In each of these stories, the reader is lured into a sinister shadow space, one both familiar and uncanny.

Life is strange, beautiful, and terrible in the world of Victoria Dalpe's debut short story collection. Her characters run the gamut from nosy neighbors to boomtown prostitutes, sentient moss to ghouls with a taste for artist’s flesh. The stories contain chance encounters with truck stop mystics, haunted reality show renovations, and cat people roaming the western plains. In Dalpe's writing, horror mixes with humor, and the ordinary with the macabre.

Les Femmes Grotesques is a unique and lush reading experience. Tragic and transformative—an unabashed exploration of the dark feminine.

PRAISE FOR VICTORIA DALPE

“Dalpe’s horror stories are equal parts intriguing, compelling, and appropriately macabre. Les Femmes Grotesques tidily secures Dalpe her position as an author to watch.”

—Monica S. Kuebler, Rue Morgue

“Anne Rice for the post-Twilight age.”

―Gemma Files, Shirley Jackson and Sunburst Award-winning author of Experimental Film

“Victoria Dalpe is such a charming woman that it’s surprising to realize she has such a dark and macabre imagination―a classic tale whose Gothic roots run deep throughout the story.”

―Adrianne Ambrose, author of Fangs for Nothing, Confessions of a Virgin Sacrifice, and the “Betty and Veronica” Archie Comics

“Victoria Dalpe’s stellar debut novel suggests that sometimes you consume the ones you love. The prose is tough and unsentimental, yet evocative in its depiction of the cancerous nature of abuse. Parasite Life battens down on you―insidious and predatory.”

―Laird Barron, author of Blood Standard

Victoria Dalpe is an artist and writer based out of Providence, RI. Her dark short fiction has appeared in over thirty anthologies and her first novel, Parasite Life came out in 2018 through ChiZIne Publications and will be re-released in 2023 through Nightscape Press. She is a member of the HWA and the New England Horror Writers. Her short story collection Les Femmes Grotesques will be out in fall 2022 with Clash Books. Victoria also co-edited the Necronomicon 2019 Memento Book with Justin Steele.

ISBN: 9781955904230