Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant (1850 – 1893) was a popular 19th-century French writer, considered one of the fathers of the modern short story and one of the form’s finest exponents. He delighted in clever plotting, and taking his cue from Balzac, he wrote comfortably in both the high-Realist and fantastic modes; many of his short stories (notably “Le Horla”) describe apparently supernatural phenomena. However, the supernatural in Maupassant is often implicitly a symptom of the protagonists’ troubled minds, as Maupassant was fascinated by the burgeoning discipline of psychiatry. In his later years he developed a constant desire for solitude, an obsession for self-preservation, and a fear of death and crazed paranoia of persecution, that came from the syphilis he had contracted in his early days. On January 2, in 1892, Maupassant tried to commit suicide by cutting his throat and was committed to a celebrated private asylum at Passy, in Paris, where he died on July 6, 1893.

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CLAIRE DEAN‘s stories have been published in Beta-Life (2014), Spindles (2015), Thought X, The Best British Short Stories, Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories About Birds, Still Shadows & Tall Trees and elsewhere. Marionettes and Into the Penny Arcade are published as chapbooks by Nightjar Press. She lives in Lancashire with her two young sons. She tweets at @claireddean and maintains her web presence at GATHERING SCRAPS.

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If we’re both going crazy, then we’ll go crazy together, right? Mistakes have been made. Um, I’m happy you’re home. Don’t take it so personally, okay? I don’t like most people. He’s in the vast majority. You act like you want me to be your friend and then you treat me like garbage.

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P.R. Dean is a writer from Brisbane, Australian. He has written plays, musicals, opera librettos, and the occasional short story.

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From her website:

When I was a child, my family moved quite often around villages in Buckinghamshire. Changing schools frequently and living surrounded by fields to play in meant that I lived a lot in my imagination. By the time we moved to Northampton I’d already written several plays and ‘novels’, largely inspired by Dr Who and The Man from Uncle. On leaving school, I got a ‘proper’ job, but continued to write. (more…)

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Stephen Dedman is the author of four novels, a non-fiction book and more than 100 short stories, plus reviews, role-playing games, stageplays, essays and editorials. Most of the fiction he’s written has been speculative, fantastic, or just plain weird, but he’s also written thrillers, erotica, and westerns. Sometimes all at the same time.

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Maria Deira grew up in the high desert of Eastern Oregon but now lives in the cozy gloom of the Willamette Valley. Her fiction has been published in A cappella Zoo, Fiction Southeast, Word Riot, GigaNotoSaurus, and Strange Horizons. She’s currently working on a novel.

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JOHN M. DEISINGER is a writer from Milwaukee who lives in Michigan. He blogs at JohnMDeisinger.com

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