Mistification

Overview

They entered the cellar and he locked the door behind them. He drew the mist to give the girl a sense of euphoria and anticipation. “There is magic here; tricks,” the girl said. “I know because I blink and things change. I feel like I can see germs in the air. It’s damp. What if I catch something?” He said, “You can’t catch magic. You can learn parts of it, you are born with some. Magic is not contagious, though its element is contagion. Some things can influence you long after you have stopped touching them. Some things will never stop touching you, even when they are long forgotten.” His voice was so quiet it gave her comfort.

Reviews

Chosen for the Locus Best Fantasy List 2011

"Mistification could be among the year's most powerful dark fantasies." —Niall Alexander, Strange Horizons

 

"Misitification is a book like no other. That sounds cliché, but in this case it's absolutely true ... [it] is at once weirdly bizarre and utterly fascinating. It's a tale that'll make you think about the world and the way we view it, about how much our perception shapes our reality." —A Fantastical Librarian

 

Praise for previous titles:

"Slights is a rusted blade of a book, cutting away at the reader's comfortable expectations until only bitter bones are left; a delightful middle class suburban fright." —Jay Lake
 

"It's a masterpiece of voice, a bleak and haunting novel that gets its hooks into you and yanks, all the while scratching its broken nails down the blackboard of your psyche. Kaaron Warren has set the standard by which all future Australian horror novels will have to be judged." —Trent Jamieson
 

"Like walking from a dream into a mythical land both familiar and delightfully strange. A tale of tolerance and survival, in a fascinating and beautifully realised world." —Trudi Canavan, author of the Black Magician Trilogy

 

"Kaaron Warren is a fresh, amazingly talented voice out of Australia. You must read her work." —Ellen Datlow

Author Biography

Shirley Jackson award-winner Kaaron Warren published her first short story in 1993 and has had fiction in print every year since. She was recently given the Peter McNamara Lifetime Achievement Award and was Guest of Honour at World Fantasy 2018, Stokercon 2019, and Geysercon 2019. Kaaron was a Fellow at the Museum for Australian Democracy, where she researched prime ministers, artists, and serial killers. She’s judged the World Fantasy Awards and the Shirley Jackson Awards.