This is three-time IHG award-winning author Caitlin R. Kiernan's long unpublished, "lost" first novel. The Five of Cups attempts to blend the two dominant subgenres of the contemporary vampire tale, crossing the historical Gothic with the gritty, urban realism of "splatterpunk." Grounded in the squalor of street-life in Atlanta in the early 1990s, but with an epic scope that encompasses the Irish famine of 1847, a yellow-fever epidemic in 1853 New Orleans, and the Union assault on Atlanta in 1864, Kiernan describes her novel as an "overly-ambitious jumble of competing ideas and subplots, trying to unite vampirism, the grail myth, the tarot, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and the Arthuriad into a single, coherent storyline. This limited edition hardcover will be the only edition ever published and will include the following: * The original introduction, written by Poppy Z. Brite in 1996 * A lengthy new introduction by the author * A 1999 essay on The Five of Cups written by Kiernan for her newsletter * Facsimiles of original notes, outlines, correspondence, rejection slips, photos, and fragments from Kiernan's files and notebooks * Black-and-white interior illustrations by Richard Kirk