2011
First Published
4.08
Average Rating
206
Number of Pages
Death and pleasure. Freud's Todestrieb, his statement that "libido has the task of making the destroying instinct innocuous, and it fulfils the task by diverting that instinct to a great extent outwards....The instinct is then called the destructive instinct, the instinct for mastery, or the will to power." Few authors have spun stories of Thanatos and Eros as skillfully and powerfully as Livia Llewellyn. In his introduction to this volume, Laird Barron writes "Scant difference exists between exquisite pleasure and pain." An orphan girl with a mind for anthracite falls into the hands of a cult worshipping an entombed god. In the Pacific Northwest, evergreens lull prepubescent girls into their trunks to serve as wombs. A suburban housewife troubled by her present encounters the sixteen year-old girl she ached to touch in her dreams. These ten stories promise to indulge a reader's sensibilities, their fears and desires.
Avg Rating
4.08
Number of Ratings
264
5 STARS
39%
4 STARS
40%
3 STARS
13%
2 STARS
5%
1 STARS
3%
goodreads
Author
Livia Llewellyn
Author · 6 books
I was born in Anchorage, Alaska, and spent my childhood in Tacoma, Washington. And now I live on the East Coast. I’m not quite sure how that happened…. By day I’m a secretary. I file papers, create spreadsheets, update calendars, sort papers—the usual secretarial things. At night, I write about lonely young girls who can speak to engines, Nikola Tesla’s secret journals, long-horned demons lost in Northwest suburbia, giant biomechanical insects, mothers who are good monsters, monsters who are good mothers, lots of consensual human-&-creature sex, and even more broken hearts. You can also find me on my website, where I talk a lot about ants (too many), coffee (too little), and cheese (never enough!).
