Glitter & Mayhem

A party in a science fiction anthology? Apex Books has that! Step behind the velvet rope of these fabulous science fiction and fantasy stories of roller rinks, nightclubs, glam aliens, party monsters, drugs, sex, glitter, and debauchery. Dance through nightclubs, roller derby with cryptids and aliens, be seduced by otherworldly creatures, and ingest cocktails that will alter your existence forever. Join glittery authors Christopher Barzak (One for Sorrow) and Daryl Gregory (Pandemonium) on the dance floor, drink cocktails with Maria Dahvana Headley (Queen of Kings: A Novel of Cleopatra, the Vampire) and Tim Pratt (Marla Mason series), and skate with Seanan McGuire (InCryptid series), Diana Rowland (Kara Gillian series), and Maurice Broaddus (The Knights of Breton Court series). The fantastic Amber Benson gets the party started with her floor-rattling introduction (Calliope Reaper-Jones series). We’re waiting. Table of Contents Introduction by Amber Benson "Sister Twelve: Confessions of a Party Monster" by Christopher Barzak (Read for free at Apex Magazine!) "Apex Jump" by David J. Schwartz "With Her Hundred Miles to Hell" by Kat Howard "Star Dancer" by Jennifer Pelland "Of Selkies, Disco Balls, and Anna Plane" by Cat Rambo "Sooner Than Gold" by Cory Skerry "Subterraneans" by William Shunn & Laura Chavoen "The Minotaur Girls" by Tansy Rayner Roberts "Unable to Reach You" by Alan DeNiro "Such & Such Said to So & So" by Maria Dahvana Headley "Revels in the Land of Ice" by Tim Pratt "Bess, the Landlord’s Daughter, Goes for Drinks with the Green Girl" by Sofia Samatar "Blood and Sequins" by Diana Rowland "Two-Minute Warning" by Vylar Kaftan "Inside Hides the Monster" by Damien Angelica Walters (formerly known as Damien Walters Grintalis) "Bad Dream Girl" by Seanan McGuire "A Hollow Play" by Amal El-Mohtar  "Just Another Future Song" by Daryl Gregory "The Electric Spanking of the War Babies" by Maurice Broaddus & Kyle S. Johnson "All That Fairy Tale Crap" by Rachel Swirsky   About the Editors John Klima previously worked at Asimov's, Analog, and Tor Books before returning to school to earn his master's in Library and Information Science. He now works full time as the assistant director of a large public library. When he is not conquering the world of indexing, John edits and publishes the Hugo Award-winning genre zine Electric Velocipede. The magazine is also a four-time nominee for the World Fantasy Award. In 2007 Klima edited an anthology of science fiction and fantasy stories based on spelling-bee winning words called Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories. In 2011 Klima edited Happily Ever After, a reprint anthology of fairytale retellings. He and his family live in the Midwest. Lynne M. Thomas is the Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University. She’s probably best known as the co-editor of the Hugo Award-winning Chicks Dig Time Lords (2010) with Tara O’Shea, Whedonistas (2011) with Deborah Stanish, and the Hugo Award-nominated Chicks Dig Comics (2012) with Sigrid Ellis, all published by Mad Norwegian Press. Along with the Geek Girl Chronicles book series, Lynne is the Editor-in-Chief of the Hugo Award-nominated (2012 & 2013) Apex Magazine, an online professional prose and poetry magazine of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mash-ups of all three. She moderates the Hugo Award-winning SF Squeecast and contributes to the Verity! podcast. Lynne lives in DeKalb with her husband Michael, their daughter Caitlin, and a cat named Marie. Lynne is also a part-time Dancing Queen and grew up at roller rink in the wilds of Massachussetts. Michael Damian Thomas is the Hugo Award-nominated Managing Editor of Apex Magazine and a former Associate Editor at Mad Norwegian Press. He’s the co-editor of the Doctor Who essay anthology Queers Dig Time Lords with Sigrid Ellis. Michael lives in DeKalb with his wife Lynne, their daughter Caitlin, and a cat named Marie. He can solve most of the world’s problems with a cocktail, some music, and a pair of rollerskates. Excerpt From: "Sister Twelve: Confessions of a Party Monster" by Christopher Barzak It didn't take with me, the world and its rules, the things it expected of me. In the end, that’s the only reason why I find myself still here after all these countless years, and still I refuse to leave the scene. If you drop a beat, I’m on it. If I hear the slightest scratch, I’m ready to spin. If my shoes give out, if I split a sole or break a heel, it doesn’t matter. I kick them off and keep on dancing like the music and my body can’t be put on pause. We have a date — the music, the dance floor, and I. We’re going to move all night long if we have anything to say about it. If I gave a damn about the world, though, and what it wanted from me, I’d be sitting in a high–backed chair right now with my needlepoint in my lap, collecting a fine layer of dust as I concentrated on a difficult stitch. My father liked seeing us girls do things like that. “Nothing more beautiful than to see a young lady with her head bent over a hoop,” he used to say as he passed through our room, where my sisters would be sitting in that exact position. Then he’d notice me heaped in the corner chair, where I’d pulled my legs under me and sat hunched over the yellowed pages of a novel, and he would tsk. Seriously, he would tsk. Once, he told me, “You are quite fortunate to have been born last of all my daughters.” “Why is that?” I asked, placing my finger upon the sentence I was just then reading before looking up into his disappointed face, eyes blinking beneath their furry salt and pepper mantle. The gold crown on his head was tilted a little to the side, as if a beggar or a drunkard had just accosted him. “Because the youngest child always gets away with more than his or her older siblings,” was his answer. Then he turned to walk away. “Is that luck, Father,” I asked, “or is it just the intelligent observation of others going through life experiences before you have, and then analyzing the results of their conclusions, that leads to smarter decision–making?” “Tsk–tsk,” said my father. Looking over his shoulder, he shook his head as if I were a bitter pill his advisor forced him to swallow each night for the sake of his health. The youngest child is also supposedly the one everyone likes (except the older siblings, of course, because they tend to feel jealous of all the attention diverted to the baby). But whether any of that is true or just psychoanalytical bullshit doesn’t really matter. What matters is that, somehow, that psychoanalytical bullshit sometimes maps on to your life in a real way; and at those times, if you’re a person who’s able to be honest with yourself, you have to sit around and think, Well, okay, maybe I should pay attention to what this is telling me? In my case, yes, almost everyone liked me, except for my sisters, who I always felt either hated or thought little of me, because of both my prolonged innocence and also because of the way I often stupidly pointed out the flaws in their thinking without realizing how embarrassing that might be for them. Really, my pointing out their flaws was a symptom of my innocence — back then I thought it was a good thing to be honest with people, no matter what — but that explanation doesn’t excuse the hurt I must have caused them. In the end, what matters is that I too often told the truth as if it were as ordinary as the air we breathe, and because of that I could sometimes make my sisters feel like the lowest creatures in existence. “I told you so.” Those were the words I often found myself using with my sisters in the year after my brother–in–law, the soldier who I’m sure has gone on by now to be king in place of my father, discovered our secret. “I told you so, I told you so,” I would tell my sisters in the eleven months that passed during the year after that man brought a halt to our dancing. I said this so often because I so often realized things that my sisters never noticed, and they always made me feel like a stupid little girl when I said things like, “Shouldn’t we wait to leave until we hear the guard snoring?” or “Shouldn’t we maybe tie him to his chair anyway, just in case he’s fooling? That way, he can’t follow us down into the clubs.” They laughed at me, my sisters. They said, “Oh child, you are always so afraid.” But I wasn’t afraid. I was never afraid. I was just observant and cautious. I knew that soldier had something on us, I just didn’t know what. Turns out, he had a cloak that could make him invisible, and he had some wisdom from an old crone he’d met in the woods on his way to our castle to solve the secret of our nightly disappearances for our father. The wisdom the old crone gave him was this: Don’t drink the cup of wine they’ll give you at the end of the night, but make them think that you did. It was good advice, really. Old crones know a lot. They’ve seen shit go down that most young people only hear about in songs and movies. The wine that we gave to our nightly guards, to our would– be saviors and suitors, was always drugged. It put them dead asleep within minutes of sipping it twice, and while they were nodding off in the corner, their minds growing black as a bog, my sisters and I — well, the twelve of us would go out dancing.