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 worshipping 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 a reader's sensibilities, fears, and desires. A finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award in two categories: Best Novella and Best Collection! "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 Livia Llewellyn is an award-nominated writer of horror, darkfantasy and erotica, whose fiction has appeared in ChiZine, Subterranean , Apex Magazine, Postscripts, NightmareMagazine, as well as numerousanthologies . Engines of Desire: Tales of Love &Other Horrors received a 2011 Shirley Jackson Award nomination for BestCollection, "Omphalos received a 2011 SJA for Best Novelette, and "Furnace" receiveda 2013 SJA nomination for Best Short Fiction. You can find her online atliviallewellyn.com.