From a ghostly Civil War battlefield to a combat theme park in Vietnam, from the omnipotent brain of an autistic boy to a shocking story of psychic vampires, journey into a world of fear and mystery, a chilling twilight zone of the mind. A woman returns from the dead with disastrous results for the family who loves her. . . . An old-fashioned barbershop is the site of a medieval ritual of bloody terror. . . . During a post-apocalyptic Christmas celebration, a messenger from the South brings tidings of great horror. . . . Includes the following stories: “The River Styx Runs Upstream” “Eyes I Dare Not Meet in Dreams” “Vanni Fucci Is Alive and Well and Living in Hell” “Vexed to Nightmare by a Rocking Cradle” “Remembering Siri” “Metastasis” “The Offering” “E-Ticket to 'Namland” “Iverson's Pits” “Shave and a Haircut, Two Bites” “The Death of the Centaur” “Two Minutes and Forty-Five Seconds” “Carrion Comfort” rns from the dead with disastrous results for the family who loves her.... An old-fashioned barbershop is the site of a medieval ritual of bloody terror.... During a post-apocalyptic Christmas celebration, a messenger from the South brings tidings of great horror.... From a ghostly Civil War battlefield to a combat theme park in Vietnam, from the omnipotent brain of an autistic boy to a shocking story of psychic vampires, journey into a world of fear and mystery, a chilling twilight zone of the mind. From the Paperback edition. A woman returns from the dead with disastrous results for the family who loves her.... An old-fashioned barbershop is the site of a medieval ritual of bloody terror.... During a post-apocalyptic Christmas celebration, a messenger from the South brings tidings of great horror.... From a ghostly Civil War battlefield to a combat theme park in Vietnam, from the omnipotent brain of an autistic boy to a shocking story of psychic vampires, journey into a world of fear and mystery, a chilling twilight zone of the mind. "From the Paperback edition. Dan Simmons , a full-time public school teacher until 1987, is one of the few writers who consistently work across genres, producing novels described as science fiction, horror, fantasy, and mainstream fiction, while winning major awards in all these fields. His first novel, Song of Kali, won the World Fantasy Award; his first science fiction novel, Hyperion, won the Hugo Award. His other novels and short fiction have been honored with numerous awards, including nine Locus Awards, four Bram Stoker Awards, the French Prix Cosmos 2000, the British SF Association Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Award. In 1995, Wabash College presented Simmons with an honorary doctorate in humane letters for his work in fiction and education. He lives in Colorado along the Front Range of the Rockies. Introduction to “The River Styx Runs Upstream”   It’s a cliché that writing fiction is a bit like having children. As with most clichés, there’s a base of truth there. Having the idea for a story or novel—that moment of pure inspiration and conception—is as close to ecstasy as writing offers. The actual writing, especially of a novel, runs about the length of a human gestation period and is a time of some discomfort, frequent queasiness, and the absolute assurance of difficult labor before the thing is born. Finally, the stories or books take on a definite life of their own once published and soon are out of the writer’s control completely; they travel far, visiting countries that the writer may never see, learning to express themselves fluently in languages the author will never begin to master, gaining the ear of readers with levels of affluence and education far beyond those of their progenitor, and—perhaps the most galling of all—living on long after the author is dust and a forgotten footnote.   And the ungrateful whelps don’t even write home.   “The River Styx Runs Upstream” was conceived on a beautiful August morning in 1979, in the summerhouse behind my wife’s parents’ home in Kenmore, New York. I remember typing the first paragraph, pausing, and thinking—This will be my first story to be published.   It was, but not before two and a half years and a myriad of misadventures had passed.   A week after I’d finished writing the first draft of “The River Styx …” I drove from western New York to Rockport, Maine, to pick up my wife Karen after her stay at the Maine Photographic Workshop. Along the way, I spent a day in Exeter, New Hampshire, meeting and talking to a respected writer whom I’d previously only corresponded with. His advice: submit to the “little magazines,” spend years—perhaps decades—building a reputation in these limited-circulation, contributor-copy-in-lieu-of-pay markets before even thinking about trying a novel, and then spend more years producing these small books from little-known publishers, reaching only a thousand or so readers but trying to acquire some critical underpinning.   I picked up Karen in Rockport and we beg