The Humanity of Monsters

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Release date: September 15, 2015

Publisher: ChiZine Publications

ISBN 13: 978-1771483599 (Print) / 978-1771483605 (Digital)

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We are all of us monsters. We are none of us monsters.

Through the work of twenty-six writers, emerging to award-winning, The Humanity of Monsters plumbs the depths of humane monsters, monstrous humans, and the interstices between:

Monstrous heralds of change, the sight of whom only children can survive. Monsters born of the battlefield, in gunfire and frost and blood, clothed in too-familiar flesh. Monsters, human and otherwise, born of fear, and love, and retribution all, wrapped tight and inextricable one from the other: the Fallen outside of time, lovers and monsters in borrowed skin, creatures from beyond the stars, and humans who have travelled to them.

In stories by turns surreal, sublime, brutal, and haunting, there are no easy answers to be found. Only the surety that though there be monsters, you will name them false. And when you meet those who truly are, you will not know them.

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Table of Contents:

“Tasting Gomoa” by Chinelo Onwualu
“Dead Sea Fruit” by Kaaron Warren
“The Bread We Eat in Dreams” by Catherynne M. Valente
“The Emperor’s Old Bones” by Gemma Files
“The Things” by Peter Watts
“muo-ka’s Child” by Indrapramit Das
“Six” by Leah Bobet
“The Nazir” by Sofia Samatar
“A Handful of Earth” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
“In Winter” by Sonya Taaffe
“Ghostweight” by Yoon Ha Lee
“How to Talk to Girls at Parties” by Neil Gaiman
“Night They Missed the Horror Show” by Joe Lansdale
“If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love” by Rachel Swirsky
“Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream” by Maria Dahvana Headley
“The Horse Latitudes” by Sunny Moraine
“Boyfriend and Shark” by Berit Ellingsen
“Never the Same” by Polenth Blake
“Mantis Wives” by Kij Johnson
“Proboscis” by Laird Barron
“Out They Come” by Alex Dally MacFarlane
“and Love shall have no Dominion” by Livia Llewellyn
“You Go Where It Takes You” by Nathan Ballingrud
“Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife” by A.C. Wise
“Theories of Pain” by Rose Lemberg
“Terrible Lizards” by Meghan McCarron

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Reviews and Advance Praise:

The Humanity of Monsters doesn’t just shine a light on our monstrous actions. It peels back the skin and digs greedy fingers into the whole bloody, twitching mess. Illuminating and transformative. One of the best anthologies I’ve read this year!

– Michael Kelly, Series Editor, Year’s Best Weird Fiction

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“This anthology reminds us that the monster can be love, hate, fear or pain — but in the end, it’s a representative of us.”

– Nancy Hightower, The Washington Post

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“… a walk into the shadows of a darkened room at midnight as well as a journey to the darkest corners of the human mind…. [O]verall the book is much stronger than most anthologies.”

– Josef Hernandez, Examiner.com

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“… a spirited, incisive, often disturbing collection of nightmarish visions from all corners of the globe.”

– Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

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“As a whole, The Humanity of Monsters is gripping and Matheson has achieved [their] goal to question the divide between monstrous and non-monstrous: the book is an undulating, ever-permuting body caught in the same “liminality of state” that fuels its contents. The stories here are quick to rip off skin, scales and fur, and reveal that humans and monsters are more alike than we’d like to think. We bleed. We hurt. We’re all instruments to our desires.”

– Haralambi Markov, “Repulsion and Revelation: The Humanity of Monsters,” Tor.com