This collection of stories is not your happy interspecies romps found in a Dr. Tingle novel with a nice hard life affirming morale lesson pounded into you at the end. So, Keep your creature romances confined to your Dungeons & Dragons games because in real life they can only end horribly.

I've been dragging my feet on this for two months and I've decided to throw in the towel. I can't bring myself to read any more solid walls of text.

"Great swaths of the rocky seafloor rising up to meet her beneath a carpet of calcified cyanobacteria and the branching lobes and solitary cups of archaeocyath sponges.There are knotted clusters formed by problematic chancellorids, an enigma to taxonomists, who must place all organisms in this box or that box; the chancellorids may be only sponges, or they may be slug like halkieriids protected inside their skins of star shaped, calcareous sclerites."

I wanted to like this so much, but I just can't get into it.

*Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the e-ARC, but since I did not finish, I do not feel it's fair for me to rate or review at this time.*

Kiernan assembled this collection of her stories from the Sirenia Digest, her personal electronic periodical filled with stories and short pieces she writes for her adoring, spendthrift fans. I subscribed well into its run so I read most of these stories fresh. Her offerings included dark contemporary fantasy, literate lesbian erotica, psychological horror, and futuristic noir. I am a little squeamish but I was only bothered by the language and the subject matter in the bleak sci-fi stories, perhaps because I have more hope for the future. Otherwise, I recommend them for anyone who wants to see wonders and depravity described in beautiful prose. ( )

What can I tell you about the Dear Sweet Filthy World I have returned from?

I could tell you it is a land bordered by dangerous women prowling the interstates of America; one has a head stuffed with visions of conflagrations at Dresden and Hiroshima and Peshtigo and Chicago; two are incestuous twins in a roving church of murder and sex, orgasmic rites with knives and pliers.
Should I tell you of the caged woman unsure if she was once a dragon?

Should I tell you of lovers found in the liminal lands between earth and sea, one a demon from the sky and one a creature of the Earth?

Should I tell you of the women who give themselves in orgasmic embrace to giant trilobites and Cthulhoid monsters and giant orchids and dragons, willing lambs to ecstatic slaughter?

Should I tell you that I saw Mr. Lovecraft’s shoggoths and heard howling werewolves? That I saw the savage art of the Black Dahlia murder?

Should I tell you of the names I heard whispered: Dickens and Shakespeare, Giger and the Campbells Joseph and Ramsey, Neko Case and Charles Fort, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Robert Frost, and Rob Bottin?

Should I tell you that in the abyss of this world’s seas are vampires and dryads?

Should I tell you of the cities of this world, a coal-blackened, fairyland London or something like a New York City where fairies and goblins trade amnesia for art?

Should I tell you of the woman filled with microscopic cities?

Should I tell you of a dildo disappearing into an invisible lover or of the artist cursed and bound by his model?

Should I tell you of all the women sacrificed in future carnivals and future forests and on seashores?

Should I tell you of woman wishing to be cocooned like an insect?

Should I tell you of the echo of this world’s sea in the blood of so many, of the terror and transformation it brings?

Should I tell you of the Hell of regret and guilt and its shadowy guards?

I could tell you of these things, but I would be telling you only about the bones of theme and imagery, the ligament marks of plot. You would be as close to understanding as a Victorian paleontologist and his chunky reconstruction of a T. Rex. He would not know the grace and the movements of the monster. You would not know the grace and movement and articulations of the Dirty Sweet Filthy World.

I could suggest that these fervent couplings with the Other, whether sterile mergings or consequential in birthing monsters to devour our future, these exchanges of bodily fluids, human with alien, are artesianal oozings from a dark and bitter and deep human well seeking racial extinction

I could suggest that the weaving streams of narrative, the fault lines where universes grind against each other in dislocations of setting and persona, where the boundaries between observer and participant crumble and mix, where stories end in sheer cliffs of insinuation or playfulness, are traces of Kiernan’s mind birthing this world under pressure of deadlines, jagged and raw orogenies not always covered by accretions of revisions and convention or eroded by editorial suggestion.

Should I tell you these things? Should I suggest these things?

I have told you these things. I do suggest these things.

But I cannot tell you if you should enter the Dear Sweet Filthy World.

It's a variegated land. I cannot tell you if you will find beauty or obscenity, verities of destruction and creation, or nacreous decadence. ( )

Full review to come! ( )