Sing Me Your Scars (Apex Voices) - Softcover

Damien Angelica Walters is the author of Cry Your Way Home, Paper Tigers, and Sing Me Your Scars, winner of This is Horror's Short Story Collection of the Year. Her short fiction has been nominated twice for a Bram Stoker Award, reprinted in The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror and The Year's Best Weird Fiction, and published in various anthologies and magazines, including the Shirley Jackson Award Finalists Autumn Cthulhu and The Madness of Dr. Caligari, World Fantasy Award Finalist Cassilda's Song, Nightmare Magazine, and Black Static. Until the magazine's closing in 2013, she was an Associate Editor of the Hugo Award-winning Electric Velocipede. She lives in Maryland with her husband and two rescued pit bulls and is represented by Heather Flaherty of The Bent Agency.

"Like the best horror fiction, this collection is at once subversive and invested in the peculiar delights of the genre. The result is a full-body experience, packed with gasps and shivers, pulse-pounding jolts and moments of intense instinctive recoil -- shocking, yes, but completely enthralling and oddly uplifting as well."
-Helen Marshall, The Los Angeles Review of Books

"Love, loss, and the mutable, yet ineluctable, truth of identity are the bedrock, the steely spine of Sing Me Your Scars. The stories comprise a mirror, shattered to 20-odd bits and reassembled and bound within a frame. Each jagged sliver reflects some distortion of the viewer, each shard bends and traps light and pierces the eye, perhaps the soul, with an isolated wound, but step back and back and a kaleidoscopic effect takes hold. Behold a powerful, important statement writ in the weird."
-Laird Barron, Locus Magazine

"I've read some wonderful pieces of fiction over the years, hundreds and hundreds of fantastic stories that I've loved in their own way. But this is something special, something just at a level above all that."
-Paul M. Feeney, Ginger Nuts of Horror

"...Sing Me Your Scars by Damien Angelica Walters is a sharp treatise on the subject of human pain, in all its forms, and what comes after. Underlying the physical torments endured by Walters' protagonists are believable emotional horrors with which most readers will relate. Realistic tragedies - loss of love, proxy wars in a messy divorce, parental disinterest, the loss of a relative to Alzheimer's - are placed side-by-side with more bizarre tribulations, such as the gradual vanishing of a lover's body, impossible anatomical experimentations, and Inquisitorial ordeals inflicted on wielders of magic."
-Christopher Burke, Weird Fiction Review

"Sing Me Your Scars is a gripping collection of short stories that provides a number of deeply-felt chills without relying on the crutches of common horror clichés and tropes. ...Damien Angelica Walters focuses less on the boogeymen in the shadows and more on inner demons like doubt, insecurity, and dependance. Don't get me wrong - this is no mundane collection of inner monologues; we've got a snake-headed woman you might recognize from Mythology 101, and a robot model of Henry VIII that lives with a stripper, and women who can sing buildings into existence, and many more such wondrous creations. But every single story, no matter how outlandish the window dressing may seem, is grounded in the very real foibles and frailties of human existence. ...Walters is a writer that seems prepared to be around for the long haul, and horror fiction as a whole is likely to benefit greatly from her talents."
-Blu Gilliand, The October Country

"I haven't felt this way about a collection of short stories since I read Thomas Ligotti's Songs of a Dead Dreamer. Walters's collection of short stories is haunting, creepy, and beautiful. The author makes mundane terrors seems otherworldly, and the otherworldly seems strangely familiar."
-The Dunwich Review

"Walters creates a lush fantasy world in which the reader becomes quickly immersed despite the limited word count of these stories. I am in awe of this author's ability to achieve so much in so few words."
-Suzanne van Rooyen, South African Speculative Fiction Review

"If you have not read any of Walters' work then this collection of short stories is an excellent place to start. Even if you have read some of the stories in other publications, it is worth getting this collection for the eight new stories. 'Sing Me Your Scars' by itself is reason enough to part with some money and treat yourself."
-Andy Whitaker, SFCrowsnest

"...creepy, weird, heartbreaking, and lovely."
-Sarah Richardson, Women Write About Comics