A Girl's Guide to Guns and Monsters - Martin Harry Greenberg [1]
Copyright © 2010 by Tekno Books and Kerrie Hughes.
eISBN : 978-1-101-18464-6
All Rights Reserved.
DAW Book Collectors No. 1502.
DAW Books is distributed by Penguin Group (USA).
All characters and events in this book are fictitious.
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First Printing, February 2010
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Introduction copyright © 2010 by Kerrie Hughes
“The Drifter,” copyright © 2010 by Jane Lindskold
“Our Lady of the Vampires,” copyright © 2010 by Nancy Holder
“Best Friends,” copyright © 2010 by Lilith Saintcrow
“Elizabeth & Anna’s Big Adventure,” copyright © 2010 by Jeanne Stein
“Lupercalia,” copyright © 2010 by Anton Strout
“Murder She Workshopped,” copyright © 2010 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
“Heart of Ash,” copyright © 2010 by Jim C. Hines
“Jiang Shi,” copyright © 2010 by Elizabeth A. Vaughan
“No Matter Where You Go,” copyright © 2010 by Tanya Huff
“Signed in Blood,” copyright © 2010 by Phyllis Irene Radford
“Broch de Shlang,” copyright © 2010 by Mickey Zucker Reichert
“The Wooly Mountains,” copyright © 2010 by Alexander B. Potter
“Invasive Species,” copyright © 2010 by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
INTRODUCTION
My favorite stories have a common theme: a girl, a gun, and a monster to defeat. It stems from a life filled with monsters disguised as humans. I’m certainly not the first person in life to be beaten, abused, and raped, and sadly I won’t be the last. I see it in the news every day—children kidnapped and murdered, animals tortured, the mentally ill abandoned to their own madness. And then there’s war; is there any monster bigger than war and the atrocities committed during it?
A person could go crazy obsessing over the injustice of it all. Is it any wonder addiction is the main way to anesthetize one’s self from the fact that at any time and in any town any one of us can be the victim of a stranger in the dark or your ex-lover in the light? I spent years being bitter and angry over the idea that most monsters never pay for their crimes, and the one that hurt me got to walk away free and easy. Or was that simply a lie I told myself? When I stopped dwelling in the past, I found out that most of my tormentors were in jail for other crimes or had created a personal hell for themselves with alcohol, drugs, and self-loathing.
I also found that I could become one of the most hated monster slayers of all time, an agent of change. So I learned how to be a survivor and then how to teach girls, and sometimes boys, to fight monsters. I do this by working at a rape crisis center in my hometown. Every time I answer a call to go to the hospital and let a victim know their rights, and that they not only have the power to survive, but to fight back against the monster who attacked them, I feel like Buffy slaying a vampire. A conceit I formerly only knew in the plots of really good books featuring a girl, a gun, and a monster.
In this anthology I was pleasantly surprised to find that the stories I received could be put together in a chronological order that starts in the Old West and ends in outer space. The order is particularly apt, since monsters have existed for thousands of years, and will