She admits she is pleased when the new placard is raised, "Madame Tussaud's House of Wax." She stands in the crowd with Francois at her side. He leans close enough to touch her ear with the fringe of his mustache and whispers, "What part of the museum would the famous Madame Tussaud like to survey on her inaugural visit?"

"The Chamber of Horrors, I think," she says softly.

"Really, my dear? All that grim fantasy and blood?"

"There is no fantasy about it, Francois. It is an embryo, a showing of what is to come."

Blending historical fiction with fantasy and the...

Adam McOmber's lush, hallucinatory stories are both familiar and wholly original. Drawn from the historical record, Biblical lore, fairy tales, science fiction, and nightmares, these offbeat and fantastical works explore gender and sexuality in their darkest and most beautiful manifestations. In the tradition of Angela Carter or Kelly Link, My House Gathers Desires is covertly funny and haunting, seeking fresh ways to consider sexual identity and its relation to history.

In "Sodom and Gomorrah," readers encounter a subversive, ecstatic new version of the Old Testament story....

Jane Silverlake lives with her father in a crumbling family estate on the edge of Hampstead Heath. Jane has a secret--an unexplainable and frightening gift that allows her to see the souls of man-made objects--and this talent isolates her from the outside world. She finds solace in her only companions, Madeline and Nathan, but as the friends come of age, their idyll is shattered by...