Conjunctions: 74 / Grendel’s Kin: The Monsters Issue

Spring 2020

TABLE OF CONTENTS

We Are All Breakable, Ready to Break
Lucas Southworth

The Moon Fairy
Del Samatar and Sofia Samatar

The Thickening
Brian Evenson

I, Poltergeist
Mary Kuryla

The Owl Count
Elizabeth Hand

First Love
Joanna Ruocco

We Are All Breakable, Ready to Break
Lucas Southworth

Monster Eight
Jeffrey Ford

Lego
Translated by Rebecca Hanssens-Reed and Tere Dávila

The Gricklemare
Julia Elliott

Thirteen Short Tales about Monsters
A. D. Jameson

New Sisters
Selena Anderson

Monstersister
Joyce Carol Oates

Cosmogony
Lucy Ives

The Soul Collector
Ethan Rutherford

Near, and Nearer Now
Arra Lynn Ross

Fragility
Catherine Imbriglio

The Care and Feeding of Minotaurs
James Morrow

The Constant Lover
Karen Heuler

Goodbye Baby
Jae Kim

Elizabeth
Terese Svoboda

Surgeon
Justin Noga

Wherever Thou Wilt Touch a Bruise Is Found
Quintan Ana Wikswo

The Ancient One
Madeline Kearin

Lost Souls
Matthew Baker

Description

Conjunctions: 74, Grendel’s Kin: The Monsters Issue

Edited by Bradford Morrow

Cover art by Hugo von Trimberg: Der Renner, ca. 1230–ca.1313, courtesy of The Morgan Library & Museum, MS M.763, fol. 230r. Photography by Janny Chiu, 202.

Monsters are the ultimate Other. In them, our most heinous traits, our weirdest fantasies, our greatest primordial fears, are mirrored and transmogrified into grotesqueries of every kind. Our ancestors’ imaginative visions of terror and dread gave rise to a spectacular alternative universe of fiends, daemons, ghosts, griffins, zombies, succubi, dragons, chimeras, sea serpents, vampires, werewolves, and other monstrous progeny. Latter-day generations have been just as creative in adding marvelous creatures to the Nuclear Age pantheon—1954 alone saw the birth of Godzilla, stirred to life by the atomic bomb, not to mention the giant mutant ants of Them! No matter the era, no matter which century, be it a dark age or one of enlightenment, monsters have held a mesmerizing fascination, as well as an existential horror, for everyday mortals.

In Grendel’s Kin, classic monsters such as the Minotaur and Sasquatch are conjured alongside newly imagined unfriendly beings like the Gricklemare, the Moon Fairy, and the Soul Collector, as well as a poltergeist, a tentacled creature discovered in an uncharted crevasse in Antarctica, a sister who is grossly, inexorably extruded from her host sibling (much to the latter’s mortification), and killer fleas from beyond Pluto. Here are monsters who inhabit the churning oceans and ride on killer tsunamis. Monsters born of plague and strife and hatred. Monsters who lurk in spellbound woodlands. Village and city monsters. Monsters who are stubborn, inescapable, greedy, pestilent, some of them cunning, others a bit clumsy—and most of them as malignant as a stumble off a very high cliff.

Conjunctions:74, Grendel’s Kin: The Monsters Issue explores, through innovative fiction, poetry, and essays, the many ways in which monsters are sublime and horrifying and an important part of the human legacy from one generation to the next.