The Humanity of Monsters

We are all of us monsters. We are none of us monsters. Through the work of twenty-six writers, emerging to award-winning and masters of their craft, 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, and creatures from beyond the stars and humans who have travelled to them. Dreams of lost and siren-song depths - of other half-held, half-remembered lives. And the things we have survived, and the things we might yet survive, in the face of greater, eviscerating loss. In stories by turns surreal, sublime, brutal, and haunting, there are no easy answers to be found, no simple nor uncomplicated labels to be had. 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.

“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