Discontinue If Death Ensues

Winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in an Anthology. Horror stories about women, written by women. This anthology focuses on the strength of women faced with adversity. It explores many ways in which societal structures and personal action – including mistreatment of the environment and other people, particularly women – can reach a tipping point, creating unexpected changes, empowering women around the world.

It contains fifteen interlaced stories and five poems from five authors in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand – all women who were nominated for the 2021 HWA Bram Stoker Award® for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction: Lee Murray, Cindy O’Quinn, Kyla Lee Ward, Anna Taborska and Carol Gyzander.

The Flame Tree Beyond and Within short story collections bring together tales of myth and imagination by modern and contemporary writers, carefully selected by anthologists, and sometimes featuring short stories from a single author. Overall, the series presents a wide range of diverse and inclusive voices with myth, folkloric-inflected short fiction, and an emphasis on the supernatural, science fiction, the mysterious and the speculative. The books themselves are gorgeous, with foiled covers, printed edges and published only in hardcover editions, offering a lifetime of reading pleasure.

Carol Gyzander is a Bram Stoker Award® finalist who writes and edits horror, weird fiction, and science fiction, with stories appearing in Weird Tales, Weird House Magazine, Under Twin Suns Alternate Histories of the Yellow Sign, and Across the Universe: Tales of Alternative Beatles. As anthology editor, she contributed to A Woman Unbecoming and the Even in the Grave ghost story anthology.

Lee Murray is a five-time Bram Stoker Award®, and multiple Australian Shadows and Sir Julius Vogel Award-winner. Lee is New Zealand’s only recipient of the Shirley Jackson Award. She holds a New Zealand Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Fiction.

Cindy O’Quinn is a Bram Stoker Award®-winning writer. Author of “Quondam” from The Nightmare Never Ends, “Lydia” from the Shirley Jackson Award-winning anthology The Twisted Book of Shadows, “The Thing I Found Along a Dirt Patch Road”, “A Gathering on the Mountain”, and “One and Done”. Her poetry has been nominated for the Elgin, Dwarf Star, and Rhysling Awards. She is an Appalachian writer from the beautiful mountains of West Virginia, which are the ideal backdrop for writing scary stories and dark poetry.

Kyla Lee Ward is a Sydney-based creative whose work has garnered Australian Shadows and Aurealis awards. She has been nominated for multiple Rhyslings, Stoker and Ditmar nominations.

Anna Taborska writes horror stories and screenplays with tales appearing in over forty anthologies. She has been nominated for a British Fantasy Award three times, and for a Bram Stoker Award® five times. Anna has also directed five films.