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Engines of Desire: Tales of Love and Other Horrors Kindle Edition

by Livia Llewellyn (Author), Laird Barron (Introduction) Format: Kindle Edition
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 51 ratings
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Death and pleasure. Freud’s Todestrieb, his statement that “libido has the task of making the destroying instinct innocuous, and it fulfills the task by diverting that instinct to a great extent outwards....The instinct is then called the destructive instinct, the instinct for mastery, or the will to power.” Few authors have spun stories of Thanatos and Eros as skillfully and powerfully as Livia Llewellyn. In his introduction to this volume, Laird Barron writes “Scant difference exists between exquisite pleasure and pain.” An orphan girl with a mind for anthracite falls into the hands of a cult worshiping an entombed god. In the Pacific Northwest, evergreens lull prepubescent girls into their trunks to serve as wombs. A suburban housewife troubled by her present encounters the sixteen-year-old girl she ached to touch in her dreams. These ten stories promise to indulge the reader’s sensibilities, their fears and desires.
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    March 3, 2011
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

These 10 powerful stories mark relative newcomer Llewellyn as a writer to watch in the genres of dark fantasy, horror, and erotica. Lush, discursive, elliptical writing weaves scenarios of women confronted with a horrible other, as in the title story, where a woman faces down a destructive childhood love, and in "At the Edge of Ellensburg," where sex-charged attraction destroys a woman obsessed with a serial killer. Deeply disturbing imagery marks several stories: in "Omphalos," original to the volume, a family vacation revolves around incest; infanticide underpins the dark fantasy story "Her Deepness"; and forced pregnancy and childbearing simmer into violence in "The Four Hundred Thousand." Plot sometimes gets lost in the wordplay, and the promised emotional climax doesn't always deliver, but readers ready for a challenge will gladly sink their teeth in. (Apr.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Review

"These 10 powerful stories mark relative newcomer Llewellyn as a writer to watch in the genres of dark fantasy, horror, and erotica. Lush, discursive, elliptical writing weaves scenarios of women confronted with a horrible other, as in the title story, where a woman faces down a destructive childhood love, and in "At the Edge of Ellensburg," where sex-charged attraction destroys a woman obsessed with a serial killer." - Publishers Weekly "Mystery, yearning, curiosity and need power the turbines of Livia Llewellyn's Engines of Desire." - Stephen Studach for ChiZine.com "This a fine book written with such personal and illustrative prose that you often feel as if you're viewing the action through the harried eyes of the narrator. It is dark, engaging, and stirring in all the right ways.'' - Alex Brown for Tor.com

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B004QGYYCY
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Lethe Press (March 3, 2011)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 3, 2011
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 1486 KB
  • Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 214 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 51 ratings

About the author

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Livia Llewellyn

Livia Llewellyn

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Livia Llewellyn’s fiction has appeared in over forty anthologies and magazines and has been reprinted in multiple best-of anthologies, including The Best Horror of the Year, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, and The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica. Her short fiction collections Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors and Furnace were both nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award, and “One of These Nights” has been nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Short Story. You can find her online at liviallewellyn.com and on Twitter and Instagram.

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
51 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Brian Lillie
5.0 out of 5 stars Taking it to the Point of No Return, and Then Some...
Reviewed in the United States on April 21, 2015
Verified Purchase
Me, I pretty much only read short stories and novellas when it comes to horror, dark fantasy, etc. Novels don't usually do it for me mostly because they tend to feel so watered down compared to shorter work (obviously, there are lots of exceptions--We Have Always Lived In The Castle, etc.). I've been a voracious horror story reader for over 30 years now and can tell you that authors with the level of talent and insane originality that Livia Llewellyn possesses do NOT come by very often. Her fiction is industrial strength, over-the-top, uniquely horrifying and painfully humane. If you are a connoisseur of challenging, chewy, surreal, horror fiction, ENGINES OF DESIRE will totally be your jam.

There are a whole bunch of classics-in-the-making collected here, including the title story, "At the Edge of Ellensburg", "Omphalos", and "Her Deepness". Llewellyn's fiction is so dense with ideas and emotion that it usually takes me a few readings just to get my bearings. Even then, it is really hard to describe her stuff. "Omphalos" is one of the most brain-meltingly creepy stories I've ever read, dealing with incest, the internalization of abuse, and ultimately how the internal eventually comes back to scorch the earth. Ha! What a terrible description. In any case, it's amazing and the ending is so jaw-dropping. Oy!

"Ellensburg" is a more 'normal' novella-length piece, a crime and sex story told with fever dream intensity. It's also probably the most overtly sexual thing I've ever read, coming close to erotica in its frankness. In fact, the ending is a call back to an earlier sex scene and is so utterly PERFECT that it almost feels like you just dreamed the whole thing yourself. Amazing.

Here's a great quote from an interview Llewellyn did at Weird Fiction Review*: "I love writing to that point of no return and then forcing it a few steps beyond, to see not just what lies there in that rubicon of an emotional moment, but to see how it evolves (or devolves) the character."

As a reader and huge fan, I have to say YES!!! She totally does exactly that. And not just once, either. She takes almost every story out into that place of extreme discomfort, but refuses to stop there just for the sake of nihilistic titillation, as many so-called 'edgy' writers would. The writers she most reminds me of are Charlee Jacob, who has a similar courage and stylistic moxie (especially in her short stories, but also times a billion in her novel HAUNTER), and Thomas Ligotti, if he was a woman who actually liked humanity and wasn't scared to get dirty.

This is a brilliant collection...

* http://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/12/interview-livia-llewellyn-and-the-weird/
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A.D.
4.0 out of 5 stars A new voice in weirdness
Reviewed in the United States on December 27, 2014
Verified Purchase
I tried Llewellyn on because Laird Barron recommended her. I'm glad I did. Her work has a different tone and texture than many of her contemporaries. If you're into Barron or Langan or their ilk I highly recommend her. You won't be disappointed.
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M. Griffin
5.0 out of 5 stars Very highly recommended strange fiction
Reviewed in the United States on September 30, 2011
Verified Purchase
If not for a recommendation on Laird Barron's blog, I might never have picked up this excellent collection (to which Barron provided a foreword). Prior to the release of this collection, all I'd seen from Livia Llewellyn was "Brimstone Orange," too short a piece to give much of a sense of this writer's capabilities. I'm very glad I didn't miss what turned out to be one of the best single author short story collections I've come across in recent years.

Llewellyn's prose style is strongly visual and evocative. Readers who prefer their prose simple and declarative may find this a too rich, but those enjoy a writer with a vibrant, poetic approach to putting words together will love it. Especially as a debut collection, Engines of Desire is noteworthy for the strength and richness of its language.

That's not to say these stories are for everyone. The mood is uniformly dark, at times bitterly so. These stories cover a wide ground from post-apocalyptic science fiction to erotica, from psychological horror to dark fantasy. At first I thought the book might be too scattered genre-wise, but further along I realized the stories here were held together not by genre conventions, but by thematic commonalities and a consistency to the personal concerns of the characters, apart from place, time or the existence of monsters or magic. Whatever the trappings of one story or another, all clearly arise out of a strong, unified creative impetus. In terms of cumulative effect, these stories hold together quite well, both individually and as a collection.

The collection opens with "Horses," a bleak and psychologically extreme piece of post-apocalyptic SF. It effectively lets the reader know what they're in for. This is followed by a dramatic shift to what is effectively (despite the insertion of a few elements that feel vaguely "fantastic" but which are not really part of the story's core) a realistic story of a sexually obsessed and self-destructive college student. Llewellyn depicts the college girl obsessed with the wrong guy with the same raw desperation with which she draws characters beset by a disintegrating.

Among the rest of the collection, the best include "The Four-Hundred," the title story "The Engines of Desire," and "Her Deepness." This last, an ambitious novella, is a really impressive example of fantasy world building. Truly dark, deeply weird and at times surreal.

While a few of these stories were less effective on the level of compelling plot or characters than they were in terms of language and mood, I found none of them less than satisfying overall. If we can extrapolate from an author's debut collection to guess what they may be capable of, I really can't wait to see what Livia Llewellyn does next.
11 people found this helpful
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A. McCaskill
3.0 out of 5 stars Dark and Deep
Reviewed in the United States on July 7, 2014
I bought this collection because I had read a story in an anthology that I liked, but I think the stories probably benefit from some time between reading one and the next; the Lovecraftian influence and transgressive sexual elements are effective in small doses, but I have a tendency to say I'm just going to read one story and then devour them all in a great gulping rush, and the cumulative sense was one of oversatiation on vaguely icky sex and tentacled sea monsters. I still find her to be a talented writer - I just think she's better off in mixed anthologies, or for readers who have more self-control.
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Rodney Gardner
4.0 out of 5 stars Sophisticated and adept
Reviewed in the United States on December 19, 2018
Traumatic and dramatic trials from the past run deep. Overcoming them often means facing something even more difficult. Livia Llewellyn’s sophisticated and adept writing hits like a whirlwind. This dark and provocative collection is my second from the author and to put it simply, I am hooked. 4.5 stars.
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