March 2011:
9781590213247• 214 pp • trade paper/ebook
Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors
Death and pleasure. Freud’s Todestrieb, his statement that ”libido has the task of making the destroying instinct innocuous, and it fulfils the task by diverting that instinct to a great extent outwards….The instinct is then called the destructive instinct, the instinct for mastery, or the will to power.” Few authors have spun stories of Thanatos and Eros as skillfully and powerfully as Livia Llewellyn. In his introduction to this volume, Laird Barron writes ”Scant difference exists between exquisite pleasure and pain.” An orphan girl with a mind for anthracite falls into the hands of a cult worshipping an entombed god. In the Pacific Northwest, evergreens lull prepubescent girls into their trunks to serve as wombs. A suburban housewife troubled by her present encounters the sixteen year-old girl she ached to touch in her dreams. These ten stories promise to indulge a reader’s sensibilities, their fears and desires.
Reviews
“These 10 powerful stories mark relative newcomer Llewellyn as a writer to watch in the genres of dark fantasy, horror, and erotica. Lush, discursive, elliptical writing weaves scenarios of women confronted with a horrible other, as in the title story, where a woman faces down a destructive childhood love, and in “At the Edge of Ellensburg,” where sex-charged attraction destroys a woman obsessed with a serial killer. Deeply disturbing imagery marks several stories: in “Omphalos,” original to the volume, a family vacation revolves around incest; infanticide underpins the dark fantasy story “Her Deepness”; and forced pregnancy and childbearing simmer into violence in “The Four Hundred Thousand.” Plot sometimes gets lost in the wordplay, and the promised emotional climax doesn’t always deliver, but readers ready for a challenge will gladly sink their teeth in.”
—Publishers Weekly