Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart

Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart by GennaRose Nethercott is a collection of dark fairytales and fractured folklore exploring how our passions can save us—or go monstrously wrong.

From the author of the breakout novel Thistlefoot, these stories delve into the abomination that resides within us all. They capture the churning, clawing, ravenous yearning—the hunger to be held, seen, and known. And the terror, too: to be loved too well, not enough, or for long enough. To be laid bare before your sweetheart, to their horror. To be recognised as the monstrous thing you are.

Two teenage girls working at a sinister roadside attraction called the Eternal Staircase explore its secrets and their own doomed summer love. A zombie rooster plays detective in a missing persons case. A woman moves into a new house with her acclaimed artist boyfriend and finds her body slowly shifting into something specially constructed to accommodate his needs and whims. A pack of middle schoolers turn to the occult to rid themselves of a hated new classmate. And a pair of outcasts—a vampire and a goat woman—find solace in each other, even as the world's lack of understanding might bring about its own end.

In these lush, strange, beautifully written stories, GennaRose Nethercott explores human longing in all its diamond-dark facets to create a collection that will redefine what you see as a beast and make you beg to have your heart broken.

"Real magic, real delight, doled out generously in the shape of wistful, ferocious, this-world-but-better stories."—Kelly Link, author of White Cat, Black Dog

A Most Anticipated Book

One of the Washington Independent Review of Books' Best Books of the Year