Hair Side, Flesh Side

A child receives the body of Saint Lucia of Syracuse for her seventh birthday. A rebelling angel rewrites the Book of Judgement to protect the woman he loves. A young woman discovers the lost manuscript of Jane Austen written on the inside of her skin. A 747 populated by a dying pantheon makes the extraordinary journey to the beginning of the universe.

Lyrical and tender, quirky and cutting, Helen Marshall’s exceptional debut collection weaves the fantastic and the horrific alongside the touchingly human in fifteen modern parables about history, memory, and cost of creating art.

Machine

Celia’s body is not her own, but even her conscious mind can barely tell the difference. Living on the cutting edge of biomechanical science was supposed to allow her to lead a normal life in a near-perfect copy of her physical self while awaiting a cure for a rare and deadly genetic disorder.

But a bioiandroid isn’t a real person. Not according to the protesters outside Celia’s house, her coworkers, or even her wife. Not according to her own evolving view of herself. As she begins to strip away the human affectations and inhibitions programmed into her new body, the chasm between the warm pains of flesh-and-blood life and the chilly comfort of the machine begins to deepen. Love, passion, reality, and memory war within Celia’s body until she must decide whether to betray old friends or new ones in the choice between human and machine.

Monstrous Affections

This collection of short stories won the Black Quill Award, Best Dark Genre Collection (2010).

A young bride and her future mother-in-law risk everything to escape it.
A repentant father summons help from a pot of tar to ensure it.
A starving woman learns from howling winds and a whispering host, just how fulfilling it can finally be.

Can it be love?

 

Horror Story and Other Horror Stories

Love and loss are the two prevailing themes in this 93,000-word short story collection, featuring 19 of the author’s tales — five of which are original to this collection:

– “When Fat Men Love Thin Women”
– “The Death Artist”
– “The Uncertainty Principle”
– “Monster”
– “The Love Clinic”

The rest of the stories appeared in such publications as On Spec, TransVersions, Prairie Fire, Northern Frights, Dark Planet, Descant, ChiZine, and the Tesseracts and Queer Fear anthology series.