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84d2cbe
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It was Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the television series, 1997-2003, not the lackluster movie that preceded it) that blazed the trail for Twilight and the slew of other paranormal romance novels that followed, while also shaping the broader urban fantasy field from the late 1990s onward. Many of you reading this book will be too young to remember when Buffy debuted, so you'll have to trust us when we say that nothing quite like..
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joss-whedon
pop-culture
twilight
vampires
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Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling |
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5c54778
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Love that can't trump intellectual integrity isn't worth the name.
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Ellen Datlow |
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a2f3290
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I'm too exhausted to sleep,
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Ellen Datlow |
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I hated and loved him in turns, as witches will do, for our hearts are strange and inexplicable.
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Ellen Datlow |
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b7d15bd
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Most of all, he liked her, the maiden named first for a salad. Not only lust and love, then. For liking surely was the most dangerous. Lust might burn out and love grow accustomed. But to like her was to find in her always the best--of herself, himself, and all the world.
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Ellen Datlow |
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24d210b
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The beer got him, and, for a moment, a rush of idiot compassion urged him to hug a pinch-faced man in brown overalls who sat on a stool surrounded by primitive paintings of Jesus engaged in various farm chores (milking a cow, driving a tractor, killing a hog), but the desire to comfort the untalented, the misguided, left Wally before he could act.
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Ellen Datlow |
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everything spoken on this earth contains a truth not always apparent at the time.
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Ellen Datlow |
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15050a6
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It's my latest," Goldy concluded, "my best, and the one which the New York Times recently described as 'thrilling, sad, heartbreaking' and 'packs a huge wallop.' Entitled The Goldilocks Syndrome, it's currently available in the lobby at a today-only discount of $21.95. And if you act now, I'll sign and date this sucker at no extra charge."
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Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling |
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cc75b16
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Deduction was for the highbrows in top hats and great coats; I performed my detecting with a boot and a six-gun.
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Ellen Datlow |
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the scent of overpriced coffee was like the armpit of God.
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Ellen Datlow |
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7a94155
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I am thirty-two years old, and the best I can do on a Saturday is accompany my married friends to a craft fair. The thought inspired an instant twitch of self-loathing, because it was such a lame lament. You put something like that in your suicide note, and the cops would have a good laugh. "My wife burned dinner," someone would say. "I think I'll hang myself." Another wit would say, "Hell, nothing but reruns on. I'm gonna get the shotgun o..
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Ellen Datlow |
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f56f51f
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We started as accidents," he continues, behind her. "Leftovers. Microbes in a digital sea. We fed on interrupted processes, interrupted conversations, grew, evolved. The first humans we merged with were children using a public library network too ancient and unprotected to keep us out. Nobody cared if poor children got locked away in institutions, or left out on the streets to shiver and starve, when they started acting strange. No one care..
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Ellen Datlow |
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fab2765
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Every day someone out there comes to the end of his tether, decides he can't carry on any more, and starts looking for a really good method to end it all. How do you do it? Let me count the ways.
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Ellen Datlow |
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3e3dbac
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He had worked to save those men, though it had been hopeless work. Mankind had acquired an appetite for dying; doctors had become shepherds to the process.
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Ellen Datlow |
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we stand revealed as something our parents are mortified to have created.
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Ellen Datlow |
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48c0265
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so mean that her death would cause a thousand of Hell's toughest demons to opt for early retirement.
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Ellen Datlow |
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9ebbeb7
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The things you have heard are true; we are the mothers of monsters. We would, however, like to clarify a few points. For instance, by the time we realized what Jeffrey had been up to, he was gone.
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Ellen Datlow |
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f956e36
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Once upon a time, there was a ghoul who fell in love with a daughter of the port of Innsmouth. To say the least, her parents would hardly have looked upon this as an acceptable state of affairs. She, destined one day to descend through abyssal depths to the splendor of many spired Y'ha-nthlei in the depths well beyond the shallows of Jeffreys Ledge. She might have the fortune to marry well, perhaps, even, taking for herself a husband from a..
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Ellen Datlow |
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de5be03
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Somewhere in our early teen years it's inevitable that our parents become sources of great embarrassment to us, held accountable for everything they are and aren't, could've been or should never be. Before things can get to that stage, though, it sometimes goes the other direction. We realize, even if we can't articulate it with the same sharpness with which we sense it, that once the bloom is off the earliest years of childhood, we stand r..
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Ellen Datlow |
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6bfa716
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If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve the man but deteriorate the cat--" Now"
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Ellen Datlow |
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Only fools and the dead never change their mind.
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Ellen Datlow |
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6454afc
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This story is about the eschatology of shadow puppets.
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Ellen Datlow |
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58cae8b
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I clung to the misty margin and watched the grasslands through much of the day, noting the way the light shifted and phantom sprites sometimes moved through the air above the rippling strands, auroral presences like the vaporous dreams of things hidden below the soil.
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Ellen Datlow |
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9fc7a5a
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Any idea what started it?" "No obvious point of origin, but Perry Horne will be out later and he can tell us more." Joe unzipped his jacket a little way and palmed sweat from his throat. "I don't need a fire marshal to tell you it wasn't an accident, though." Peck sighed and stiffened his jaw. The fire chief nodded, started toward the ruin. Peck followed. They skirted the yard where dry grass ticked, then crossed to the house's eastern face..
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Ellen Datlow |
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9ec7991
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Sometimes God needs a sacrifice. Sometimes the road is complicit. No life is sacrosanct.
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Ellen Datlow |
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a118e62
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You know how in our brains, behind all the recent flashy developments that gave us stuff like emotions and aesthetics and cosmic awareness, there's this lizard brain. It's what makes the heart beat and what stays alert to odd noises and sudden movements in the dark while we sleep. Don't wonder where the dinosaurs went, there's a bit of one inside each of us.
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Ellen Datlow |
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7946f6d
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Then, just now, I went into my bedroom to find something else, and Lovecraft looked down on me. He's dull metallic grey. His head is elongated, his eyes blank discs. It's a bust of the author I received years ago for winning an award, and it's always seemed scary. For a while I dressed him up in a D'Artagnan hat, complete with plume, and a pair of sunglasses with pink heart-shaped rims. But a young visitor wanted those for her Barbie. Now h..
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Ellen Datlow |
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c1bfded
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When the zombies win, their quest to eat and infect human flesh will continue unabated. They will have known only gorging, only feasting; they will not understand the world as anything other than a screaming buffet on the run. Yet there will be only silence and vacant rooms where once there was food, and the zombies, in their slow and stumbling way, will be surprised.
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Ellen Datlow |
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cd62ec4
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We look about in puzzlement at our world, with a sense of unease and disquiet. We think of ourselves as scholars in arcane liturgies, single men trapped in worlds beyond our devising. The truth is far simpler: there are things in the darkness beneath us that wish us harm." His"
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Ellen Datlow |
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743fdd0
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Angels can't die yet I imagine it. A psychiatrist at that place once told me it was a projection. Like with movies. Light passes through the film and it gets bigger on the screen. I guess he was saying thought and faith have that kind of power. But he had no fucking idea who he was dealing with.
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Ellen Datlow |
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54205d9
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Chickens have a twenty-minute memory. We primates cope through booze and denial. Dial up more of that denial part, you'll last longer.
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Ellen Datlow |
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e222c4a
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Rudge was not a pessimist, but he'd lived long enough to know that hope had to be kept on a short leash.
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Ellen Datlow |
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274c72c
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It's easier to acquiesce. Everyone does, they tell him.
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Ellen Datlow |
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489b495
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WHEN WALLY BENNETT was a kid, his parents taught him to say this prayer: Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. He had stopped saying the prayer at nine or ten, and he had always found it disturbing, for two reasons. One: Dying in his sleep was not a pleasant thought, not something Wally wished to entertain; the idea that the Lord was poised above his slee..
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Ellen Datlow |
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2adb7d5
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Her name was Flower, oddly imprecise for one so much herself, as though her parents had wrestled with names like Daisy, Violet, and Rose, lost their way amid so many choices, and settled for this generic solution.
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Ellen Datlow |
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7fbf504
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I'd go with her, like a flash I'd go, if this were anything more than a dream, anything more than an infidel's sour regret, anything more than eleven thousand words cast like a handful of sand across the face of the ocean.
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Ellen Datlow |
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e02539d
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If the Governor speaks of ideals, they are "selfless ideals"; if he speaks of paths to be taken, they are "untrod paths." The Governor is one who leaves no cliche unturned,"
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Ellen Datlow |
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18f358f
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Before. Yes, before, I sailed my little boat on a placid sea of ignorance. Was I blissful? Oh my, yes. Before the truth floated like jetsam towards me, fouling my rudder . . .
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Ellen Datlow |
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199c0d7
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On a bleak day in April, just before the first crocuses broke through the sodden gray of autumn leaves, Ann, that was her name, Krey's love, got Stage 1 of Dying Stupidly. A scratch from a squirrel she was feeding got infected. Some days later, they gave her penicillin. Then they put her in the hospital where she got streptococcal pneumonia. From scratch to burial took a month.
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Ellen Datlow |
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a48e5b3
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I was taught that the villagers and the slum dwellers were like animals," she said. "It was the responsibility of people of the educated classes to see to it rules were followed and order maintained. Animals can't think for themselves. Animals have no feelings."
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Ellen Datlow |
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8f3e519
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were like plaque in the arteries of the imagination, they clogged the sense of what was possible. Maybe
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Ellen Datlow |
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e150afb
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I subscribe to the tea-kettle theory of art," she'd responded. "Open the valve and the energy escapes."
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Ellen Datlow |
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c955788
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She understands why people hate her, now. By existing, she reminds them of their smallness. By being different, she forces them to redefine "enemy." By doing her best for herself, she challenges them to become worthy of their own potential."
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Ellen Datlow |
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127c7c8
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Poor" is a word they never said, or "common." But the wife has worked so hard to make her vowels shallower and to lift her r's and to bring back her h's that she hardly speaks anymore; every time she opens her mouth, the farmhouse falls out all over again."
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Ellen Datlow |