her Locus and World Fantasy award-nominated novella Desdemona and the Deep. In her introduction to Dark Breakers, Crawford Award-winning author Sharon Shinn advises those who pick up this book to settle in for a fantastical read full of vivid world-building, with layer upon layer of detail; prose so dense and gorgeous you can scoop up the words like handfuls of jewels; a mischievous sense of humor; and a warm and hopeful heart.

C. S. E. Cooney's prose is like a cake baked by the fairies-beautifully layered, rich and precise, so delicious that it should be devoured with a silver fork.

-Theodora Goss, World Fantasy and Mythopoeic Award-winning author of The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club series

Dark Breakers is compounded of voluptuous invention and ferocious structural loves-for new romances and old friends, for the works of hands, for mortality and its gifts, and all the possibilities of worlds bleeding, weeping, wandering into each other's arms.

-Kathleen Jennings, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Flyaway

Few people create worlds as lavish and sensual as those that spring from Cooney's effervescent imagination. Her writing isn't so much inspirational, but inspiration itself: gentry-magic spun into pages and paragraphs of glittering, fizzing, jaw-dropping beauty.

-Cassandra Khaw, British Fantasy Award-nominated author of The All-Consuming World

MORE PRAISE FOR C. S. E. COONEY

C. S. E. Cooney is one of the most moving, daring, and plainly beautiful voices to come out of recent fantasy. She's a powerhouse with a wink in her eye and a song in each pocket.

-Catherynne M. Valente, New York Times-bestselling author of Space Opera

A LOCUS AWARD FINALIST FOR BEST NOVELLA

Award-winning author C.S.E. Cooney indulges in luxurious, dizzying fantasy

In Desdemona and the Deep, the spoiled daughter of a rich mining family must retrieve the tithe of men her father promised to the world below. On the surface, her world is rife with industrial pollution that ruins the health of poor factory workers while the idle rich indulge themselves in unheard-of luxury. Below are goblins, mysterious kingdoms, and an entirely different hierarchy.

The mind-blowing new novel from C. S. E. Cooney, author of Saint Death's Daughter

World Fantasy Award winner Cooney imagines angels as Lovecraftian monsters . . . Plenty of charm!

--Publishers Weekly

Many have spoken about how angels can be both terrifying yet beautiful, but few have successfully captured the idea well-until The Twice-Drowned Saint, at least. A sumptuous, saw-toothed read, it is a jewel box of a novel, glittering with a thousand details and a bright longing we're all familiar with, this want for a place better than we're in now.

--Cassandra Khaw, Bram Stoker and World Fantasy award-nominated author of Nothing but Blackened Teeth

C. S. E. Cooney is one of the most moving, daring, and plainly beautiful voices to come out of recent fantasy. She's a powerhouse with a wink in her eye and a song in each pocket. --Catherynne M. Valente

C. S. E. Cooney's prose is like a cake baked by the fairies. --Theodora Goss

World Fantasy Award winner C. S. E. Cooney takes readers on a journey of wonder, terror, and joy in this mind-bending, heartfelt novel. Contained inside impassable walls of ice, the city of Gelethel endures under the rule of fourteen angels, who provide for all their subject's needs and mete out grisly punishments for blasphemous infractions, with escape attempts one of the worst possible sins.

Our narrator is Ishtu Q'Aleth (Ish for short), the new owner of Gelethel's only cinema (having taken over from her father). More importantly, she's also the secret saint of Alizar the Eleven-Eyed, Seventh Angel of Gelethel, and one of the fourteen angels who holds dominion over the city. As Ish explains it, at the age of eight she turned down Alizar's offer to be his saint, but, in a moment that speaks to the novel's charm, the young girl and the all-knowing angel agreed to continue their relationship in secret after bonding over their shared love of cinema. Near thirty years later Ish is desperate to get her sick parents out of the city, a near-impossible task given Gelethel is surrounded by an impenetrable blue serac. But Ish's situation grows even more complicated when a new arrival to the city, a girl named Betony, appears as Alizar's true saint. There's so much to adore about the The Twice-Drowned Saint ... [a] sublime short novel. --Locus

With The Twice-Drowned Saint, C. S. E. Cooney once again crafts dazzling feats of imagination grounded in human frailties and plunges her audience inside head-first. Her boldly unique characters live in a fever dream of balletic, graceful description that will make you gasp, even as they find their own escape through the seemingly-mundane world of movies. Like nothing else you've ever read, or will ever read.

--Randee Dawn, author of Tune in Tomorrow

Fabulous Gelethel is a city of godless angels who intoxicate themselves on human death, but within its icy walls a hidden saint and a dissident angel are hatching a plan. This story left me wrecked and rebuilt: it's a truly glorious tale of family bonds, forgiveness, sacrifice, courage ... and how gods are born. Written with Cooney's signature soaring prose, humor, and imagination, this tale shines a light on cruelties both fantastical and familiar. It honors sorrow and embraces joy-I will treasure it always

--Francesca Forrest, author of The Inconvenient God

Cover art, cover design and interior black and white illustrations by Lasse Paldanius.

Winner of the 2016 World Fantasy Award for Best Collection

Contains The Bone Swans of Amandale, 2015 Nebula Award finalist for Best Novella

2015 Locus Recommended Reading List, Best Collection and Best Novella

C. S. E. Cooney is one of the most moving, daring, and plainly beautiful voices to come out of recent fantasy. She's a powerhouse with a wink in her eye and a song in each pocket.
--Catherynne M. Valente, New York Times-bestselling author of the Fairyland novels

These stories are a pure joy. C. S. E. Cooney's imagination is wild and varied, her stories bawdy, horrific, comic, and moving-frequently all at the same time. Her characters are wickedly appealing, and her language--O her language. Lush, playful, poetic, but never obscure or stilted, it makes her magic more magic, her comedy more comic, and her tragic moments almost unbearable.
--Delia Sherman, author of Young Woman in a Garden: Stories

Bone Swans is a joy of feathery bones & ghoulish clowns. I adored every word. Like an eyas cries for meat, I cry for more. C.S.E. Cooney's a major talent and these are major talent stories. Who can resist hero rats, pouting swans, feral children, flying carpets and the Flabberghast? So tongue-tied am I with delight I fall back on the usual cliches: gripping, delightful, insightful, rollicking & lyrical--and yet not one cliche is to be found in Bone Swans, only stories of surpassing delicacy and wit, told by a lady of rare talent. Please, ma'am, might I have some more?
--Ysabeau S. Wilce, Andre Norton Award wining author of Flora's Dare

A swan princess hunted for her bones, a broken musician and his silver pipe, and a rat named Maurice bring justice to a town under fell enchantment. A gang of courageous kids confronts both a plague-destroyed world and an afterlife infested with clowns but robbed of laughter. In an island city, the murder of a child unites two lovers, but vengeance will part them. Only human sacrifice will save a city trapped in ice and darkness. Gold spun out of straw has a price, but not the one you expect.

World Fantasy Award winner Ellen Kushner has called Cooney's writing stunningly delicious Cruel, beautiful and irresistible. Bone Swans, the infernally whimsical debut collection from C. S. E. Cooney, gathers five novellas that in the words of Andre Norton Award winner Delia Sherman are bawdy, horrific, comic, and moving-frequently all at the same time. Cooney's mentor, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master Gene Wolfe, proclaims in his introduction that her style is so original it can only be described as pure Cooney, and he offers readers a challenge: Try to define that when you've finished the stories in this book.

What do a post-human starship captain, an actress of the macabre, a post-singularity revolutionary, and an exiled shapeshifter have in common? They are stories and poems that would never have been written without the Deck of Destiny the grim yet playful centerpiece of the Negocios Infernales roleplaying game. But the Deck has a second vocation-- to inspire artists, via its ghoulish wisdom and bloody sense of humor, to create. The designers of Negocios Infernales, award-winning writers C. S. E. Cooney and Carlos Hernandez, have created new works based upon the Deck of Destiny, with all its fanged philosophies and macabre musings on display. Every story and poem of Infernal Bargains began by pulling one or more cards from the Deck and resulted in the satirical, sordid, somber, spirited, and very, very sanguine works you will find herein. Taken together, they compose the haunted menagerie that populates these two writers' deepest unconscious fears and desires-- and, perhaps, your own.

World Fantasy Award finalist for Best Story Collection

Locus Award finalist for Best Story Collection

Welcome to a Gilded Era like you've never before known and will never be able to forget ... If Titania herself were to commission a book, it would be this one.

-Fran Wilde, two-time Nebula Award-winning author of Updraft and Riverland

Cooney's lush follow-up to Desdemona and the Deep offers five stories linked by an intricate shared world ... Throughout, Cooney's descriptions are extravagant and gorgeous, and the musical cadence of her prose makes it exceptionally easy to be drawn into the worlds she weaves ... Romantic fantasy readers will find a lot to love.

-Publishers Weekly

A young human painter and an ageless gentry queen fall in love over spilled wine-at the risk of his life and her immortality. Pulled into the Veil Between Worlds, two feuding neighbors (and a living statue) get swept up in a brutal war of succession. An investigative reporter infiltrates the Seafall City Laundries to write the exposé of a lifetime, and uncovers secrets she never believed possible. Returning to an oak grove to scatter her husband's ashes, an elderly widow meets an otherworldly friend, who offers her a momentous choice. Two gentry queens of the Valwode plot to hijack a human rocketship and steal the moon out of the sky.

Dark Breakers gathers three new and two previously uncollected tales from World Fantasy Award-winning writer C. S. E. Cooney that expand on the thrice-enfolded worlds first introduced in her Locus and World Fantasy award-nominated novella Desdemona and the Deep. In her introduction to Dark Breakers, Crawford Award-winning author Sharon Shinn advises those who pick up this book to settle in for a fantastical read full of vivid world-building, with layer upon layer of detail; prose so dense and gorgeous you can scoop up the words like handfuls of jewels; a mischievous sense of humor; and a warm and hopeful heart.

C. S. E. Cooney's prose is like a cake baked by the fairies-beautifully layered, rich and precise, so delicious that it should be devoured with a silver fork.

-Theodora Goss, World Fantasy and Mythopoeic Award-winning author of The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club series

Dark Breakers is compounded of voluptuous invention and ferocious structural loves-for new romances and old friends, for the works of hands, for mortality and its gifts, and all the possibilities of worlds bleeding, weeping, wandering into each other's arms.

-Kathleen Jennings, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Flyaway

Few people create worlds as lavish and sensual as those that spring from Cooney's effervescent imagination. Her writing isn't so much inspirational, but inspiration itself: gentry-magic spun into pages and paragraphs of glittering, fizzing, jaw-dropping beauty.

-Cassandra Khaw, British Fantasy Award-nominated author of The All-Consuming World

MORE PRAISE FOR C. S. E. COONEY

C. S. E. Cooney is one of the most moving, daring, and plainly beautiful voices to come out of recent fantasy. She's a powerhouse with a wink in her eye and a song in each pocket.

-Catherynne M. Valente, New York Times-bestselling author of Space Opera

C. S. E. Cooney's imagination is wild and varied, her stories bawdy, horrific, comic, and moving-frequently all at the same time.

-Delia Sherman, author of The Evil Wizard Smallbone