Singular Irregularity Anthology

<500, the short story I wrote with Martin Greaves, gets a third outing this month in Singular Irregularity - an anthology of time travel gone terribly wrong edited by Kimber Grey.  Just look at that great cover from Thyc Graphics.

Turn to Ash now available for pre-order

Volume 1 of the Turn to Ash zine, which features my short story Collectable, is now available for pre-order.  The zine is officially due for release in September, but the first 50 people to pre-order will receive the additionally mini-zine Volume 0.

I'm in excellent company here, as the zine also features stories by Jason A. Wyckoff, Michael Kelly, Lucy A. Snyder, C.C. Adams and others.  Also included is some non-fiction from Jose Cruz and James Newman.

This looks like being an exciting publication so I would encourage any horror lovers to grab their copy now.  More info here.

New Published Stories

During February and March new work of mine appeared in various publications.  Firstly, of course, back in February Voids - the novella I wrote with Martin Greaves was published by Omnium Gatherum.  Voids has already picked up some rave reviews on Goodreads and Amazon, and appears to have had quite an emotional affect on some readers.

Towards the end of March another of mine and Martin's collaborations will appear as our short story <500 will be reprinted in The Singularity Magazine.  Just look at that amazing cover! 

March has already seen the release of Strange Little Girls from Belladonna Publishing, which features my story Deep Down.  Having Deep Down accepted for Strange Little Girls was perhaps my proudest writerly moment yet.  This anthology feels like it has been a long time coming, but I'm certain it will be worth the wait and that editors/artists/designers Liv Lingborn and Camilla Bruce will have done an excellent job on it.

Still to come on March 22nd is the anthology Dark Little Dreams from Bad Dreams Entertainment, which features my novellette The Wilds.  The Wilds is about Connor - a teenage boy - who is seduced by his sister in law, and then forced to go on a trek into Sutter's Wilds - a mysterious, uninhabited part of his island home - in order to find his missing brother, Lewis.  Excerpt below:

"The wind suddenly picked up and turned the pages of the notebook.  A line of trees on a ledge above them began to sway.  Connor thought he heard another sound, and Paige must have heard it too because she looked around in alarm and pressed against his side.  The wind became fearful and though they were relatively sheltered from it in the valley where they stood, the trees above began to bend with the force of it.  Watching them, Connor’s heart leapt up as he thought he saw the grey figure of a man standing beneath the trees.  He had thought it might be Lewis but it was not.  The man was oddly tall, and like the trees he swayed back and forth, but he swayed with laughter.  Connor realised that this was the sound he’d heard, a kind of mad braying laughter coming to him from far away.  With his heart pounding he flicked to the start of the notebook again and scanned Della’s notes, but there was nothing written about this laughing figure.  He saw a line he’d read before.  Here’s where the winds start.  And there was a drawing of three trees, much like the ones now swaying above them."

New Discoveries in Short Fiction

There's something to be said for discovering a short fiction writer who hasn't yet released a collection; it forces you to hunt down their existing work in anthologies and magazines.  Along the way, you'll discover new publications and new writers, but always there's a kind of treasure hunt mentality - will you unearth a new gem?

Here, I'll mention a few writers whose treasures I've been unearthing recently.

I first encountered L.S. Johnson when she submitted her flash fiction This Is How You Lose Yourself to the second Dark Lane anthology.  Although this wasn't a story in the traditional sense, but more of a prose poem, I was struck by the quality of the writing and it piqued my curiosity enough to seek out more of her work.  I then read two wonderful pieces of weird fiction: first Little Men With Knives, published in Crossed Genres; and Julie published in Tartarus Press' Strange Tales V.   I also enjoyed Johnson's other story of shape-shifting Ada, Awake published in Strangelet magazine; and her story Queen of Lakes from World Weaver Press' Fae Anthology.

L.S. Johnson has just published her first collection of stories,Vacui Magia, which contains both Little Men With Knives and Julie, amongst others, and which I would highly recommend to any lovers of literary weird tales.  Julie is also scheduled to appear in The Year's Best Weird Fiction: Volume Three later this year.  Congratulations L.S!

In Strange Tales V I also first encountered the work of Elise Forier Edie.  I enjoyed her chilling beautifully-written contribution, You-Go-Back, so much that I sought out more of her fiction and also enjoyed her story Mother Night, a clever tale featuring terrifying fairies published in the Winter Horror Days anthology from Omnium Gatherum, which proved to be a perfect read for a cold evening back in January.

Undertow Publications' The Year's Best Weird Fiction: Volume Two introduced me to a number of new writers.  First, Carmen Maria Muchado, who contributed two stories to that anthology including the excellent The Husband Stitch.  I also enjoyed her tongue-in-cheek Horror Story which can be read online in Granta Magazine.  The other stories I loved in YBWF2 was Rich Larson's The Air We Breathe Is Stormy, Stormy (I love a good mermaid story), and K.M. Ferebee's The Earth and Everything Under.  To my list of favourite shorts read this year I will also add Larson's The Mermaid Caper, and Ferebee's The Bird Country.

Just because...

My favourite films watched in 2015

1. Frank

2. Ex-Machina

3. Birdman

4. It Follows

5. Lucy

6. Nightcrawler

7. The Martian

8. Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck

9. Miss America

10 The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2

Favourite novel read in 2015
The Physiognomy by Jeffrey Ford

Some of my favourite short stories I read this year (I include links where the stories are available to read online):

Little Men With Knives by L.S.Johnson  (Crossed Genres)

Queen of Lakes by L.S.Johnson (published in Fae, World Weaver Press)

The Husband Stitch by Carmen Maria Muchado (Year's Best Weird Fiction Vol.2)

The Air We Breathe Is Stormy, Stormy by Rich Larsen (Year's Best Weird Fiction Vol.2)

There Used to be Places by Louis Rakovich (Dark Lane Anthology Vol.2)

The Redfield Girls by Laird Barron (The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All)

The Stone by Rebecca Llloyd (Mercy)

Northwest Passage by Barbara Rodin (Northwest Passages)

Getting There & Away by Austin Bunn (The Brink)

Hungerford Bridge by Elizabeth Hand (Errantry)

Sing by Karin Tidbeck (Tor.com)

The Wilds by Julia Elliott




Music

Silence Yourself by Savages
Too often these days rock or indie rock or however you want to describe this kind of music is so careerist and sanitised that it makes me want to vomit.  What happened to the days when this kind of music was made by the marginalised, the outsider, the weirdo?  These days it feels like it's been co-opted by upper-middle class kids enjoying a gap year as indie-rock stars, and the music they make leaves me cold. I'll take a Kurt Cobain, a Morrissey, a Siouxsie Sioux, a Robert Smith, or a Johnny Rotten, over your Chris Martins of this world any day of the week.

Savages' music feels like a return to the days when music was intelligent and angry.  I initially dismissed this album as some kind of weird hybrid of Joy Division and Siouxsie and the Banshees but the more I listened the more it drew me in.  My favourite tracks: She Will, I Am Here, and Shut Up.

Dark Little Dreams

I can now reveal that my novelette, The Wilds, will appear in the anthology 'Dark Little Dreams' from Bad Dream Entertainment, due to be released in March 2016.  There are a few familiar names in the table of contents who I'm especially pleased to be appearing alongside.  I'd like to give a huge thank you to editor Brett Reistroffer for selecting my story for inclusion.  The book is available for pre-order now.  You can find out more in the Bad Dream Entertainment website.

Recommended Weird Tales: The Familiars by Micaela Morrissette

With only a handful of short stories to her name (only four that I'm aware of) Micaela Morrissette is fast becoming one of my favourite weird fiction writers.

The Familiars is a beautifully written and perfectly judged tale of a mother vying for her son against the imaginary friends who keep appearing from under his bed.  The great thing about this story is that there is so much detail and such ambiguity that it can be read and enjoyed anew again and again with the reader noticing different things each time.  I’ve read The Familiars about five times now and I still haven’t quite grasped what’s actually going on in this tale.  Are the boy’s friends real or only imaginary?  There does seem to be some sort of magic going on.  In one scene the mother visits her dead husband’s grave, then goes to a stream and casts away some of his belongings.  Yet we are never told why.  This made me wonder if the friends are actually the father returning in a different form, and this was the mother’s way of trying to be rid of him/them.  Or perhaps the story is about the mother’s attempts to reign in her son’s imagination before he starts school and enters the real world.  Or perhaps it’s merely about loss and mourning, and the ways that people deal with it.  That’s the beauty of this story, it seems designed to make you ponder and speculate; an approach which in the wrong hands could simple frustrate the reader, but here it keeps you coming back again and again to re-read.  If I had to describe this story with one word it would be: enchanting.

Find it: The New Black anthology by Richard Thomas; The Weird anthology by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

Also recommended by the same author : Porn and Revolution in the Peaceable Kingdom

Set in a future world where animals have out-evolved human beings, Porn…tells the story of Tim, a lonely sentient slime mould who works in Wall-Mart and whose only source of companionship is his pet human, Fifi.  The story follows Tim’s frustrations as he tries on-line dating (with a Parrott!), attempts to keep Fifi from mating, and tries to find some sense of purpose in life.  Essentially, this is a tale of modern-day living with a twist.  Projecting it into an animal-ruled future allows the story to be both humorous (the scene where Tim comes home one day to find Fifi rutting on top of a neighbour’s car was a laugh out loud moment for me), and thought-provoking.  Some people have and will object to one scene near the end of the story, but for me this was a very enjoyable read.  Again, Morrissette delivers with her exquisite writing and fantastic world-building skills.

Find it: online at Tor.com