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Apprehensions and Other Delusions
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro is best known for her suave, vampire-about-the-world Count Saint-Germain, but she is also an accomplished short fiction writer as well. Five Star is proud to present the best of her dark fantasy and horror fiction all in one collection. Featuring a brand-new short story, "Fugues," and an introduction by noted editor Patrick LoBrutto, Apprehensions and Other Delusions is a feast of psychological thrills and chills that readers will enjoy for many dark nights to come.
Story list: Become so Shining That We Cease to Be; Confessions of a Madman; Day 17; Echoes; Fruits of Love; Fugues; Giotto's Window; Inappropriate Laughter; Lapses; Novena; On St. Hubert's Thing; Renfield's Syndrome; Traditional Values.
344 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2003
2 people are currently reading
35 people want to read
About the author
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
259 books475 followersA professional writer for more than forty years, Yarbro has sold over eighty books, more than seventy works of short fiction, and more than three dozen essays, introductions, and reviews. She also composes serious music. Her first professional writing - in 1961-1962 - was as a playwright for a now long-defunct children's theater company. By the mid-60s she had switched to writing stories and hasn't stopped yet.
After leaving college in 1963 and until she became a full-time writer in 1970, she worked as a demographic cartographer, and still often drafts maps for her books, and occasionally for the books of other writers.
She has a large reference library with books on a wide range of subjects, everything from food and fashion to weapons and trade routes to religion and law. She is constantly adding to it as part of her on-going fascination with history and culture; she reads incessantly, searching for interesting people and places that might provide fodder for stories.
In 1997 the Transylvanian Society of Dracula bestowed a literary knighthood on Yarbro, and in 2003 the World Horror Association presented her with a Grand Master award. In 2006 the International Horror Guild enrolled her among their Living Legends, the first woman to be so honored; the Horror Writers Association gave her a Life Achievement Award in 2009. In 2014 she won a Life Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention.
A skeptical occultist for forty years, she has studied everything from alchemy to zoomancy, and in the late 1970s worked occasionally as a professional tarot card reader and palmist at the Magic Cellar in San Francisco.
She has two domestic accomplishments: she is a good cook and an experienced seamstress. The rest is catch-as-catch-can.
Divorced, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area - with two cats: the irrepressible Butterscotch and Crumpet, the Gang of Two. When not busy writing, she enjoys the symphony or opera.
Her Saint-Germain series is now the longest vampire series ever. The books range widely over time and place, and were not published in historical order. They are numbered in published order.
Known pseudonyms include Vanessa Pryor, Quinn Fawcett, T.C.F. Hopkins, Trystam Kith, Camille Gabor.
After leaving college in 1963 and until she became a full-time writer in 1970, she worked as a demographic cartographer, and still often drafts maps for her books, and occasionally for the books of other writers.
She has a large reference library with books on a wide range of subjects, everything from food and fashion to weapons and trade routes to religion and law. She is constantly adding to it as part of her on-going fascination with history and culture; she reads incessantly, searching for interesting people and places that might provide fodder for stories.
In 1997 the Transylvanian Society of Dracula bestowed a literary knighthood on Yarbro, and in 2003 the World Horror Association presented her with a Grand Master award. In 2006 the International Horror Guild enrolled her among their Living Legends, the first woman to be so honored; the Horror Writers Association gave her a Life Achievement Award in 2009. In 2014 she won a Life Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention.
A skeptical occultist for forty years, she has studied everything from alchemy to zoomancy, and in the late 1970s worked occasionally as a professional tarot card reader and palmist at the Magic Cellar in San Francisco.
She has two domestic accomplishments: she is a good cook and an experienced seamstress. The rest is catch-as-catch-can.
Divorced, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area - with two cats: the irrepressible Butterscotch and Crumpet, the Gang of Two. When not busy writing, she enjoys the symphony or opera.
Her Saint-Germain series is now the longest vampire series ever. The books range widely over time and place, and were not published in historical order. They are numbered in published order.
Known pseudonyms include Vanessa Pryor, Quinn Fawcett, T.C.F. Hopkins, Trystam Kith, Camille Gabor.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 22, 2024
2.5, rounded up. This had some neat ideas and elements, and a few stories I really liked, but wow. If you're a fan of the St. Germain books, be forewarned that this short fiction collection gets very, very, very dark. CW for sexual assault, torture, and war crimes.
August 8, 2018
And my final mop-up of Yarbro stories led me here, for two pieces. That's all I read and then back to Inter-Library Loan it goes!
"Confessions Of A Madman" is very strong story of "Brother Rat" who, after being determined a lunatic by the Inquisition who was investigating him for charges of heresy arising from his actions after the Black Plague destroyed his family and city, was thrown into the care of some monks (not after suffering some debilitating torture - the Inquisition has to keep up its standards, you know!). Now, years later, Brother Rat is dying and gives his last confession. This tale is very dark, with no "genre" element specifically but could certainly be considered a "conte cruel" as it turns on The Inquisition's ability, or lack thereof, to determine sanity or heresy, all while a poor man, in service of saving his loved ones, adopts a bit of wisdom that we all (hopefully) now consider common sense, but back then would have gotten all your teeth pulled out. No one expects the Religious Liberty Task Force!
Meanwhile, in "Novena", a nun strives to do good in a hopeless situation of eternal revolution and violence in some unnamed country. Man perpetrates horrors upon himself over and over and in the face of this, what good is faith? A dark, dark piece but well done all the same.
"Confessions Of A Madman" is very strong story of "Brother Rat" who, after being determined a lunatic by the Inquisition who was investigating him for charges of heresy arising from his actions after the Black Plague destroyed his family and city, was thrown into the care of some monks (not after suffering some debilitating torture - the Inquisition has to keep up its standards, you know!). Now, years later, Brother Rat is dying and gives his last confession. This tale is very dark, with no "genre" element specifically but could certainly be considered a "conte cruel" as it turns on The Inquisition's ability, or lack thereof, to determine sanity or heresy, all while a poor man, in service of saving his loved ones, adopts a bit of wisdom that we all (hopefully) now consider common sense, but back then would have gotten all your teeth pulled out. No one expects the Religious Liberty Task Force!
Meanwhile, in "Novena", a nun strives to do good in a hopeless situation of eternal revolution and violence in some unnamed country. Man perpetrates horrors upon himself over and over and in the face of this, what good is faith? A dark, dark piece but well done all the same.
December 30, 2014
I have yet to read a book by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro I did not like. Some I liked more than others... but the essential point is that I liked them all.
This collection is a bit of a departure from the St. Germain series and, if you have not read any of her other work, might surprise you by the breadth and depth of subjects and techniques. I'd like to say that it did not surprise me at all but I would be fibbing; I was delightfully surprised - again - with Yarbro's writing.
'Nuff said?
This collection is a bit of a departure from the St. Germain series and, if you have not read any of her other work, might surprise you by the breadth and depth of subjects and techniques. I'd like to say that it did not surprise me at all but I would be fibbing; I was delightfully surprised - again - with Yarbro's writing.
'Nuff said?
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews