The Mammoth Book of Angels & Demons
Read The Mammoth Book of Angels & Demons Online
Authors: Paula Guran
Tags: #Fiction, #Fantasy, #General
Paula Guran
is the senior editor of Prime Books and edits the annual Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror anthology series. Her previous anthologies include
Embraces; Best New Paranormal Romance; Zombies: The Recent Dead; Vampires: The Recent Undead; New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird
,
Halloween
,
Brave New Love, Witches: Wicked, Wild and Wonderful, Obsession, Extreme Zombies, Rock On: The Greatest Hits of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Ghosts: Recent Hauntings, Season of Wonder, Future Games
and
Weird Detectives: Recent Investigations
. She edited the Juno Books fantasy imprint for six years from its incarnation in small press and then for Simon & Schuster’s Pocket Books. Guran has been honoured with two Bram Stoker Awards and two World Fantasy Award nominations.
Recent Mammoth titles
The Mammoth Book of Weird News
The Mammoth Book of Antarctic Journeys
The Mammoth Book of Muhammad Ali
The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 9
The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies
The Mammoth Book of Lost Symbols
The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF
The Mammoth Book of Body Horror
The Mammoth Book of Steampunk
The Mammoth Book of New CSI
The Mammoth Book of Gangs
The Mammoth Book of SF Wars
The Mammoth Book of One-Liners
The Mammoth Book of Ghost Romance
The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25
The Mammoth Book of Jokes 2
The Mammoth Book of Horror 23
The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies
The Mammoth Book of Street Art
The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women
The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 11
The Mammoth Book of Irish Humour
The Mammoth Book of Unexplained Phenomena
The Mammoth Book of Futuristic Romance
The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 10
The Mammoth Book of Combat
The Mammoth Book of New Sudoku
The Mammoth Book of Quick and Dirty Erotica
The Mammoth Book of Dark Magic
The Mammoth Book of Zombies!
Constable & Robinson Ltd.
55–56 Russell Square
London WC1B 4HP
www.constablerobinson.com
First published in the UK by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2013
Copyright © Paula Guran, 2013 (unless otherwise stated)
The right of Paula Guran to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication
Data is available from the British Library
UK ISBN: 978-1-78033-799-9 (paperback)
UK ISBN: 978-1-78033-800-2 (ebook)
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
First published in the United States in 2013 by Running Press Book Publishers, A Member of the Perseus Books Group
All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written persmission from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Books published by Running Press are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail
[email protected]
.
US ISBN: 978-0-7624-4937-8
US Library of Congress Control Number: 2012944621
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Digit on the right indicates the number of this printing
Running Press Book Publishers
2300 Chestnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19103-4371
Visit us on the web!
www.runningpress.com
Printed and bound in the UK
Cover design and illustration,
JoeRoberts.co.uk
For John Shirley,
a man who knows both angels and demons.
Contents
Introduction: Things Are Complicated
Paula Guran
Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep
Suzy McKee Charnas
Frumpy Little Beat Girl
Peter Atkins
The Night of White Bhairab
Lucius Shepard
. . . And the Angel With Television Eyes
John Shirley
Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel
Peter S. Beagle
The Man Who Stole the Moon
Tanith Lee
Elegy for a Demon Lover
Sarah Monette
And the Angels Sing
Kate Wilhelm
Spirit Guides
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Demons, Your Body, and You
Genevieve Valentine
The Monsters of Heaven
Nathan Ballingrud
One Saturday Night, with Angel
Peter M. Ball
Lammas Night
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
Only Kids Are Afraid of the Dark
George R. R. Martin
Introduction: Things Are Complicated
Paula Guran
Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.
– Milan Kundera,
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
The combination of the angelic with the demonic is not a pairing of opposites: angels fall and demons sometimes seek redemption. Despite Western religion’s tendency to define the one as purely “good” and the other as completely “evil”, other religions, mythologies, traditions and folklore do not always hold fast to that dichotomy. Today, humankind’s fascination – even
belief
, as numerous polls substantiate – in these supernatural entities remains as strong or stronger than ever. Of course, modern ideations of what angels and demons are may be totally secular, indifferent to established religion, or vaguely based on past traditions and embroidered with more recent notions.
Storytellers, like the imaginative and talented ones assembled here, often provide us with new ways of looking at old concepts or devise entirely new visions of demons and angels. Their ideas are sometimes spurred by the concept of good versus evil, but they often find the gray area between the two even more inspiring.
This is an anthology of speculative fiction, not an exploration of angelology or demonology. The stories will delight and provoke without any editorializing, but the more I discovered about angels and demons, the more I felt inclined to include at least a very basic overview here and provide additional tidbits of trivia in story introductions. Please feel free to ignore my non-fictional tangents and simply enjoy these fine tales of fantasy and science fiction solely without editorial intrusion.
Popular interest in both angels and demons – and related beings that dwell between Heaven and Hell – borders on the obsessive.
Current (
Supernatural
,
Grimm
,
Once Upon a Time
) and recent television series (the British series
Demons
,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
,
Angel
,
Touched By an Angel
,
Charmed
, etc.) bring the angelic and the demonic right into one’s home. “Real” demons are encountered on paranormal investigation “reality” shows. CMT, a cable channel, presented
Angels Among Us
, with episodes featuring folks who felt they had been saved by an angel.
Demons are a mainstay of film (
Possession
,
The Rite
, M. Night Shyamalan’s
Devil
,
Paranormal Activity
,
To the Devil a Daughter
,
The Exorcist
,
Rosemary’s Baby
,
The Omen
,
The Witches of Eastwick
,
Hellraiser
,
Wishmaster
,
The Devil’s Advocate
,
The Ninth Gate
,
End of Days
,
Hellboy
, etc.), gaming (
Diablo
,
Doom
,
World of Warcraft
, others) and comics.
Angels have entertained us on the silver screen from the 1940s (
Here Comes Mr Jordan
,
It’s a Wonderful Life
,
Stairway to Heaven
,
Heaven Only Knows
, etc.) through the eighties and nineties (
Date With an Angel
,
Ghost
,
Angels in the Outfield
,
The Prophecy
,
City of Angels
,
What Dreams May Come
,
Michael
,
Wide Awake
,
Dogma
, etc.) and into the current century (
Down to Earth
,
Constantine
,
Legion
). Angels appear on television (
Touched by an Angel
,
Teen Angel
,
Fallen
,
Saving Grace
,
Highway to Heaven
, and more), fly through video games (
Sacred 2
,
Fallen Lords
,
Aion
,
Heaven
, others) and comics as well.
Writers from Dante to C. S. Lewis to Stephen King have dealt fictionally with the devil or demons. This figure of many guises – adversary, trickster, rebel, tempter – has appeared in countless tales. Demons, like vampires before them, have even become romantic heroes and heroines, seductive enemies, and fascinating supporting characters in bestselling fantasy series from Kim Harrison, Richelle Mead, Kelley Armstrong and others.
In modern entertainment, demons and devils may be portrayed as forces of great supernatural evil: incorporeal, or taking benign human visage, or hideous form. They can be fallen angels . . . or not. They may torture the damned in the fires of Hell or connive to lead humans to sell their souls. Demons might be cute little red tricksters with horns and pitchforks. Or they are God’s foes who Jesus will defeat in the Battle of Armageddon. Some see the Devil and his demons as a path to power and magic. For others, demons are just difficult monsters to be defeated in role-playing and video games.