Daniel Polansky

Daniel Polansky writes fantasy that often combines criminal underworlds, bleak humor, and compressed forms. Meat+drink is a Tor.com Original published in 2016, a short work set in Baltimore and told from the perspective of a predatory being searching the city at night. Its limited point of view and thirty-two-page length make memory and identity more important than extensive world-building. Polansky created the Low Town trilogy, which begins with Low Town and continues with Tomorrow, the Killing and She Who Waits. Elsewhere, The Builders, A City Dreaming, and Those Above show his range from novella-length western fantasy to urban and epic forms. Meat+drink belongs to the shortest strand of that bibliography and uses repetition and bodily perception to keep the reader close to its altered consciousness. The piece demonstrates how Polansky can establish atmosphere and moral uncertainty without the larger cast required by his novel sequences.