Two dozen dark tales from one of Australia's finest genre writers. Drawing on inspiration from such diverse sources as Japanese mythology, European folklore, modern urban legends, and ancient native Australian and American traditions, as well as the literature of Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Bram Stoker, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allan Poe -- the author tells stories of humanity's deepest desires and most dreadful nightmares. Dedman journeys into the past, present, and future...to the jungles of Malaysia, outback ghost towns, and modern metropolises...to places both too familiar and unfamiliar to give comfort. An accomplished storyteller, Dedman re-imagines supernatural entities like vampires, succubi, and ghosts and combines them with modern terrors such as ecological and scientific horrors and the eternal evils of the political and the rperverse. His stories are disturbing, erotic, or amusing -- or any combination of the three. With one original story and several never published in the United States or the United Kingdom, Never Seen by Waking Eyes will serve as an apt introduction for many to the darker short works of Stephen Dedman.
Where to begin? I grew up (though many would dispute this) on the outer limits of Perth's metropolitan area, far enough from a good library that I had to make up my own sf and horror stories. I continued to do this when I should have been studying, and after false starts at two other universities, received a B.A. in Creative Writing and Film in 1984. Since then, I've held too many boring jobs and a few interesting ones, including actor, tutor, experimental subject, editorial assistant for Australian Physicist magazine, education officer and used dinosaur salesman for the WA Museum, and the manager of a science fiction bookshop. I've been writing for fun for more than thirty years, and for money for twenty; I sold my first short story in 1977, and my first novel in 1995. I quit yet another boring job in 1996 to write full time, and am currently working on two novels and (usually) writing one new story a month.
My novels are THE ART OF ARROW CUTTING (Tor, 1997) and FOREIGN BODIES (Tor, 1999); I've also written a non-fiction book BONE HUNTERS: ON THE TRAIL OF THE DINOSAURS (Omnibus, 1998), and 13 of my best short stories are collected THE LADY OF SITUATIONS (Ticonderoga Publications, 1999). A bibliography can be found at www.eidolon.net/stephen_dedman
I still live in Western Australia, and enjoy reading, travel, movies, complicated relationships, talking to cats, and startling people.
