Sleeping With the Monster: Stories

by Anya Martin

Overview

Twelve women. Twelve horrors disguised as love. In Anya Martin’s new collection of horror tales: a teenage girl faces the consequences of wishing her dog could live forever; a romantic college student wakes a gargoyle in Paris; and a lonely woman finds her house infested with insects. History’s darker depths are delved as an American jazz singer confronts her lover who has committed terrible war crimes as he descends into madness in post-WW2 Germany; and a couple experiences H.P. Lovecraft’s Resonator machine via found footage from the Velvet Underground. In the publisher’s favorite tale: Actress Elsa Lanchester reveals the true story of Bride of Frankenstein involving the preserved brain of Karl Marx’s daughter in 1923 London.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781590217009
Publisher:	Lethe Press
Publication date:	10/01/2018
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.63(d)

About the Author

Anya Martin was weaned on Friday Night Frights, has always rooted for the monster, and regrets abandoning her earliest career aspiration-digging for dinosaurs. She listens to punk rock with a heavy side of funk and experimental jazz, cooks dangerously hot curries, and hangs with dogs whenever possible. She's also half-Finnish, has an anthropology degree from Smith College, and earns her living as a journalist. Her fiction has appeared in anthologies and magazines including Tales from a Talking Board, Looming Low, Eternal Frankenstein, Cthulhu Fhtagn!, Giallo Fantastique, Cassilda's Song, Borderlands 6, Mantid, Daybreak Magazine and Womanthology: Heroic. She produces The Outer Dark podcast, featuring interviews with contemporary Weird/spec-lit creators, with Scott Nicolay, for This Is Horror.

Editorial Reviews

10/01/2018
Lovers of weird fiction will be thrilled by this collection, which has a little something for everyone: historical fiction, more traditional horror, and the downright strange. Dog lovers will find themselves particularly drawn toward “A Girl and Her Dog,” but may find the tragedy “Old Tsah-Hov,” written from a dog’s perspective, to be more heartbreaking than enjoyable. Fans of Frankenstein will want to read “The Un-Bride,” which feels like an episode of The Twilight Zone as written by Mary Shelley. Martin tackles some tough topics with varying degrees of success: “Passage to Dreamtime,” a play, presents an almost sympathetic viewpoint of a Nazi and his lover, though it does not shy away from details of the crimes he committed, while “Window” and “The Prince of Lyghes” take on domestic violence more successfully. The strongest story of the collection, “Boisea trivittata,” is a lingering horror that will make readers put pest control on speed dial. Despite occasional hiccups, this is a strong collection with a good balance of politically charged and straight-up strange storytelling. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"In Anya Martin's gorgeous debut collection, the weird and the fantastic live side by side with characters and places at once extraordinary but somehow curiously familiar too. From insects invading a woman's life bit by bit, to a meeting between Bride of Frankenstein actress Elsa Lanchester and the brain of Karl Marx's daughter, these stories will haunt and intrigue you long after the final pages. Beautiful, heartbreaking, and with precisely the right dose of the unsettling, Sleeping With the Monster is an unforgettable foray into the strange that you don't want to miss." - Gwendolyn Kiste, author of The Rust Maidens and Pretty Marys All in a Row

From the Publisher

2019-01-11

Martin's debut collection amasses 12 horror tales featuring surreal creatures and discombobulating dream worlds.

The book opens with "A Girl and Her Dog," which follows high schooler Cassie and her beloved collie, Daniel. A strange woman, whom Cassie refers to as "Old Crone," convinces her that when Daniel shakes in his sleep, it means that "the Evil Man" is tormenting him in his dreams. She urges Cassie to wake the dog during his nightmares, and this leads to the young woman having an unexpected encounter. Other characters in other stories enter dreamlike or hallucinatory states, as well; in both "Sensoria" and "Grass," the protagonists' drug use offers a possible explanation for their respective visons of an undead man and a green, slimy monster. The author shows a distinct H.P. Lovecraft influence; "Resonator Superstar!" and "The Prince of Lyghes" even originally appeared in Lovecraft-themed anthologies. However, all the stories here display the author's knack for indelible, unnerving passages. In "The Prince of Lyghes," for instance, a woman is shocked by an assortment of caged, eccentric beasts: "Some spread razorblade teeth and sashayed left to right on scaly chicken-like legs that weren't quite in the right places." Many tales have supernatural elements (magic in "Jehessimin"; a ghost in "Window"), but others have more tangible monsters, such as an abundance of boxelder bugs in "Boisea Trivittata." The book's highlight is "The Un-Bride or No Gods and Marxists," a clever play on the real-life origin of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which sprang from a conversation with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron. In Martin's tale, Hollywood actress Elsa Lanchester relates her own story of bringing the dead back to life, addressing it to her actor spouse, Charles Laughton, and Frankenstein film director James Whale.

Potent, memorable stories that will fluster some readers and terrify others.

Kirkus Reviews