Horror isn’t often this intelligent. Fairytales aren’t usually this smart.
Satan’s youngest daughter works at a call center. The Twelve Dancing Princesses lure men into an underground nightclub. A dancing bear falls in love and into addiction. The Queen of All Magic throws a party on the bayou to celebrate the death of her soulmate. I’ll Tell You a Love Story does exactly as its title promises; tells love stories. Stories that blend the ordinary with the mythic, mixes the everyday with fables, and shifts between hope and heartache.
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Reviews & Interviews
“I’ll Tell You A Love Story is an extraordinary read exploring love’s complexity and all its odd shapes. In this collection, Johnson takes the dough scraps from the cookie cutter fairy tales and finds love bereft of happily-ever-after. Each story is colored with enviable imagination and deep yearning.”
“That is the kind of thing that I lose my shit for, frankly, the beauty of imagination along with the barroom candor and living that contrasts it so well. Couri’s first collection takes us through worlds with train stations at the very end of them, through the love story of The Queen of All Magic and her recently murdered soulmate, and through the end of the world more than once.”
About the Author
Advance Praise for I’ll Tell You a Love Story
“In her dizzying debut, Couri Johnson has created a snow globe with a door and a key. Shake it. Then go in and hang out with this beautiful menagerie of characters. The girl who carries her sorrows inside a bird that squawks like an interrupted teakettle. The devil’s daughter who is, naturally, trying to do the right thing. A talking lily. With each shake you’re in a new, fully realized world, somehow swirling around love, places we look for help at our most damaged, recognizable hungers that remain unresolved. ‘After the earthquake, she goes out collecting bones,’ begins one story, and isn’t that what we are all doing? Building friends from the ruins. Read this delightful book. It will haunt you. In a good way.
– Karen Schubert, author of Black Sand Beach
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“The strange, the mysterious, and the magical dance hand in hand with the ordinary in Couri Johnson’s powerful tales, but the ordinary turns out to be just as strange and magical as any fairy tale—and just as full of thorns. Johnson’s stories are searing portrayals of love, of longing, and of people discovering ways to live once they’ve been stripped of their illusions. Read them.”
– Rebecca Barnhouse, author of The Book of the Maidservant
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“In a suit of stories that crackle with wit and cool, Couri Johnson weaves her own modern fairytales out of heartbreak and disillusionment. Familiar tropes are taken apart and reshaped for the twenty-first century. Johnson creates a world where fantasy bleeds into the everyday, where your best friend might be The Queen of All Magic, a gang of sirens live down the street, and that call centre where you work might in fact be Hell. Surprising in their originality, filled with broken wisdom, and with a refreshing use of language and imagery, these are stories to savour and mull over one at a time but which add up to a satisfying whole. This is The Bloody Chamber for the social media age. Horror isn’t often this intelligent. Fairytales aren’t usually this smart. Snap it up. I loved it.”
– Tim Jeffreys, author of You Will Never Lose Me and editor of the Dark Lane Anthology series
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“Get ready to embrace the world in all its grit and glory. In Couri Johnson’s auspicious debut, I’ll Tell You a Love Story, she will wrap you up in her warm embrace of everything beautiful and monstrous, everything joyous and tragic, and when the final dance is over, you’ll realize you’ve been swept away, that you’ve been told a love story, and that you’ve also lived it.”
– Christopher Barzak, author of Wonders of the Invisible World
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