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$2.99 eBook Sale: October 2021

It’s officially October and that means it’s time for tricks, treats, and SALES! Check out all the chilling and thrilling ebooks you can snag for $2.99 here.

Poster Placeholder of - 33The Family Plot by Cherie Priest

Music City Salvage is owned and operated by Chuck Dutton: master stripper of doomed historic properties and expert seller of all things old and crusty. Business is lean and times are tight, so he’s thrilled when the aged and esteemed Augusta Withrow appears in his office. She has a massive family estate to unload—lock, stock, and barrel. For a check and a handshake, it’s all his. And it’s enough of a gold mine that he assigns his daughter Dahlia to personally oversee the project. Augusta Withrow left out a lot of things. It’s empty, but Dahlia and the crew quickly learn it is far from abandoned. There is still something in the Withrow mansion, something angry and lost, and this is its last chance to raise hell before the house is gone forever.

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Image Placeholder of - 76Psychomech by Brian Lumley

Richard Garrison, a Corporal in the British Military Police, loses his sight while trying to save the wife and child of millionaire industrialist Thomas Schroeder from a terrorist bomb. While Garrison is recovering from his injuries, Schroeder makes him an offer the young man cannot refuse-refuge at Schroeder’s luxurious mountain retreat and rehabilitation from the best doctors who can treat Garrison’s blindness and if not cure him, at least teach him a new way of life. But Thomas Schroeder has a secret. He is dying and determined not to lose his life. The doctors tell him his body cannot be saved. But about his mind? Garrison’s healthy young body would make an excellent replacement for Schroeder’s failing corpus.

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Place holder  of - 71The Doll Collection edited by Ellen Datlow

The Doll Collection is exactly what it sounds like: a treasured toy box of all-original dark stories about dolls of all types, including everything from puppets and poppets to mannequins and baby dolls. Featuring everything from life-sized clockwork dolls to all-too-human Betsy Wetsy-type baby dolls, these stories play into the true creepiness of the doll trope, but avoid the clichés that often show up in stories of this type.

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Image Place holder  of - 73Wild Cards X: Double Solitaire edited by George R. R. Martin, written by Melinda M. Snodgrass

Aboard his grandfather’s spaceship and fleeing the violent turmoil between jokers, aces, and nats that his vicious ambition spawned, Blaise is headed for a new conquest: the planet Takis. Dr. Tachyon is left behind… but he’s lost more than his only way of returning to his homeworld. Blaise has stolen his body, as well—leaving Tach trapped in the pregnant body of a teenage runaway.

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Dolls Aren’t Just For Children

The Doll Collection edited by Ellen Datlow
Written by Ellen Datlow

Dolls, perhaps more than any other object, demonstrate just how thin the line between love and fear, comfort and horror, can be. They are objects of love and sources of reassurance for children, coveted prizes for collectors, sources of terror and horror in numerous movies, television shows, books, and stories. Dolls fire our collective imagination, for better and—too often, for worse. From life-size dolls the same height as the little girls who carry them, to dolls whose long hair can “grow” even longer, to Barbie and her fashionable sisters, dolls do double duty as child’s play and the focus of adult art and adult fear.

The Doll Collection, Introduction

I’m a doll lover. I admit it. I collect whole dolls and parts of dolls: heads and arms and legs DatlowVoodooDolland torsos. Voodoo dolls (I used to go down to New Orleans every few years and each time would discover different styles); three-faced dolls, the kind whose faces change from sleeping to smiling to crying with a twist of a little gadget at the top of the head; kewpie dolls, the adorable creatures invented by Rose O’Neill; Japanese kokeshi dolls, made of wood with painted faces and bodies. A changeable Little Red Riding Hood/wolf/grandma doll given to me by a friend. A two headed Chernobyl kitty made for me by that same person, inspired by my account of the tour I took to the infamous nuclear accident site in Ukraine, and given to me by my class, the summer I taught Clarion West. The next time I taught, several years later, my students each made me a doll on a stick modeled after themselves. My love of dolls is no secret. Anyone who enters my apartment can witness that interest.

Why do I collect weird dolls? No idea. I’ve recently found photographs of me as a young child with a doll I was given by my grandparents. She’s pretty normal. I remember owning a knock off of the popular “Ginny” doll of the 1950s. Again, nothing weird about her. My mom wouldn’t buy me or my sister Barbie dolls—she thought they were too mature for kids, but also they and their clothing were expensive.

So I never owned a Barbie doll—until an enterprising friend created a three-faced Barbie DatlowVampireBarbiefor me: Piranha Barbie (with a mouth made of a wicked-looking sea shell), Vampire Barbie (a couple of very pointy canine teeth) , and the dog-faced girl (not adapted from a Barbie, but instead a baby doll). I’ve also been privileged to visit Japan’s largest private collection of Barbie Dolls, owned by a Tokyo businessman.

I personally am not creeped-out by most dolls (except perhaps the very disturbing, lifelike dolls created by Japanese artist Katan Amano), but I know many people who are. Why might that be? Dolls often reside in “the uncanny valley” a phrase that refers to a theory developed by robotics professor Masahiro Mori in 1970: it posits that objects with features that are human-like, that look and move almost, but not quite, like actual human beings, elicit visceral feelings of revulsion in many people. The “valley” in question refers to the change in our comfort with these objects—our comfort level increases as the objects look more human, until, suddenly, they look simultaneously too human and not quite human enough, and our comfort level drops off sharply, only to rise again on the other side of the valley when something appears and moves exactly like a human being.

Pre-order The Doll Collection today:
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Books-a-Million | iBooks | Indiebound | Powell’s

Follow Ellen on Twitter at @EllenDatlow, on Facebook, or visit her website.

On the Road: Tor/Forge Author Events in March

The Glass Arrow by Kristen SimmonsOf Irish Blood by Mary Pat KellyFinn Fancy Necromancy

Tor/Forge authors are on the road in March! Once a month, we’re collecting info about all of our upcoming author events. Check and see who’ll be coming to a city near you:

Ellen Datlow, The Doll Collection

Tuesday, March 10
Morbid Anatomy Museum
Books provided by WORD Bookstore.
Brooklyn, NY
7:00 PM

Monday, March 16
Jean Cocteau Cinema
Santa Fe, NM
6:30 PM

Saturday, March 21
Functionally Literate
Lowndes Shakespeare Center
Also with Pat Rushin and Teege Braune.
Orlando, FL
7:00 PM

James Grady, Last Days of the Condor

Wednesday, March 11
Barnes & Noble at The Catholic University of America
Washington, DC
6:00 PM

Randy Henderson, Finn Fancy Necromancy

Tuesday, March 3
Third Place Books
Lake Forest Park, WA
7:00 PM

Thursday, March 5
Village Books
Bellingham, WA
7:00 PM

Leanna Renee Hieber, The Eterna Files

Tuesday, March 3
Barnes & Noble
West Chester, OH
7:00 PM

Mary Pat Kelly, Of Irish Blood

Friday, March 6
Hackney’s On Lake
Songs and Stories with Catherine O’Connell
Glenview, IL
12:00 PM

Orland Park Public Library
Irish Tales and Tunes with Catherine O’Connell
Orland Park, IL
7:00 PM

Saturday, March 7
Irish American Heritage Center
Songs and Stories with Catherine O’Connell
Chicago, IL
1:00 PM

Monday, March 9
Evergreen Park Public Library
Evergreen Park, IL
6:30 PM

Wednesday, March 11
Anderson’s Bookshop
Naperville, IL
7:00 PM

Hank Phillippi Ryan, Truth Be Told

Thursday, March 26
West Boynton Branch Library
Boynton Beach, FL
2:00 PM

Kristen Simmons, The Glass Arrow

Saturday, March 7
NoVa Teen Book Festival
Washington-Lee High School
Books provided by One More Page Books.
Arlington, VA
2:00 PM

Wednesday, March 18
Inkwood Books
Tampa, FL
7:00 PM

Thursday, March 26
Joseph-Beth Booksellers
Crestview Hills, KY
7:00 PM

Jo Walton, The Just City

Monday, March 16
57th Street Books
Chicago, IL
6:30 PM

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Starred Review: The Doll Collection edited by Ellen Datlow

The Doll Collection edited by Ellen Datlow“Dolls, puppets, and other human simulacra are objects of fear and wonder in this eclectic anthology of 17 excellent original stories that Datlow (Nightmare Carnival) selected for their ability to “mine the uncanniness of dolls for all its worth.””

Ellen Datlow’s The Doll Collection got a starred review in Publishers Weekly!

Here’s the full review, from the February 2 issue:

starred-review-gif Dolls, puppets, and other human simulacra are objects of fear and wonder in this eclectic anthology of 17 excellent original stories that Datlow (Nightmare Carnival) selected for their ability to “mine the uncanniness of dolls for all its worth.” In Stephen Gallagher’s “Heroes and Villains,” the creepy candor with which a ventriloquist’s dummy tells truths about its deceased former owner suggests that it’s not the current owner who is speaking through it. Joyce Carol Oates’s “The Doll-Master” is narrated by the title character, who gradually reveals the ghoulish nature of his “doll” collection. Datlow’s ban on clichéd “evil doll” stories encouraged contributors to explore refreshingly original ideas, including the doll hospital in Veronica Schanoes’s “The Permanent Collection,” which nods to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s classic “The Sandman” while depicting a Mengele-like surgeon named Coppelius, and the strange folk tradition of Jeffrey Ford’s “The Word Doll,” in which children are compelled to escape into the world of an imaginary playmate. Accompanying photos of dolls and their parts intensify the eeriness of these works, which easily transcend their familiar theme.

The Doll Collection will be published on March 10.

Pre-order The Doll Collection today: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Books A Million | iBooks | IndieBound | Powell’s

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Book Trailer: The Doll Collection

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The Doll Collection edited by Ellen Datlow

The Doll Collection is exactly what it sounds like: a treasured toy box of all-original dark stories about dolls of all types, including everything from puppets and poppets to mannequins and baby dolls. Featuring everything from life-sized clockwork dolls to all-too-human Betsy Wetsy-type baby dolls, these stories play into the true creepiness of the doll trope, but avoid the clichés that often show up in stories of this type.

Master anthologist Ellen Datlow has assembled a list of beautiful and terrifying stories from bestselling and critically acclaimed authors such as Joyce Carol Oates, Seanan McGuire, Carrie Vaughn, Pat Cadigan, Tim Lebbon, Richard Kadrey, Genevieve Valentine, and Jeffrey Ford. The collection is illustrated with photographs of dolls taken by Datlow and other devoted doll collectors from the science fiction and fantasy field. The result is a star-studded collection exploring one of the most primal fears of readers of dark fiction everywhere, and one that every reader will want to add to their own collection.

The Doll Collection publishes on March 10th.

Pre-order The Doll Collection today: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Books A Million | iBooks | IndieBound | Powell’s

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