Chelsea Quinn Yarbro - photo by Charles Lucke
Trailblazer. Literary Icon. Genre Magician.
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (just “Quinn” to her friends) wrote her first story at age six, and never looked back. Since her professional debut in 1969 she as has published more than 120 books and more than 150 works of short fiction across the entire gamut of literary and nonfiction genres, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, mainstream, mysteries, westerns, history, metaphysics, and more. Along the way she has also written plays, worked as a palmist/tarot reader and cartographer, and composed music for orchestra, voice, and theater. Her deep fascination with world history and social structures informs all her fiction...in particular the life and loves of her best-selling protagonist, the vampire Count Saint-Germain, whose adventures span more than 4000 years.
Quinn’s singular impact in the horror and fantasy genres has been recognized with multiple honors, including a Grand Master award from the World Horror Association, a literary knighthood from the Transylvanian Society of Dracula, the Lord Ruthven Award, and Lifetime Achievement awards from both the Horror Writers Association and the World Fantasy Association. She is the first (and so far only) woman to be named a Living Legend by the International Horror Guild.
False Dawn: Special Revised & Expanded Edition
In the 1970s Quinn made waves in the science fiction world with her story “Frog Pond” and its follow-on, the incredibly dark and challenging False Dawn—arguably the first post-apocalyptic novel to address the idea of systemic environmental collapse. Today, as global climate change and increasing chemical pollution threaten us, the cautionary lessons and human drama in False Dawn are more topical than ever. For this special edition, Quinn has expanded and updated her original text, and included three stories featuring False Dawn’s protagonist, Thea: the prequel “Frog Pond,” plus two tales appearing here for the first time—“The Rain, It Raineth Every Day” and “Thorny’s Way.”
Orphans of Memory
Fans of Quinn’s epic Vampire Saint-Germain Cycle, rejoice! The long wait since 2014’s Sustenance, set in Europe during the Anti-Communist McCarthy era, is almost over. Orphans of Memory, the newest historical horror novel in the series, leaps back in time to 816 AD, and Saint-Germain’s adventures in the exotic world of the Khazar Empire—a nearly-forgotten civilization that prospered for centuries in the region between the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. As ever, Quinn brings the past to life through vibrantly rich and accurate detail, extraordinary characters, and intense, high stakes action, as her vampire hero battles a human darkness so evil it can’t be allowed to triumph.