Lovedeath

In the tradition of Stephen King’s Different Seasons and Anne Rice’s Lestat Chronicles , acclaimed author Dan Simmons presents his most ambitious work ever, in a collection of five novellas that explore the exquisite conjunction of love and death. Combining consummate literary artistry and undiluted emotional impact, Lovedeath portrays a world—sometimes terrifyingly, sometimes tantalizingly—just beyond the familiar. Rarely has an author depicted human sexuality at such an unbridled, startling pitch, or portrayed a love that flirts so recklessly with its own extinction.

• “Entropy’s Bed at Midnight.” A father and his young daughter start their road trip on the highway out of Denver, when suddenly the humdrum accident statistics of the insurance companies take on a terrifying reality. Now, a pitched battle between love and laughter on one side and pain and death on the other side begins. And one man will pit the desperate devotion to his child against the massed forces of chaos in the universe.

• “Dying in Bangkok.” A man discovers and returns to the flesh bazaars of Southeast Asia over the years spanning the Vietnam War to our own time of plague. There, he is hopelessly ensnared by a woman with a rare and shocking sexual gift, as well as the power to seduce and destroy both body and soul.

• “Sleeping with Teeth Women.” A young Sioux warrior embarks on a vision quest that will change him and his world forever. In an erotic night charged with peril, he will be forced to make a choice of the right woman or die. And with his death will die the last chance for his people to triumph over the white man’s scourge that is about to sweep the earth.

• “Flashback.” A Federal agent is haunted by guilt for his failure to prevent a presidential assassination that rocked the world. Yet beneath that trauma lies an even darker secret that can only be revealed by Flashback, the most deviously potent mind drug ever devised by pharmaceutical science.

• “The Great Lover.” The time is World War I. The place is the infernal mud that lines the trenches of the Somme. The chronicler is James Edwin Rooke, the celebrated young British officer and poet. The annals tell of the terrors of this world and the transports of the next, as only war at its most horrifying can make possible.

Lovedeath confirms Dan Simmons as an unquestionable master of his craft, a singular and powerful voice among today’s authors of fiction.