Once you purchase this collection and open the door of the cover and read, you will enter realms where a living glass woman is on display in a glass box, you’ll meet the Streamers/Screamers and the Bone-Dog. You can linger in "The Drawback" and marvel at a tidal giant. You’ll visit "Al’s Iso Bar" during a quest for a husband, meet those who work for the god of the love of money, journey through peculiarly skewed cultures occupied by people who are like us, but strangely different. You will briefly dwell in stories and character experiences that are akin to our own but just one step to the sinister side of the path. And there, you will find a thin trail, leading off into the greater dark.

Kaaron Warren has been a tale telling tour guide along such trails for close to twenty years now. She carries a uniquely magical lantern to illuminate her way, but she is sparing with it, will only light so much of the dark upon each tour.

Welcome to the weird and wonderful, darkly perverse, amazing universe of Kaaron Warren’s imagination.

I have been a fan of Warren’s writing since 1993 when I first experienced several of her stories.

Kaaron Warren honed her talent on the short story whetstone. For well over a decade she produced award winners and enduring works of the short and novelette form.

Of late she has become a published novelist. Angry Robot books initiating that phase of her career by giving her a three-book contract. The first of the three is Slights, already drawing much interest and acclaim.

There are at least five classics in this collection. Works that will stand in the ranks of the better examples of short genre writing for decades to come.

Warren is one of the most interesting and consistently accomplished genre writers to emerge from the black-red soil of Australia’s dark fantasy field in several decades.

As with many of the best wordsmiths she has the ability to weave one line that can carry maximum, often visceral, impact.

A virtuoso, a wild and gorgeous, long lasting talent who will weather the tests of time. Heck, she’s the Kate Bush of Australian dark fantasy.

Hers is a rare, outré music that echoes back to us from black spheres out beyond the borders of so many composers’ abilities; out there where, as Lovecraft has told us, "they roll in their horror unheeded" within a gaping, dark universe.

That glimmer of light in the dark distance up ahead is Kaaron Warren. There is plenty of wick and fuel to draw upon within her lamp, and she has many more journeys to take us on, a host of uncanny matters to illuminate for us, along those darker paths. . .