Kristi Demeester

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About Kristi Demeester
Kristi DeMeester is the author of Such a Pretty Smile, a novel from St. Martin's Press, Beneath, a novel from Word Horde, and Everything That's Underneath, a collection of short stories forthcoming from Apex Publications.
Her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of the Year, Year's Best Weird Fiction, Black Static, The Dark, Apex Magazine, and several others.
In her spare time, she alternates between telling people how to pronounce her last name and how to spell her first.
Find her online at www.kristidemeester.com.
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Author Updates
Books By Kristi Demeester
***Winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in the Anthology category***
Want to see something weird?
Embrace the odd? Satisfy your curiosity? Surrender to wonder?
From Crystal Lake Publishing and the Bram Stoker Award-winning co-editor of the smash hit Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories comes Behold! Oddities, Curiosities and Undefinable Wonders.
Sixteen stories and two poems take you into the spaces between the ordinary—and the imaginations of some of today's masters of dark and thrilling fiction.
- A travel writer learns the terrible secrets at a hotel that's not at all as it seems.
- A disfigured woman and her daughter explore methods of weaponizing beauty.
- An amateur beekeeper acquires an object that shows her the true
danger of the hive-mind. - Drifters ride the rails seeking something wondrous that could change their fates forever.
- A strange creature that holds our very existence in its hands shapes the lives of two lovers to touching and devastating effect.
- A young man helps his grandfather—and something much more monstrous—atone for bargains made during wartime.
- And much, much more…
Featuring Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman, Ramsey Campbell, Lisa Morton, Brian Kirk, Hal Bodner, Stephanie M. Wytovich, John Langan, Erinn L. Kemper, John F.D. Taff, Patrick Freivald, Lucy A. Snyder, Brian Hodge, Kristi DeMeester, Christopher Coake, Sarah Read and Richard Thomas. Foreword by Josh Malerman. Illustrations by Luke Spooner. Cover art by John Coulthart. Brought to you by Bram Stoker Award-nominated editor Doug Murano and Crystal Lake Publishing—Tales from the Darkest Depths.
Interview with the editor:
What kinds of short stories will readers find in this anthology?
Doug Murano: I wanted this book to encompass a lot of the things I love about weird fiction, fantasy and horror—as well as give a tip of my cap to some of the things I loved growing up. So, it’s not exclusively a horror anthology, though you’ll find there’s plenty of darkness and dread throughout the book.
It was important to me that the stories throughout the anthology embraced and celebrated the odd—so you're not going to find stories of big-top exploitation or carnival freak shows here. The closest, perhaps, you'll find to this angle is in Lisa Morton's story—but that piece turns the freak-show trope on its head and aspires to something much more daring, interesting, and, ultimately, haunting.
Some tonal touch-points for much of the book are actually Jim Henson's work — like Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal — particularly in the Undefinable Wonders section. I also drew tonal influences from Guillermo del Toro’s filmography, especially his Spanish-language films like Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone. As in those films, there’s terror and darkness here, but there’s beauty, wonder, and magic, as well. In other words, the book is willfully bizarre, wide-ranging, and beautifully strange.
It’s dangerous out there…
On the road.
The highways, byways and backroads of America are teeming day and night with regular folks. Moms and dads making long commutes. Teenagers headed to the beach. Bands on their way to the next gig. Truckers pulling long hauls. Families driving cross country to visit their kin.
But there are others, too. The desperate and the lost. The cruel and the criminal.
Theirs is a world of roadside honky-tonks, truck stops, motels, and the empty miles between destinations. The unseen spaces.
And there are even stranger things. Places that aren’t on any map. Wayfaring terrors and haunted legends about which seasoned and road-weary travelers only whisper.
But those are just stories. Aren’t they?
Find out for yourself as you get behind the wheel with some of today’s finest authors of the dark and horrific as they bring you these harrowing tales from the road.
Tales that could only be spawned by the endless miles of America’s lost highways.
So go ahead and hop in. Let’s take a ride.
Line-up:
- Introduction by Brian Keene
- doungjai gam & Ed Kurtz — “Crossroads of Opportunity”
- Joe R. Lansdale — “Not from Detroit”
- Kristi DeMeester — “A Life That is Not Mine”
- Robert Ford — “Mr. Hugsy”
- Lisa Kröger — “Swamp Dog”
- Orrin Grey — “No Exit”
- Michael Bailey — “The Long White Line”
- Kelli Owen — “Jim’s Meats”
- Bracken MacLeod — “Back Seat”
- Jess Landry — “The Heart Stops at the End of Laurel Lane”
- Jonathan Janz — “Titan, Tyger”
- Nick Kolakowski — “Your Pound of Flesh”
- Richard Thomas — “Requital”
- Damien Angelica Walters — “That Pilgrims’ Hands Do Touch”
- Cullen Bunn — “Outrunning the End”
- Christopher Buehlman — “Motel Nine”
- Rachel Autumn Deering — “Dew Upon the Wing”
- Josh Malerman — “Room 4 at the Haymaker”
- Rio Youers — “The Widow”
Proudly represented by Crystal Lake Publishing—Tales from the Darkest Depths.
Interview with the editor:
So what makes Lost Highways: Dark Fictions From the Road so special?
Lost Highways comes at the theme of road stories with the desire to push the boundaries of what that theme means. Because of that, it collects authors of diverse levels of experience and notoriety in the worlds of horror and dark fiction. This brings together voices like Joe R. Lansdale, Cullen Bunn, Josh Malerman, Damien Angelica Walters, Rio Youers, Bracken MacLeod, Rachel Autumn Deering, doungjai gam with Ed Kurtz, and Kristi DeMeester. All of these unique voices bring a fresh and often unexpected take on the theme.
What made you think of this theme for the anthology?
Road trips can be fun but they can also be long and boring. And while you can read a book to yourself to pass the time, it’s not a very social experience. So Lost Highways was born out of the idea that...
What happens when we make monsters? What happens when we make monsters of ourselves? Grotesque beings lurch from our darkest dreams. Vicious beasts stalk our twisted pasts. Lost souls haunt our deepest regrets. They are the blood on our hands. They are the obsessions in our heads. They are the vengeance in our hearts. They are Miscreations: Gods, Monstrosities & Other Horrors. Edited by Bram Stoker Award-winning editors Doug Murano and Michael Bailey. Featuring a foreword by Alma Katsu, and illustrations throughout by HagCult.
A Bram Stoker Award Finalist!
From the Bram Stoker Award-nominated editor of the 2018 This is Horror Anthology of the Year, ASHES AND ENTROPY, comes a new vision of weird and horrific ambiguity. NOX PAREIDOLIA is fully color-illustrated by Luke Spooner and includes stories by Laird Barron, S.P. Miskowski, Brian Evenson, Kristi DeMeester, Michael Wehunt, Gwendolyn Kiste, Zin E. Rocklyn, Christopher Ropes, Doungjai Gam, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, Carrie Laben, Kurt Fawver, David Peak, Don Webb and Duane Pesice, Paul Jessup, K.H. Vaughan, and more.
“The editor’s claim that the first season of True Detective was a big inspiration for this anthology is evident: Ashes and Entropy sports a finely balanced mixture of grit, crime and blood along with the irrational, occult and weird.”–Rue Morgue
Stand on the precipice and prepare to dive down through the event horizon into the bleak and mind-shattering void of both the cosmos and of humanity.
Nightscape Press is proud to present ASHES AND ENTROPY edited by Robert S. Wilson, an anthology of cosmic horror and noir/neo-noir. ASHES AND ENTROPY is beautifully illustrated by Luke Spooner and includes brand new stories by Laird Barron, Damien Angelica Walters, John Langan, Kristi DeMeester, Jon Padgett, Nadia Bulkin, Jayaprakash Satyamurthy, Lucy A. Snyder, Tim Waggoner, Jessica McHugh, Paul Michael Anderson, Max Booth III, Lynne Jamneck, Greg Sisco, Lisa Mannetti, Nate Southard, Erinn L. Kemper, Matthew M. Bartlett, Autumn Christian, and more.
Edited by Ross E. Lockhart, Tales from a Talking Board examines these questions--and more--with tales of auguries, divination, and fortune telling, through devices like Ouija boards, tarot cards, and stranger things.
So dim the lights, place your hands upon the planchette, and ask the spirits to guide you as we present fourteen stories of the strange and supernatural by Matthew M. Bartlett, Nadia Bulkin, Nathan Carson, Kristi DeMeester, Orrin Grey, Scott R. Jones, David James Keaton, Anya Martin, J. M. McDermott, S.P. Miskowski, Amber-Rose Reed, Tiffany Scandal, David Templeton, and Wendy N. Wagner.
Crawl across the earth and dig in the dirt. Feel it. Tearing at your nails, gritty between your teeth, filling your nostrils. Consume it until it has consumed you. For there you will find the voices that have called from the shadows, the ones that promise to cherish you only to rip your body to shreds.
In Everything That’s Underneath, Kristi DeMeester explores the dark places most people avoid. A hole in an abandoned lot, an illness twisting your loved one into someone you don’t recognize, lust that pushes you further and further until no one can hear your cry for help. In these 18 stories the characters cannot escape the evil that is haunting them. They must make a choice: accept it and become part of what terrifies them the most or allow it to consume them and live in fear forever.
"An outstanding story in outstanding hands." - Josh Malerman
A biting novel from an electrifying new voice, Such a Pretty Smile is a heart-stopping tour-de-force about powerful women, angry men, and all the ways in which girls fight against the forces that try to silence them.
There’s something out there that’s killing. Known only as The Cur, he leaves no traces, save for the torn bodies of girls, on the verge of becoming women, who are known as trouble-makers; those who refuse to conform, to know their place. Girls who don’t know when to shut up.
2019: Thirteen-year-old Lila Sawyer has secrets she can’t share with anyone. Not the school psychologist she’s seeing. Not her father, who has a new wife, and a new baby. And not her mother―the infamous Caroline Sawyer, a unique artist whose eerie sculptures, made from bent twigs and crimped leaves, have made her a local celebrity. But soon Lila feels haunted from within, terrorized by a delicious evil that shows her how to find her voice―until she is punished for using it.
2004: Caroline Sawyer hears dogs everywhere. Snarling, barking, teeth snapping that no one else seems to notice. At first, she blames the phantom sounds on her insomnia and her acute stress in caring for her ailing father. But then the delusions begin to take shape―both in her waking hours, and in the violent, visceral sculptures she creates while in a trance-like state. Her fiancé is convinced she needs help. Her new psychiatrist waives her “problem” away with pills. But Caroline’s past is a dark cellar, filled with repressed memories and a lurking horror that the men around her can’t understand.
As past demons become a present threat, both Caroline and Lila must chase the source of this unrelenting, oppressive power to its malignant core. Brilliantly paced, unsettling to the bone, and unapologetically fierce, Such a Pretty Smile is a powerful allegory for what it can mean to be a woman, and an untamed rallying cry for anyone ever told to sit down, shut up, and smile pretty.
SHIRLEY JACKSON AWARD-WINNER (Vol. 7)
WORLD FANTASY AWARD FINALIST (Vol. 6)
"Michael Kelly's Shadows and Tall Trees is a smart, soulful, illuminating investigation of the many forms and tactics available to those writers involved in one of our moment's most interesting and necessary projects, that of opening up horror literature to every sort of formal interrogation. It is a beautiful and courageous series."
-- Peter Straub, author of Ghost Story
"Shadows and Tall Trees epitomizes the idea of, and is the most consistent venue for weird, usually dark fiction. Well worth your time."
-- Ellen Datlow, Best Horror of The Year
Alison Littlewood - Hungry Ghosts
Brian Evenson - The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell
Carly Holmes - Tattletale
Charles Wilkinson - A Coastal Quest
C.M. Muller - Camera Obscura
James Everington - The Sound of the Sea, Too Close
Kay Chronister - Too Lonely, Too Wild
KL Pereira - You, Girls Without Hands
Kristi DeMeester - The Quiet Forms of Belonging
Kurt Fawver - Workday
M. Rickert - The Fascist Has a Party
Neil Williamson - Down to the Roots
Rebecca Campbell - Child of Shower and Gleam
Seán Padraic Birnie - Dollface
Simon Strantzas - The Somnambulists
Steve Rasnic Tem - Sleepwalking With Angels
Steve Toase - Green Grows the Grief
V.H. Leslie - Lacunae
Mainstream publishers want all-star lineups. Small press publishers often can’t afford to pay pro rates…and even when they can, the names in the table of contents can be limited by the editor’s reach or effort. Bestselling horror, fantasy, and thriller authors Christopher Golden and James A. Moore knew there had to be a better way. Inspired by the efforts of legendary anthology Charles L. Grant, who helped move so many new writers in the horror community’s conversation, Golden and Moore teamed up with Haverhill House’s Twisted Publishing imprint to create…
THE TWISTED BOOK OF SHADOWS
Determined to pay pro rates, the editors crowdfunded the project, and then put the word out as far and wide as possible, loudly and repeatedly encouraging submissions by diverse voices, and recruiting a stellar editorial committee to read along with them, including Linda A. Addison, Nadia Bulkin, Rachel Autumn Deering, Lamar Giles, KL Pereira, and Lee Thomas.
Out of seven hundred stories received through a blind submission process—none of the editors had any idea who the authors were—nineteen made the final cut. Within these pages you will find the beautifully weird side-by-side with terrifying nightmares, horrifying folklore, and hellish futures. Nineteen unique and haunting tales that truly earned their place in a book entitled…
THE TWISTED BOOK OF SHADOWS
Discover your new favorite horror stories by:
Melissa Swensen -- M.M. De Voe -- Andrew Bourelle -- Sara Tantlinger -- Jeffrey B. Burton
Eóin Murphy -- Sarah L. Johnson -- Jason A. Wyckoff -- Amanda Helms -- Trisha J. Wooldridge
Liam Hogan -- KT Wagner -- Rohit Sawant -- P.D. Cacek -- John Linwood Grant
George Edwards Murray -- Cindy O’Quinn -- David Surface -- Kristi DeMeester
THE TWISTED BOOK OF SHADOWS
You Save: ₹ 107.72(8%)
Encompassed in the pages of The Best Horror of the Year have been such illustrious writers as:
Neil Gaiman
Kim Stanley Robinson
Stephen King
Linda Nagata
Laird Barron
Margo Lanagan
And many others
With each passing year, science, technology, and the march of time shine light into the craggy corners of the universe, making the fears of an earlier generation seem quaint. But this light creates its own shadows. The Best Horror of the Year chronicles these shifting shadows. It is a catalog of terror, fear, and unpleasantness as articulated by today’s most challenging and exciting writers.
The cover art is 'Stheno' by Jim Burns
Fiction:
I Write Your Name by Ralph Robert Moore
illustrated by Ben Baldwin
A Crown of Leaves by Kristi DeMeester
Pendulum by Steven J. Dines
illustrated by Vincent Sammy
Glass Eyes in Porcelain Faces by Jack Westlake
illustrated by Richard Wagner
Massaging the Monster by Cody Goodfellow
illustrated by Sebastian Mazuera
The Touch of Her by Steven Sheil
The Summer Is Ended and We Are Not Saved by Natalia Theodoridou
Features:
Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker
NOT A LOTTERY
Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore
I'LL BE WATCHING YOU
Reviews:
Case Notes: Book Reviews
Mike O'Driscoll: Sefira & Other Betrayals by John Langan • Andrew Hook: Jutland by Lucie McKnight Hardy; Broad Moor by Alison Moore • Daniel Carpenter: Pharricide by Vincent De Swarte (translated by Nicholas Royle) • Georgina Bruce: The Girl in Red by Christina Henry; Sealed by Naomi Booth; Wounds by Nathan Ballingrud • Nicholas Royle interviewed by Andrew Hook & Daniel Carpenter • Nathan Ballingrud interviewed by Georgina Bruce
Blood Spectrum: Film Reviews by Gary Couzens
The Andromeda Strain • Def-Con 4 • I Am Mother • The Rain • Bloom • Don't Look Now • The Sender • Demonlover • Who? • November • Donbass • American Horror Project Volume 2 • When A Stranger Calls • Double Face • The Woman in the Window • The Perfection • Mega Time Squad • Beyond the Sky • Escape Room • Killer Party • Heretiks
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