Twice Dead Things

by A.A. Attanasio

Featuring mesmerizing explorations into the limitless realm of creativity, this volume offers bold, exciting tales that captivate, thrill, and give form to a universe that is both wonderful and terrifying.

Genres: Fantasy, Horror

320 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2006

About the author

I’m a novelist and student of the imagination living in Honolulu. Fantasies, visions, hallucinations or whatever we call those irrational powers that illuminate our inner life fascinate me. I’m particularly intrigued by the creative intelligence that scripts our dreams. And I love carrying this soulful energy outside my mind, into the one form that most precisely defines who we are: story.

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good collection of Attanasio's short fiction. The book is broken up into three sections; the first is a selection of eight traditional stories in a more traditional vein. Slain is a short moody piece without dialog about a witch. Ink from the New Moon is an epistolary alternate history in which Chinese explorers investigate North America. Maps for the Spiders is an sf story in which an artificial intelligence ponders death via poetry. Demons Hide Their Faces is a very good Lovecraftian ancient civilization horror story. The Dark One: A mythography wasn't to my taste; it's a summary of an epic of immortality without dialog with lapses into second person alchemy... or something. Zero's Twin looks at love among the mathematicians with no good conclusion. Atlantis Rose looks at love among the mystics with an existential conclusion. Death's Head Moon is a very long story told in a single-paragraph format and is aggressively Irish and very Nietzsche-does-Hawaii with too much German and Japanese, but I liked it very much save for that. The second section off the book is labeled "Some Experiments," and begins with a group of short anthropomorphic bird fables, followed by a section set in Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Several of the sections originally appeared in horror anthologies as far back as 1975, but an attempt here was made to tidy them all up into a single piece. I didn't think that worked too well, but I enjoyed the original individual parts. The last section is a very good novella the title of which also used on the book itself. It's a very odd and very well written story of a 54-year old unnamed yoga instructor who is off on a romantic getaway with her husband, Bernie. They are attacked by vampires and she becomes a member of the undead, both as a vampire and a ghost. It becomes somewhat convoluted, but she adopts a young woman cancer patient (also unnamed; in fact, she's referred to as the unnamed young woman) as a sort of sidekick and all manner of hijinks ensue. It's a very funny story! For example, a chapter break is titled "Melismatic Screams of the Undead," and the first line is: "Cremating my own body had chucked me into a dark, philosophical mood." It has a lot of twists and turns, but all ends well and leaves a smile behind. Attanasio's writing is very rich, lyrical in places, and quite enjoyable. This book is a good sampling of the wide range his work encompasses.