Tyler Hayes

A dinosaur detective in the land of unwanted ideas battles trauma, anxiety, and the first serial killer of imaginary friends. Most ideas fade away when we're done with them. Some we love enough to become Real. But what about the ones we love, and walk away from? Tippy the triceratops was once a little girl's imaginary friend, a dinosaur detective who could help her make sense of the world. But when her father died, Tippy fell into the Stillreal, the underbelly of the Imagination, where discarded ideas go when they're too Real to disappear. Now, he passes time doing detective work for other unwanted ideas - until Tippy runs into The Man in the Coat, a nightmare monster who can do the impossible: kill an idea permanently. Now Tippy must overcome his own trauma and solve the case, before there's nothing left but imaginary corpses. File Unders: Fantasy [ Fuzzy Fiends | Death to Imagination | Hardboiled but Sweet | Not Barney ]

The Imaginary Corpse

Tim Waggoner

Juliette Wade

Lucy A. Snyder

Ekaterina Sedia

Maurice Broaddus

Michael Haynes

Alex Bledsoe

Amanda C. Davis

Jennifer Brozek

Marissa Lingen

Sarah Hans

Janet Harriett

Erika Holt

Gary Kloster

Remy Nakamura

Andrew Romine

Damien A. Walters

When you talk about outsiders, it's easy to think about that sense of isolation when you're not one of the "popular kids" in high school, when you're the new person on the job, when you stand out in a bad way. But there's more than that. There's the sense of wonder at a new, alien place. There's seeing everything you know through a new, different point of view. These stories defy expectations and easy genre boundaries. But if you want that sense of wonder and amazement when you first encountered speculative fiction, that idea that there is something different, something more just around the corner, just out of sight, that sense of coming home to the unfamiliar, then this is the book you want to read. Edited by Nayad Monroe - who also edited What Fates Impose - these nineteen stories bring us tales of being the other, of belonging, and not belonging.

Tyler Hayes

Books

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