Monstrous Affections

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A young bride and her future mother-in-law risk everything to escape it. A repentant father summons help from a pot of tar to ensure it. A starving woman learns from howling winds and a whispering host, just how fulfilling it can finally be. Can “it” be love?

Here is the classic debut collection of creepy tales from David Nickle, the award-winning author of such celebrated works as Volk: A Novel of Radiant Abomination and Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism. One of the foremost practitioners of Canadian Gothic fiction, Nickle is widely acclaimed for his evocative prose and sui generis imagination.

This 10th anniversary edition of Monstrous Affections includes―along with the original introduction by acclaimed author and journalist Michael Rowe―a foreword by Bram Stoker Award-winning author John Langan, an afterword by Shirley Jackson Award-winning author Laird Barron, and illustrations by David Nickle.

Praise for Monstrous Affections

“Bleak, stark and creepy, Stoker-winner Nickle’s first collection will delight the literary horror reader…

…A jarring cover illustration by Erik Mohr prepares the reader for 13 terrifying tales of rural settings, complex and reticent characters and unexpected twists that question the fundamentals of reality. All are delivered with a certain grace, creating a sparse yet poetic tour of the horrors that exist just out of sight…
This ambitious collection firmly establishes Nickle as a writer to watch.

Publisher’s Weekly, Starred Review

“… A perverted version of Alice Munro country…

These stories work so well in part because of Nickle’s facility with the language of the place he’s created. He is comfortable writing in different voices, including that of a nearly illiterate young woman in the excellent “Janie and the Wind,” and he knows the idiom of his semi-rural environment…”

Alex Good

Quill & Quire, Starred Review

“Ghosts, Vampires, mythical beasts and circus sideshows.

You’d think that you were reading a book full of what you had always expected a horror story to be, but Nickle takes a left turn and blindsides you with tales that are not of the norm, but are all the more horrific because of surprise twists, darkness and raw emotion.”

January Magazine

in Best Books of 2009 Fiction

“Even though this is the third or fourth time that I’ve read some of these tales, they’ve lost none of their power through the passage of time or the rigors of repeated study.

In particular, “The Sloan Men” … and “The Pit-Heads” … qualify as genre classics, resonating with a disconcerting sense of not-quite-right otherness.”

Robert Morrish

Twilightridge.net

“David Nickle writes ’em damned weird and damned good and damned dark.

He is bourbon-rough, poetic and vivid. Don’t miss this one.”

Cory Doctorow