Introducing THE HOUSE OF ILLUSIONISTS: AND OTHER STORIES by Vanessa Fogg
“The House of Illusionists is a treasure box for anyone who loves exquisitely crafted speculative fiction. Every story spins its own kind of quiet, lustrous magic, and in every story, in every character, Fogg finds a twist, a turn, a chink, a crack, a different point of view. One of the things I love most about Fogg’s stories is that she has a singular ability to portray love in all its messy, complex, everyday glory, always finding beauty in the darkness, and the darkness in what’s beautiful.”— Maria Haskins, editor, reviewer, and author of Wolves & Girls
Interstellar Flight Press is delighted to announce the publication of THE HOUSE OF ILLUSIONISTS by Vanessa Fogg. Now available for pre-order!
A sea-witch calls to souls from the deep. In modern suburbia, a middle-aged woman fights to keep her daughter from the clutches of a Faerie Queen. . . and finds herself confronting her own past and deepest desires. Sinister clowns run a candy shop on an idyllic resort island. A pair of neuroscientists fall in love amidst their quest to map the human mind. A woman is haunted by a starving ghost, and professors of magic do their best to keep students safe during a time of terrible war. In her debut collection, Vanessa Fogg spins fantastical tales set in worlds both close and distant from our own, exploring relationships, love, passion, and connection across space and time.
Stories include “Wild Ones,” “Traces of Us,” “Sweetest,” “Taiya,” “The Wave,” “The Young God,” “The Message,” “The Things That We Will Never Say,” “The Breaking,” “All the Souls like Candle Flames,” “Of Milk and Blood,” “Between Sea and Shore,” “Wings,” “Fanfiction for a Grimdark Universe,” “Once on a Midsummer’s Night,” “An Address to the Newest Disciples of the Lost Words,” and “The House of Illusionists.”
“Fogg’s gorgeous language and fantastical worlds are a means of exploring the human heart. Each story in this collection is masterfully done, and the whole is absolutely stunning!” — A.C. Wise, author of Out of the Drowning DeepAbout the Author
Vanessa Fogg dreams of selkies, dragons, and gritty cyberpunk futures from her home in western Michigan. She spent years as a research scientist in molecular cell biology and now works as a freelance medical/science writer and editor. Her fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Podcastle, GigaNotoSaurus, The Deadlands, Neil Clarke’s The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Vol 4, and more. For a complete bibliography, visit her website at vanessafogg.com.
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“In The House of Illusionists, author Vanessa Fogg guides us through black lakes of despair, starving cities, and fanfiction futures, breaking barriers in a sweeping, otherworldly collection that speaks to the heart of humanity. This book squeezed every emotion out of me. Possibly my favourite read of the year. Transcendent and timely.” — Lee Murray, five-time Bram Stoker Award®-winning author of Grotesque: Monster Stories[image error]
Introducing THE HOUSE OF ILLUSIONISTS: AND OTHER STORIES by Vanessa Fogg was originally published in Interstellar Flight Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
