Stories From the Plague Years

“Crammed with tales that beguile you with lyrical prose, seductive imagery, and spot-on characters that steal your breath with unblinking terror.”

F. Paul Wilson,

New York Times
bestselling author of
Ground Zero

“Michael Marano is a writer’s writer, and
Stories from the Plague Years
is a haunting tour of Marano’s fierce imagination. This collection is the perfect combination of lush writing, memorable characters and stories served raw.”

Tananarive Due, American Book-Award winning author of
Blood Colony
,
The Living Blood
, and
My Soul to Keep

“Few horror authors are better equipped to write about madness than Marano. With an expansive vocabulary, a tenacious commitment to poetic prose, and a willingness to follow whatever discursive paths his whim takes, Marano is an acquired taste—but without doubt possessed of a unique talent. . . . when they hit, they hit big: ‘Burden,’ about the ghosts of an AIDS-ravaged gay community, possesses an unusual power, and ‘Little Round Head,’ about a feral child raised by subterranean beasts, is nothing short of a horror classic.”

Daniel Kraus,
Booklist

“
Stories from the Plague Years
is ideal for fans of the kind of horror that gets under your skin and picks away at your brain, for anyone who seeks words of wisdom from an old (and I use that term affectionately) punk who’s seen an awful lot of shit go down in his day and lived to tell about it. Marano has a captivating prose style; I enjoyed the opportunity to see his style evolve and wonder where it will go next.”

Theresa DeLucci,
Tor.com

“[Marano’s] evocative, unique voice gives us nine terrifying yet tender tales; bridging the gap between a time when our world collided with evil and sickness, to the present—filled with the lasting scars we all wear . . . and can still touch . . .
if we dare.
Stories from the Plague Years
is written with a voice wholly unique and powerful. . . . These stories . . . have a depth rarely found in fiction. Marano complements this ability with a terrifying realization . . . we are all survivors of
The Plague Years
. . . Marano . . . leaves many of his peers in the dust. . . .”

Ben Eads,
Shroud Magazine

“The images of disdainful or disinterested parents are the true horrors of this story, and Marano captures their apathy and the blasé of their lives quite well. They are characters that could easily fit in the world of a Bret Easton Ellis novel. The vengeful child-spirits, who have returned to exact revenge for their deaths, are the sympathetic characters of this story, and while we know that they returned to commit horrors of their own, we can’t help but be rooting for them, for cosmic justice to right the wrongs done to them. . . . I’m interested to see where his writing goes in the future. . . .”

Paul J. Comeau,
VerbicideMagazine.com

“Award-winning dark fantasy author and frequent
Cemetery Dance
contributor Michael Marano compiles seven shorts and two novellas for this collection of abstract stories exploring disjointed minds. Explore the delusional brain of a serial killer in ‘Displacement’ or examine how illness erodes sanity (‘Winter Requiem’). An . . . intriguing series of mindfucks.”

Jessa Sobczuk,
Rue Morgue Magazine

ChiZine Publications

Stories from the Plague Years
© 2011, 2012 by Michael Marano
Introduction © 2011, 2012 by John Shirley
Interior artwork © 2011, 2012 by Gabrielle Faust
Cover artwork © 2012 by Erik Mohr
Author photo © 2012 by RiN Waigand
Interior designs © 2012 by Danny Evarts

Originally published as a limited edition hardback by Cemetery Dance Publications.

All rights reserved.

Published by ChiZine Publications

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

EPub Edition DECEMBER 2012 ISBN: 978-1-92746-931-6

All rights reserved under all applicable International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen.

No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS
Toronto, Canada
www.chizinepub.com
[email protected]

Edited by Stephen Mitchell
Copyedited and proofread by Kate Moore

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.

For my Nanitchka, and for Bill . . .

“Laura, illustre per le proprie virtù, e lungamente celebrata ne’ miei versi, apparve la prima volta agli occhi miei, nel primo tempo della mia giovanezza, l’anno del Signore 1327, il giorno sesto di aprile, nell’ora mattutina, nella chiesa di Santa Chiara in Avignone; e in quella stessa città, nello stesso mese di aprile, nello stesso giorno, nell’ora medesima, l’anno 1348, quella luce fu tolta dal mondo, essendo io allora in Verona, ignaro ahimè! della mia sciagura.”

—note scribbled by Petrarch in a copy of Virgil

This is an age of sound bites, of the Internet, of words flickering by on Twitter, of headlines scrolling by under talking heads; of videogames, YouTube, and the little chat-room boxes in which people hopelessly try to express themselves with something more than claustrophobic superficiality. This is not the age of long thoughts.

Michael Marano may be close to finding a bridge that could span the static-crackling void between the age of literature and the age of the Internet. But if he is indeed trying to build that bridge—he’s doing the forbidden. It’s not really allowed.

It’s not allowed, now, especially in writing that is rooted in genre, to have long thoughts, to explore visual descriptions with any depth. Basically what many people do now—sometimes some quite talented writers do this—is they make up their books (and films) out of Legos, out of pre-fab blocks and connectors, pre-existing tropes and premises and images, bits of their favourite movies and old books, and they click them together in “fresh” ways, form them into “new” shapes. I just saw an enjoyable, high-quality animated movie based on a book by a (very good) respected writer, which did just that. I had a good time watching that picture but, despite its pleasing gothiness, let’s not pretend the writer and filmmaker were reaching for truly original imagery. I see the same in urban fantasy novels—perhaps in works of my own! And Lord knows that’s what the great spreading red puddle of the vampire genre is about—parasitism, ironically, of earlier writers.