Laird Barron

Livia Llewellyn

Death and pleasure. Freud's Todestrieb, his statement that "libido has the task of making the destroying instinct innocuous, and it fulfils the task by diverting that instinct to a great extent outwards....The instinct is then called the destructive instinct, the instinct for mastery, or the will to power." Few authors have spun stories of Thanatos and Eros as skillfully and powerfully as Livia Llewellyn. In his introduction to this volume, Laird Barron writes "Scant difference exists between exquisite pleasure and pain." An orphan girl with a mind for anthracite falls into the hands of a cult worshipping an entombed god. In the Pacific Northwest, evergreens lull prepubescent girls into their trunks to serve as wombs. A suburban housewife troubled by her present encounters the sixteen year-old girl she ached to touch in her dreams. These ten stories promise to indulge a reader's sensibilities, their fears and desires.

Tales of Love & Other Horrors

Engines of Desire

Bryan Alexander

Livia Llewellyn's Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors is a superb first collection. It's a dark delight to read, and introduces a major voice in horror fiction.

Engines offers a very diverse set of tales and voice. Llewellyn offers stories of post-apocalypse survival, futuristic space war, sexual longing, alien gods, hybrid machine/flesh monster machines, parallel worlds, mass murderers, mining, and trees that devour girls. No story is formally alike, either. "Engine of Desire", for example, is told in reverse chronological order. “Her Deepness” uses long, lush paragraphs to immerse us in a weird, alternate world, while "Horses" is almost telegraphic in its supremely hard-bitten despair. "Teslated Salihan Evergreen" purports to be a botanical reference book entry.

Two themes unite these otherwise disparate tales. First, all of these stories concern female desire. Protagonists are usually girls or women, and what they need determines each narrative, especially in the face of overwhelming opposition. Often these needs are sexual. For a significant number of stories motherhood is a key theme in various forms: conception, childbirth, mother-daughter relations, filicide. Llewellyn zeroes in on women and what they want and never lets go.

Second, Engines of Desire is deeply... sad, melancholic, somewhere between resigned and despairing. All of the stories end with intense (and often extensive) human suffering. Some end in defeat for the protagonists, while others enjoy success at terrible cost. Several stories are about heroism, but even those require non-heroic destruction. The tones of these tales matches this theme of devastation: elegaic, frustrated, resigned, satisfied, dystopian. "Dark" just begins to describe things.

Spoilery summaries ahead for each story:(view spoiler)[

"Horses" is a Cold War alternative history where atomic war breaks out. Our protagonist works in a missile silo and helps launch the attack (an awesome, erotic, murderous scene), then flees for a presumed shelter. Pregnant, she finds the shelter nightmarish, and then things get much worse. This is one of the most extreme and economically told post-nuclear stories I've ever seen, and one of the best in the collection.

"The Engine of Desire" begins by describing a housewife having committed some kind of crime, then connecting with a long-lost love. But then the narratives recedes in time by a decade to reveal what set this scene in motion. And then it leaps back again, and again. A fierce, sad story of the enormous power (and costs) of desire. It's a brilliant example of how to build a story out of chronological order, and repays rereading. Probably my favorite from the book.

"Take Your Daughters to Work" A daughter accompanies her parent to their workplace... where they are sacrificed to the Lovecraftian monstrosities that maintain civilization.

"Her Deepness" takes place in an alternate world where mining is the center of life. The heroine has an extraordinary ability to communicate with and even shape certain rocks. Her lover brings her into a plot to rescue a piece of ancient... something, and things get Lovecraftian. (Full story is online)

"The Four Hundred Thousand" A nightmarish future city is at war, and chooses select young women to give birth to thousands of semi-human children soldiers. Our heroine starts the tale proud of receiving this honor, then learns that things are even worse than they appear.

"Omphalos" concerns incest, with multiple generations of sex producing a fraught nuclear family. The daughter, our point of view character, struggles to survive, engaging with myth on several levels.

"At the Edge of Ellensburg" Most of this reads as very well written erotica, and concerns a college student obsessed with a visiting drug dealer. The student starts off with a strange encounter with what might be an alien artifact, struggles to win the attention of her very promiscuous and uncaring stud, then learns at cost about his violent and non-fantastic nature.

"Jetsam" Someone described this as about a kind of September 11th attack perpetrated by cosmic horror, and that's about right, although it misses the urban bureaucracy of the finale.

"Teslated Salishan Evergreen" and "Brimstone Oranges" are short-short stories that read like excerpts from unpublished stories. They are evocative and economical.
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If you are interested at all in horror fiction, or if you aren't, but appreciate well-crafted short fiction, go read this collection at once. Llewellyn is someone to watch, as she could well become one of the major dark fiction authors of our time.

Engines of Desire Tales of Love & Other Horrors

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