Would you kill for your art? Would it kill for you? A painter who kills with blood-tinged pigment. A tattoo artist with a dark past who treats with demons. A sculptor on Venus who carves his life’s history into ice at the cost of his sanity. A ceramic vase that might avenge the life of a murder victim. A haunted song that drives listeners to kill. Art surrounds us. It entertains and nurtures. And for some it can do far more. It can protect a family over generations or bridge the boundary between the realms of the living and the dead. It can be a curse or a boon, a path to riches or to damnation. In Artifice and Craft, speculative fiction authors Lyndsay E. Gilbert, Laura E. Price, Adam Stemple, Brian K. Lowe, James R. Tuck, Briana Una McGuckin, Jordan Davidson, James Maxey, Madeline Dau, Joel Armstrong, C.E. Murphy, Mark Painter, Alex Bledsoe, Alethea Kontis, Gerri Leen, and Jelena Dunato craft tales of art and artistry that are shaded with the supernatural, tuned to the fantastic, and glazed with the unexpected. So listen, watch, admire. But don’t touch, and don’t turn your back. Because these works of art are far more than they seem.
Authors
Jelena Dunato is an art historian, curator, speculative fiction writer and lover of all things ancient. She grew up in Croatia on a steady diet of adventure novels and then wandered the world for a decade, building a career in the arts. Jelena’s stories have been published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Dark, Future SF and Mermaids Monthly, among others. She is a member of SFWA and Codex.
Adam Stemple is an award-winning author, poet, and musician. Like most authors, his life experience is broad and odd. He spent twenty years on the road with a variety of bands playing for crowds of between 2 and 20,000 people. He started, ran, and sold a poker training site with poker pro, Chris "Fox" Wallace. He worked in a warehouse. He picked corn. He traded options and demoed houses. He drove pizzas for nine months in 1986, which for twenty-seven years was the longest he'd ever been employed. He drank too much and has now been sober for over fifteen years. He published his first book at the age of sixteen, "The Lullaby Songbook," which he arranged the music for. His mother is a famous children's book author. His children are artistic. His wife is a better person than him in nearly all regards.
"A veritable badass fairy princess." —Jim Butcher "The faerie princess of the worlds of weird." —Jonathan Maberry "Alethea Kontis IS fairy tales." —Jim C. Hines, author of Libriomancer "Alethea Kontis: Awesome, racks up award nominations, wears tiaras." —SF author Ferrett Steinmetz "I want to live in [Alethea's] head because I think that might be the most interesting place in the world!!!!" —Ellen Oh, author of Prophecy "Alethea Kontis, the woman who writes like Shakespeare would if he were alive today." —Aaron Pound "The beauty of a princess, the confidence of a queen, the brilliance of a writer, and the demeanor of a cheerful fairy comedian!" —Cheyenne Z. "This was the story before all of the other stories, and it was the other tales that were changed over time." —Nerdophiles, on ENCHANTED
