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THE SAFETY OF UNKNOWN CITIES: ILLUSTRATED ANNIVERSARY EDITION.

by Lucy Taylor.

CITIES is my ode to human hungers and the dangerous, daring, eternal
quest for more. – Lucy Taylor

Twenty, full page, Illustrations by Glenn Chadbourne.

STIRRINGS, A FOREWORD by Glenn Chadbourne.

2016 INTRODUCTION by Lucy Taylor.

Winner of the Best First Novel from the Horror Writers Association.

CITIES is my ode to human hungers and the dangerous, daring, eternal

quest for more. – Lucy Taylor

…when I received copies of all twenty of Glenn’s illustrations for CITIES, I was both intrigued and a little disoriented…

The thought that my novel had provided inspiration for these exceptionally dark and decadent drawings (by Glenn Chadbourne)  was both gratifying and unsettling. After all, it’s been a few years now since I wrote CITIES. To see the City and its various characters—Val, Majid, Breen—brought to life in this manner was a new and exciting way of looking at a novel I hadn’t revisited for some time.

But now revisit it I have—visually. Thanks to Glenn’s extraordinary artwork, I was able to re- experience the story through another’s eyes… Always a world where hedonistic ecstasy and chthonic torments intersect and overlap.

 For pain, after all, is one of the greatest pleasures on offer in the surreal and sensuous City.

From Lucy Taylor’s Introduction, The Safety of Unknown Cities: Illustrated Edition.

Despite the often graphic sex in Cities, the book is also about the desperate human need for connection. Val, of course tries to achieve it by "changing partners with the same frequency that she changed countries." In a less forthright way, Breen suffers from a similar pattern. As a young boy burglarizing houses, he realized that he could, in a sense, become intimate with those he stole from by going through their personal items, their letters, diaries, whatever. Then later, he made the jump to a darker form of intimacy-the perusal of the contents of their bodies. -From the OCP Introduction to Safety of Unknown Cities by Lucy Taylor

NOVEL REVIEW:

"Lucy Taylors The Safety of Unknown Cities is one of the most impressive debut novels centered around relationship-driven fiction catalyzed by horrific events mostly realistic, sometimes supernatural. The Safety of Unknown Cities is very much a supernatural horror novel. Indeed its sexual, its graphically written, but its alsoan affecting and powerful novel about heartbreak and the untimely destruction of childhood. If reading the book strikes familiar chords, the resonances might be with either Clive Barker for an unflinching approach to highly charged subject matter, or with Poppy Z. Brite for sheer candor...an adventurous novel of a quality that absolutely demands an audience. -- Edward Bryant, Locus Magazine.

Also available as a A 200 copy Signed Limited Edition, Signed by Author and Artist.

2016 Overlook Connection Press, 2016.
Trade paperback. 6 X 9. Sealed.