Scream Angel

By Douglas Smith

AURORA AWARD WINNER
Think of human emotion as a geography, with peaks of pleasure and valleys of pain. Imagine a drug that flips the valleys and makes them peaks, too. You react now to an event based not on the pleasure or pain that it brings, but solely on the intensity of the emotion created. Pain brings pleasure, grief gives joy, horror renders ecstasy.
Now give this drug to a soldier. Tell them to kill. Not in the historically acceptable murder of war, but in a systematic corporate strategy--of xenocide.
They will kill. And they will revel in it.
Welcome to the world of Scream.
Jason Trelayne is a Screamer, a soldier forced to take part in the destruction of entire races. But when Trelayne falls in love with a beautiful Scream Angel, an alien who produces the addictive drug, he sets off a chain of events that pits him and a small group of followers against an empire.

An award winning novelette of rebellion, love, and an unlikely hero.

REVIEWS

"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
"A great storyteller with a gifted and individual voice." --Charles de Lint
"One of Canada's most original writers of speculative fiction." --Library Journal
"A dark and powerful story with a first line that sets the tone for what is to come: 'They stopped beating Trelayne when they saw that he enjoyed it.' (A++)" --Fantasy Book Critic
"A visceral work. A true pearl of the fantastic literature. Breath-taking." --Café de Ontem
"...the book's most skillfully crafted story...quickly becomes one that holds the reader's attention until the very end." --SpecFicWorld
"...remind me of the reasons I love the author's writing: his characterization, attention to detail and recurring themes of love, faith and redemption." --SF Crowsnest Reviews
"The story has so many layers that I'm still sorting them out. And like an onion, I'm not sure if I'll ever find the final layer." --Tangent Online
"One of those rare ideas that seems at once so perfect and so natural that someone must have come up with it before; but if someone has, I haven't heard about it, and regardless Smith exploits the potential of the idea extraordinarily well here." --Strange Horizons

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 3, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458020291

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.

Reviews for Scream Angel

[krau0098 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is the first short story by Douglas Smith. It was an interesting one; there are some cool concepts in here but the story gets a bit ambigous at points. Only half of the download is the story, the other half consists short excepts from a number Smith's other short story works.Jason Trylayne has tried to escape his past. He was a Screamer, a soldier forced to take Scream. Scream makes all harsh emotions feel like estacy and allows the soldiers to committ terrible atrocities but not feel bad about it. Trylane has fled service after not being able to stand some of the atrocities he committed. He now runs a circus on an undesirable planet and harbors a number of orphans from the planets he had destroyed as a soldier. He is still addicted to Scream though and has an Angel who he is in love with to provide it for him. Now he has been found out and needs to decide what to do to protect his crazy little multi-species family.This is a very creative book. The idea of a drug that allows humanity to committ horrible acts and feel good about doing is disturbing and interesting.Trylane is a very interesting character. He is still addicted to Scream but is trying to atone for his past acts. In doing this he has amassed a number of strange entities from various planets and put them together in a circus. In a way he is both a hero for his work trying to save these few orphans and a villian for the previous acts he has committed on Scream.Trylane's relationship with the female angel is also both interesting and disturbing all at once. He seems to love her but he is also addicted to what her body produces. This is complicated by the fact that the female angel is part of a brood pair and has an angel mate of sorts. Parts of the story are a bit difficult to follow. There are a lot of characters introduced right off and I had some trouble keeping them straight. Parts of the story include flash backs that are a bit amibiguous making the story a bit hard to follow at points.Overall I enjoyed this story. It was very creative and brings up some thoughtful (and disturbing) questions. Fans of science fiction or odd speculative fiction should give this a read for the novelty it presents.