Rare Birds: Stories by L.S. Johnson

Release date: September 17, 2019

Subgenre: Short fiction collection

About Rare Birds:

 

From 2017 World Fantasy Award finalist L.S. Johnson, the eight short stories in this collection look at the ties that bind and the transformations they provoke. Whether bound by love, blood, or violent circumstance, the characters in these tales are fundamentally altered by those closest to them … and not always for the better.

Two mothers become entwined in revenge against a violent man, with unexpected consequences. A roving gang of sirens finds themselves challenged from without and within. In a last, desperate act of love, a young surgeon goes under the knife. And in a distant territory, a mother and daughter struggle to survive—but the aid they summon is far more dangerous.

At turns brutal and tender, subtle and shocking, these stories blend realism, fantasy, and horror to create an unsettling—and unforgettable—experience.

 

Excerpt:

 

Elsa knew she was no longer just right; she was becoming less right with every passing week. Neither the doctor’s prescription nor her own lotions had done anything to stop the rash that now covered her from head to foot. She had tried vitamins, powders, baths with salts and baths with oils; still the bumps spread and swelled, some with white heads now, some with nearly black ones as well as brown. Her family believed she must have eaten something poisonous, she would have to be patient and let it work its way through her. When they said this Elsa had thought Mary, but kept her mouth shut.

Had Elsa’s mother still been alive she might have said something different. Her mother had often told her bedtime stories that weren’t in books, stories from the old world, stories her mother’s mother had told, and her mother before that, and so on … Stories of women who were changed into things, river rocks and fleet deer, nightingales and sparrows and tall, twisting trees. Always they were betrayed in some fashion and then swiftly changed, to save them from a worse fate. And then she was no more of this world, her mother would always finish, and then she would pretend to show Elsa something from the woman in question—a leaf, a feather. But such endings had never felt like escapes to Elsa. They felt like condemnations, and her dreams would be filled with monstrous images of animals with women’s faces, their silent mouths screaming endlessly.

Only now did Elsa understand her child-self had been right, that those stories weren’t fantasies. They were warnings.

 

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About L.S. Johnson:

L.S. Johnson lives in Northern California, where she feeds her cats by writing book indexes. She is the author of the gothic novellas Harkworth Hall and Leviathan. Her first collection, Vacui Magia: Stories, won the North Street Book Prize and was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award.

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