Whether We Are Mended

Perry Slaughter’s work has been called “dismayingly sexist” and “what you might get if Philip K. Dick and Chuck Palahniuk raised a special-needs baby.” His characters, grappling as they do with issues of manhood and violence, are not what one would generally regard as romantics, and yet here, in a run of remarkable stories penned in the late ’80s, he gives us romance as only he could—or would.

In settings ranging from Earth to distant planets to parallel worlds, with characters running the gamut from human to cyborg to alien, Perry Slaughter shows us love (or its analogues) in all its dirty, wretched, heartfelt squalor. With his characteristic energy and peculiar style, he shakes us by the lapels and shouts that romance is a thing of bloody science fiction.

Perry Slaughter first achieved notoriety in the mid-1980s with slender works of samizdat genre fiction hailed as “utterly bereft of any moral center.” More recently his short stories have appeared in Electric Velocipede and elsewhere. Mr. Slaughter divides his time between the northeastern United States and a yacht plying international waters. His passions include vinyl records, scotch whisky, and high-seas piracy. His exact whereabouts at any given time are unknown.

Sinister Regard is proud to have undertaken a project to reissue some of his early novellas and short fiction in new print and electronic editions. For more information, visit www.perryslaughter.com.