Gifts for the One Who Comes After

"Helen Marshall uses the fantastic to pry her way inside her readers' ribcages and break us wide open." --Neil Gaiman, author of Ocean at the End of the Lane "Helen Marshall whispers in your ear when she fits the noose around your neck, filling you with wonder and dread, urging you into a startling, beautiful darkness. These stories -- which sometimes feel more like spells are the very best kind of unsettling." --Benjamin Percy author of Red Moon and The Wilding "Helen Marshall is one of my favorite living writers. Her elegant, grotesque stories are best encountered like this, gathered together in a book and in conversation with each other; only then can you appreciate the staggering variety of her imagination. What unifies them, and what elevates them from being merely great fantasy to being literature, is the ache of human experience that informs them all: the yearning; the heartbreak; the desperate, misinformed love. This is life, in all its beauty and sorrow." --Nathan Ballingrud "Gifts For The One Who Comes After should single out Marshall as one of the most accomplished writers of the fantastic being published today, an exceptional collection likely to be among the best 2014 has to offer." --This Is Horror "... As she proved in her 2012 debut, Hair Side, Flesh Side, Marshall is a master at ?bizarre, myth-infused scenarios that play on a reader's subconscious in ways creepy and oddly pleasurable. Gifts For The One Who Comes After extends this practice with a suite of tales that employ tropes borrowed from Gothic and Grand Guignol traditions, viewing quotidian reality through a distorted lens that exaggerates angles and shadows, making the real unreal or, at the very least, surreal." --The National Post