“Objects In Dreams May Be Closer Than They Appear” by Lisa Tuttle will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2012 edited by Paula Guran. Stacey Friedberg interviews her on the story.

In your mind, does our narrator ever escape from the house?

How can anyone escape from a place that does not exist?  She’s trapped forever, I’m afraid; the price she has to pay for pursuing the impossible.

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“The Bleeding Shadow” by Joe R. Lansdale will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2012 edited by Paula Guran. Molly Tanzer interviews him on the story.

Shelf Life: Fantastic Stories Celebrating Bookstores edited by Greg Ketter sold to Sean Wallace at Prime Books, for a September 2012 release. A trade paperback edition of the previously hardcover anthology, Shelf Life features an introduction by Neil Gaiman and stories by P.D. Cacek, Ramsey Campbell, Harlan Ellison, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Charles de Lint, Lisa Morton, Melanie Tem, Jack Williamson, Gene Wolfe, and others.

“The Sandal-Bride” by Genevieve Valentine will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2012 edited by Rich Horton. Jennifer Konieczny interviews her on the story.

Sara, the Sandal-Bride, collected stories, because “she’d needed something that was hers, to hoard against a life with some dull boy to whom she had given her word.” What stories do you return to time and again? Do you have favorites that you always recommend?

I definitely have a few books from childhood that appeal to me now as much as ever. I own half a dozen editions of Beagle’s The Last Unicorn and Sagan’s Contact—some too worn to read, but all of which I’m keeping. And every once in a while, a story will strike me just so—Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison was a recent find.

MORE: Read the rest of the interview here!

“Catastrophic Destruction of the Head” by Margo Lanagan will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2012 edited by Paula Guran. Erin Stocks interviews her on the story.

The soldier veers back and forth from being brutally violent to almost naive and desperate for love. What was it like to write those two opposing sides of his personality?

Well, neither version of him is terrifically intelligent or self-aware, and his veering is part of his lack of reflection. He doesn’t have an awful lot of control over himself; he just reacts to whatever circumstances present to him, from his gut and from what childhood lessons he’s remembered. In a way that makes him easier and more colorful to write: put an irritant in front of him and off goes his temper or his terror, so he shoots someone or destroys something, or takes a lot of drugs to avoid what he’s seeing; put a woman in front of him and he’s torn in four by mixed lust and scorn and mother-love and fear of the unknown.

Quite a lot of the story is simply presenting this veering, without him realizing how horrendous he’s being or how pathetic; it’s only at the end that he begins to feel a faint whisper of developing conscience, a realization that things don’t have to be this way. So it was exhausting, primarily. I could only watch this fellow for so long, and I was glad of any pause I got between drafts, and it was always a matter of taking a deep breath and steeling myself before plunging in again. There was very little compensatory beauty or sweetness in this story; it was a relief to be done with it, I have to say.

MORE: Read the rest of the interview here!