Les Femmes Grotesques Victoria Dalpe 9781955904230

In each of these stories, the reader is lured into a sinister shadow space, one both familiar and uncanny.

Life is strange, beautiful, and terrible in the world of Victoria Dalpe's debut short story collection. Her characters run the gamut from nosy neighbors to boomtown prostitutes, sentient moss to ghouls with a taste for artist's flesh. The stories contain chance encounters with truck stop mystics, haunted reality show renovations, and cat people roaming the western plains. In Dalpe's writing, horror mixes with humor, and the ordinary with the macabre. Les Femmes Grotesques is a unique and lush reading experience. Tragic and transformative-an unabashed exploration of the dark feminine.

Victoria Dalpe is an artist and writer based out of Providence, RI. Her dark short fiction has appeared in over thirty anthologies and her first novel, Parasite Life came out in 2018 through ChiZIne Publications and will be re-released in 2023 through Nightscape Press. She is a member of the HWA and the New England Horror Writers. Her short story collection Les Femmes Grotesques will be out in fall 2022 with CLASH Books. Victoria also co-edited the Necronomicon 2019 Memento Book with Justin Steele.

"Dalpe's horror stories are equal parts intriguing, compelling, and appropriately macabre. Les Femmes Grotesques tidily secures Dalpe her position as an author to watch."

-Monica S. Kuebler, Rue Morgue

"Anne Rice for the post-Twilight age."

-Gemma Files, Shirley Jackson and Sunburst Award-winning author of Experimental Film

"Hungry horror fans take note: like a box of poisoned petit fours, Dalpe's collection delights and sickens with every bite."

-Molly Tanzer, author of Creatures of Will and Temper

"The sharp, pointedly-observed, disquieting stories in Les Femmes Grotesques live in our modern in-between spaces. After reading them, they'll take root and tendril within your own in-between spaces. There's nothing you can do about it."

-Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Pallbearers Club

"Les Femmes Grotesques is mystical, magical, and fey in the more savage sense of the word. Be it industrial-strength urban legends or cautionary occult tales, Dalpe tightly winds fresh dark skeins of weirdness around old school horror."

-Laird Barron, author of Swift to Chase

"Women are indeed grotesque in Victoria Dalpe's astonishing debut collection, Les Femmes Grotesques-and they are beautiful, monstrous, strong. Equally beautiful is Dalpe's lush writing, leading her protagonists through transmutations as spectacular as the strange and beguiling worlds they move through. From the tragic to the triumphant, Les Femmes Grotesques is a dark and dazzling vision that may very well change you, too."

-Livia Llewellyn, author of Furnace

"Each of the stories in this intriguing collection begins with seemingly familiar landscapes and characters, but things aren't what they seem. Dalpe's lyrical writing carries us through twists and turns that shift our assumptions of who the monsters and victims are on the journey to wonderful, unexpected endings."

-Linda D. Addison, award-winning author, HWA Lifetime Achievement Award recipient and SFPA Grand Master

"Victoria Dalpe's Les Femmes Grotesques is a fearsome work to behold. These dark and sensuous tales are filled with rich prose, intriguing characters and settings right out of your most gorgeous nightmares. This is an unforgettable collection you don't want to miss."

-Gwendolyn Kiste, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Rust Maidens and Reluctant Immortal

"Victoria Dalpe's Les Femmes Grotesques is ferocious fun, a witty and bloody mixtape of folk magic and cosmic hazards set against a backdrop of modern decay."

-Nadia Bulkin, author of She Said Destroy

Victoria Dalpe's characters in Les Femmes Grotesques were living real lives long before being disrupted by the horrors she's dreamed up. Each is painted with prose that belies the dark oil flowing beneath their daily strifes, threatening to bubble up and consume even the towns and cities that surround them. These are not safe stories. A surprising and recommended short fiction collection.

-Simon Strantzas, author of Nothing is Everything

"The modern gothic tales in Victoria Dalpe's Les Femmes Grotesques are steeped in shadow and ruin, her outsider protagonists reaching for a connection forever out of reach. These are old-fashioned scares elevated through deep explorations of character."

-Steve Rasnic Tem, author of Figures Unseen (Valancourt Books)

"Whether you're exploring the shadows beneath an impromptu loft apartment, attending a very unlikely support group, or venturing to an alternative take on The Island of Dr. Moreau, Victoria Dalpe's stories will take you down the rabbit hole. Follow them. You never know where you'll end up, but you'll also never regret the trip."

-Orrin Grey, author of How to See Ghosts & Other Figments