- Format
- Paperback
- Pages
- 222
- ISBN
- 9781951971410
- Price
- $18.95
- Publication Date
- April 28, 2026
The Blood Year Daughter
G.G. Silverman
In G.G. Silverman’s debut fairytale-horror collection The Blood Year Daughter, a woman builds husbands out of gravel and slaughterhouse feathers, two sisters eat cinnamon-scented pieces of their mother, and a charming doctor’s murdered brides whisper warnings to his newest wife.
Silverman’s women and girls escape smiling captors, draw blood to curse their loved ones, and wield fear to defend themselves in post-apocalyptic worlds. They ignore the insults of rotting Elderwomen filled with flies, resist marriage proposals, and fill themselves—joyfully—with multitudes of snakes. They are murdered and choose to live again.
Drawing from folktales, Silverman’s Italian roots, and killers both real and imagined, The Blood Year Daughter’s stories recall Kelly Link and Carmen Maria Machado. Spare and glittering as a spiderweb, sharp as a needle through a husband’s nose, they establish G.G. Silverman as a formidable voice in feminist horror and magical realism.
Praise for The Blood Year Daughter
“Silverman gives voice to the brutal, tragic, and transformative experiences of womanhood in her debut story collection...This short story collection spans multiple genres, including horror, fantasy, magic realism, and feminist fiction, and navigates each with confidence and skill. Silverman establishes herself as a compelling voice to watch. Recommended for readers of Carmen Maria Machado, Angela Carter, and Veronica Schanoes.” —Booklist (starred review)
“The Blood Year Daughter is a remarkable short story collection that mixes feminist horror and twisted fairy tales into potent concoctions.” —Foreword Reviews
“Silverman’s striking debut brings together 12 fairy tale–inflected horror stories that center women and girls who survive, transform, and protect themselves in worlds shaped by violence and desire…Throughout, Silverman’s prose is spare yet ferocious, favoring sharp imagery, slippery folktale logic, and emotional precision over explanation, and allowing horror and tenderness to coexist in the same breath. It’s a dark delight.” —Publishers Weekly
“Devastating, dreamlike, and deeply beautiful, these horror stories are filled with aching revenge and undeniable redemption. The Blood Year Daughter is a spectacular and bloody star shooting across the sky. Highly, highly recommended.” —Gwendolyn Kiste, four-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Haunting of Velkwood and Reluctant Immortals
“A gorgeous and gothic collection of tales, filled with feral women, witches, the ghosts of drowned girls, and the beating hearts of the forgotten. In this lyrical debut, the uncanny and the awe-inspiring sing from the pages. This book is a siren’s song, calling us toward a deeper understanding of what it means to be human and what it means to love.” —Alexander Weinstein, author of Children of the New World
“An astonishing collection. This is large-caliber fairy tale horror, fiction that lands the reader in faraways crackling with sex, violence, and terrifyingly raw life. If, as Peter and Iona Opie once argued, a feature of traditional fairy tales is that they are ‘unbelievable,’ Silverman has reengineered the genre to turn tradition on its head. These stories are grisly, golden, and glorious, ringing out, sentence after intoxicating sentence, with enthusiastic surrender to their own mysterious source.” —Hugh Sheehy, author of Design Flaw and The Invisibles
“This collection is creepy, knife-sharp and captivating. These sentences and images hover like ghosts over original and beautiful stories entangled with threads of fairytale, horror and magical-realism.” —Ramona Ausubel, author of Awayland
“From the first sentence—‘all the mother’s milk ran red that year’—these stories startle, move, and provoke. They speak the kind of truth only the fantastic can reveal. Fans of Kelly Link and Carmen Maria Machado will love The Blood Year Daughter.” —Ayşe Papatya Bucak, author of The Trojan War Museum
“The Blood Year Daughter is an electric jolt of beautiful and visceral stories. Silverman’s lush imagery and raw characters explore the feral and the feminine in such memorable ways. Women claw and dance and hiss, filling the pages with aching tales and relatable rituals. The connections delicately weaved between ghosts and dreams, and between nature and identity, all culminate into a powerful collection that is not to be missed.” —Sara Tantlinger, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Devil’s Dreamland
“G.G. Silverman’s debut collection of interstitial stories takes you on a journey full of fabulism and folklore, through her artistically crafted tales of haunted women and the horrors of the world. With Silverman as your guide, you are in the hands of a talented, multi-disciplined creator who delivers hard hitting dark tales that land with heartfelt, intense, and thoughtful blows. Fans of Angela Carter will be delighted!” —Daniel Braum, author of Phantom Constellations: Strange Tales and Ghost Stories
“Blood and milk, a silk husband, a small door, and an old, snaky woman who offers you tea outside the club—this book is the best thing since the Brothers Grimm. Don’t venture into the Black Forest without it.” —Angela Buck, author of Horses Dream of Money
“Effortlessly mixing horror and magic realism with fairy tales, these stories somehow seem at once hauntingly familiar and entirely unexpected. Silverman’s sentences are whip-smart and lyrical, and the stories themselves are fearless in the way they approach what it means to be a woman under threat, both in the fantastic world and in our own all-too-real world. A stunning debut.” —Brian Evenson, author of Good Night, Sleep Tight
“Filled with vision and a quiet rage, these stories know in their depths the beauty of pain and the secret wisdom of a trauma as ancient as it is contemporary. The Blood Year Daughter casts a vivid glamour, visceral and hallucinatory as a dream.” —J. Ashley-Smith, Shirley Jackson Award-winning author of The Measure of Sorrow
