I want to thank Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, for her expertise, encouragement, and kindness, and for always helping me find the joy in this process. Jill Bialosky, for taking on this book and making it better, and Drew Weitman for her aid and patience. Dave Cole for his meticulous editing, Sarahmay Wilkinson for her beautiful cover design, Jess Murphy and Julia Druskin for helping my manuscript become a book, and Erin Lovett and Michelle Waters for helping that book find readers.

I’m incredibly grateful to the Program in Creative Writing at UW-Madison and my classmates there, for giving me time to write this book and supporting me while I did. Thank you especially to Jesse Lee Kercheval for her mentorship and for being always ready to help, from the first page to the last, to Jaquira Díaz for being more confident in me than I was in myself, to Beth Nguyen for her gentle guidance, and to Sean Bishop for helping me keep my priorities straight. I also must thank the staff and students of the Alpha Writers Workshop, especially AJ, Lara, Cassie, Julie, Rachel, Patrick, and Seth, each of whom offered advice I desperately needed. I am grateful to every teacher who instructed and encouraged me as I took my first shaky steps into writing, and exceptionally grateful to Dr. Marilyn Elkins, Wendy Oleson, Greg Brown, and Jan Edick.

This book could not have happened without the friends and family who gave it—and me—so much of their time, attention, and love. My thanks and my love to Kit, so indispensable they must be thanked twice. To Danie, who read every page of this book three times over and who loved it when I couldn’t. To Alana, who was making worlds with me from the beginning. And to Jesse, George, Emilia, Mica, Maddy, and Katie for their friendship, feedback, and cheerleading. And, always, thank you to my family, Beverly and John Harlan and Mike Layfield, and especially my parents, Christopher Harlan and Karen Layfield, who brought me into this world and so are ultimately to blame for all of this.

Finally, this book owes a debt of gratitude to the works of Shirley Jackson, who showed me what magic looks like on the page. And to the music of the Mountain Goats, by which every one of these stories was written. I’d also like to thank the magazines that have previously published my stories and generously allowed them to be reprinted here, listed below.

Strange Horizons—“Hunting the Viper-King”

The Gettysburg Review—“Take Only What Belongs to You”

The Michigan Quarterly Review—“Algal Bloom”

The Colorado Review —“Endangered Animals”

Copyright

Fruiting Bodies is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.