By Her Hand, She Draws You Down

By Douglas Smith

Aurora Award Finalist story from a multi-award winning author. Best New Horror selection.

*** Now an independent film ***

"Doug Smith is, quite simply, the finest short-story writer Canada has ever produced in the science fiction and fantasy genres, and he's also the most prolific. His stories are a treasure trove of riches that will touch your heart while making you think."
—Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo Award-winning author of Hominids and FlashForward

"A great storyteller with a gifted and individual voice."
—Charles de Lint

"One of Canada's most original writers of speculative fiction."
—Library Journal

DESCRIPTION:
Cath, a beautiful young sidewalk artist, is driven by a mysterious hunger that feeds from the portraits she draws of her victims. Joe loves Cath still, but as Cath’s hunger grows, so does Joe’s fear--fear that one day she may draw him down.

REVIEWS:
"A haunting variant on the vampire legend with an understated and brutal ending."
—Publishers Weekly

"Delightfully creepy."
—Booklist

"I was reminded of the tone of some of Harlan Ellison’s best work."
—The Fix

"...examines vampirism from an unusual and genuinely horrifying angle."
—SF Site Review

"...a title that rules. ...psychic vampirism, creepy street performers, the horrors of small coastal towns. And Smith took the story somewhere that surprised me. The twist is sustained."
—Jay Lake, Tangent Online

"Well done and with a nice twist."
—Fantasy Book Critic

"Haunting passages and scenes."
—Strange Horizons

"...a chilling, weird tale of an artist with a great hunger."
—The Haunted Weblog

"Familiar subjects...dealt with in an original form and with a final turn that will surprise you."
—Bibliopolis

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Doug is an award-winning author of speculative fiction, with over a million words of fiction sold and over a hundred short story sales to professional markets in thirty countries and two dozen languages.

He has published three short story collections: Chimerascope (ChiZine Publications, Canada, 2010), Impossibilia, (PS Publishing, UK, 2008), and just recently, La Danse des Esprits (Dreampress, France, 2011).

Doug has twice won Canada's Aurora Award for speculative fiction, and have been a finalist for the international John W. Campbell Award, the Canadian Broadcast Corporation's Bookies Award, and the juried Sunburst Award.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Douglas Smith
• Release date: Apr 2, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458015471

Douglas Smith

Douglas Smith is an award-winning historian and translator and the author of Rasputin and Former People, which was a bestseller in the U.K. His books have been translated into a dozen languages. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he has written for The New York Times and Wall Street Journal and has appeared in documentaries with the BBC, National Geographic, and Netflix. Before becoming a historian, he worked for the U.S. State Department in the Soviet Union and as a Russian affairs analyst for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. He lives with his family in Seattle.