What exactly is the difference between a love letter and a suicide note? Is there really any difference at all? These might be the questions posed by Dear Sweet Filthy World, Caitlin R. Kiernan's collection of twenty-nine stories. Treading the grim places where desire and destruction, longing and horror intersect, the author rises once again to meet the high expectations she set with such celebrated collections as Tales of Pain and Wonder, To Charles Fort, With Love, and the World Fantasy Award-winning The Ape's Wife and Other Stories.

In these pages you'll meet a dragon's lover, a drowned vampire cursed always to ride the tides, a wardrobe that grants wishes, and a lunatic artist's marriage of the Black Dahlia and the Beast of G©♭vaudan. You'll visit a ruined post-industrial Faerie, travel back to tropical Paleozoic seas and ahead to the far-flung future, and you'll meet a desperate writer forced to sell her memories for new ideas. Here are twenty-eight tales of apocalypse and rebirth, of miraculous transformation and utter annihilation. Here is the place where professing your undying devotion might be precisely the same thing as signing your own death warrant or worse. The stories in Dear Sweet Filthy World were first published in the subscription-only Sirenia Digest, run by Caitlin for her most devoted readers.

CONTENTS

• Werewolf Smile
• Vicaria Draconis
• Paleozoic Annunciation
• Charcloth, Firesteel, and Flint
• Shipwrecks Above
• The Dissevered Heart
• Exuvium
• Drawing from Life
• The Eighth Veil
• Apsinthion (ἀψίνθιον)
• Three Months, Three Scenes, With Snow
• Workprint
• Tempest Witch
• Fairy Tale of the Maritime
• —30—
• The Carnival is Dead and Gone
• Scylla for Dummies
• Figurehead
• Down to Gehenna
• The Granting Cabinet
• Evensong
• Latitude 41°21’45.89”N, Longitude 71°29’0.62”W
• Another Tale of Two Cities
• Blast the Human Flower
• Camuffare
• Here Is No Why
• Hauplatte/Gegenplatte
• Sanderlings
• Interstate Love Song (Murder Ballad No. 8)