Written as a lost volume from her celebrated diaries, Anaïs Nin at the Grand Guignol follows the iconic feminist author into an erotic and twilit realm of dark fantasy and sexual obsession, a world of forbidden desire and deadly consequence from which she might never fully return. Paris, 1933. In the aftermath of her love triangle with novelist Henry Miller and his dancer wife June, thirty-year-old Anaïs Nin is left reeling. Stifled by her bourgeois marriage, she retreats into the midnight world of the Grand Guignol, the legendary theatre of horror and fear whose devoted patrons thrill at the macabre spectacles depicted on the black box stage. It is there that she falls under the spell of the actress Paula Maxa, known as The Most Murdered Woman of All Time, who awakens Anaïs to a secret realm of bewitchment and vice, of pleasure and pain. Only Maxa already belongs to Monsieur Guillard, the lustful night creature that haunts the dark streets of Pigalle. As the demon lover's insatiable hunger grows stronger by the hour, Anaïs finds herself trapped in a far more dangerous triangle, a cat-and-mouse game with Maxa's very soul as the ultimate prize.
Author
ROBERT LEVY is an author of unsettling stories and plays whose work has been seen Off-Broadway. A Harvard graduate subsequently trained as a forensic psychologist, his work has been called "frank and funny" (Time Magazine), "idiosyncratic and disarming" (The New York Times), "ambitious and clever" (Variety), "smart" (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction) and "bloody brave" (the UK's SFX Magazine). His first novel, the contemporary dark fairy tale THE GLITTERING WORLD, was published by Gallery/Simon & Schuster and a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award as well as a Lambda Literary Award nominee, and also won an Earphones Award for exceptional audio from Audiofile Magazine. Shorter work has appeared in places like The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Nightmare, Black Static, The Dark, Shadows & Tall Trees, The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction, and The Best Horror of the Year, among many others. His debut collection NO ONE DIES FROM LOVE: Dark Tales of Loss and Longing will be published by Word Horde in 2023. Robert is a single dad who lives with his children in Brooklyn near a toxic canal, where he is awaiting his mutant powers to develop any day now. He teaches at the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing.
