Hey, I’m excited. I know, I know . . . I excite easy but there’s particularly good reason this week.
Nicky and I are taking a long weekend break in the coastal wilds of Northumberland, armed with only a couple of books, our appetites and my writing book. So if you hang your hat somewhere near Alnwick then keep an eye peeled for us around the Treehouse Resaurant or that wonderful bookshop with the toy train running through all the rooms or the local Thai restaurant or any of the local real ale establishments or, well, you know the drill: just come say Hi, give us your mailing address and we’ll send you a book when we get home.
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This time from Kat Howard onTor.com: go here:
on-the-edges-of-a-haunting-elizabeth-hands-wylding-hall/
‘When writing a post on Elizabeth Hand’s writing for a series called "That Was Awesome," there’s a certain temptation to shortcut the entire thing, and simply list her bibliography. Because, really, if you want to read a writer who knows how to do awesome—from the creepy that hides on the edges of the page to the numinous that bursts across it—you should be reading Elizabeth Hand.
'Instead of just pointing you in her general direction, though, I’m going to talk specifically about one of her more recent books, WYLDING HALL. It is definitely awesome—and recently nominated for both the Locus and Shirley Jackson awards, so you don’t have to take my word for it.’
Maybe not, Kat but it seems you know what you’re talking about so I’m going to recommend that our readers listen to what you have to say. It’s also maybe worth mentioning, folks, that Kat’s short fiction has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, anthologized in year’s best and best of collections, and performed on NPR. ROSES AND ROT is her debut novel and I’m betting it’s going to be worth checking it out. After all, Publishers Weekly called it the Best Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror Novel of Summer 2016 and Neil Gaiman called Kat ‘a remarkable young writer.’
Let’s all of us check her novel out and then report back Meanwhile, you can find Kat on twitter at @KatWithSword—tell her Pete sent ya!
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—which I can’t really tell you anything about just yet although we’re discussing several projects that have got me feeling pretty juiced up. Certainly I can mention that the signing sheets for Steve Erikson’s THE FIENDS OF NIGHTMARIA are now on their way to Canada to Steve who (as of 10 minutes ago) now has all the layouts to check.
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Meanwhile the one-man blur of brush and paint that is David Stoupakis is still creating a veritable conflagration with the artwork for our limited edition of Joe Hill’s THE FIREMAN. Each time David sends a new piece (check out this one, the face in the furnace) Joe and I go into slavering burbles. All of which gives me just a minute or two to say Hey and to pass on heaps of good vibes and heartfelt best wishes to those folks in Canada who have lost so much with the terrible fires. I honestly cannot imagine how you must feel—stay positive (somehow) and . . . well, I guess just pray for rain.
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Just in from Bouncy Brian Sammons and Gruesome Glynn Barrass . . .
the final line-up of stories for their THROUGH A MYTHOS DARKLY, a neato neato title, I reckon, with one of my all-time favourite story titles (being a fan of The Band and all—I’m sure you’ll guess it). Here’s the pitch:
THROUGH A MYTHOS DARKLY is a new anthology of Lovecraftian horror edited by Brian M. Sammons and Glynn Owen Barrass featuring tales in alternative realties. Places unknown, yet eerily familiar. Imagine a world where the legacy of King Arthur and his knights is alive and well today. What if the American Civil War ended how it shouldn’t have? Here you will find doctors fighting ills not born from nature as we know it, and those that do the imaginable in a world where the dead hold all the power. Viking Britons must make strange alliances to save their empire; famous monsters from cinema are re-imagined; religious mania grips nations but the gods worshipped are not the ones you would expect; turn of the century whalers hunt larger, more terrifying prey; and more. Those are some of the starting points of these tales, and then you look at them, darkly, through the prism of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos and the end result is seventeen stories that take the reader to places and worlds beyond your wildest dreams . . . and your darkest nightmares, too.
And here’s the full roster:
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‘The Roadrunners’ by Cody Goodfellow
- ‘Scrimshaw’ by Jeffrey Thomas
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‘Sweet Angie Tailor in: Subterranean Showdown’ by John Langan
- ‘An Old and Secret Cult’ by Robert M. Price
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‘Stewert Behr – Deanimator’ by Pete Rawlik
- ‘To Kill a King’ by Don Webb
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‘The Last Quest’ By William Meikle
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‘Fate of the World’ by Christine Morgan
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‘Red in the Water, Salt on the Earth’ by Konstantine Paradias
- ‘The Night They Drove Cro Magnon Down’ by D.A. Madigan
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‘Sacrifice’ by Sam Stone
- ‘Get Off Your Knees I’m Not Your God’ by Edward Morris
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‘Excerpts from the Diaries of Henry P. Linklatter’ by Stephen Mark Rainey
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‘Plague Doctor’ by Tim Waggoner
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‘Amidst the Blighted Swathes of Grey Desolation’ by Lee Clark Zumpe
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‘Cognac, Communism, and Cocaine’ by Nick Mamatas and Molly Tanzer
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‘Kai Monstrai Ateik (When the Monsters Come)’ by Damien Angelica Walters
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You’ll surely have seen that we have a limited quantity of CD’s THE SHINING (which looks beautiful—I hate those guys, I tell you, I trulyhate ‘em) and we still have a few copies of several titles in our “Other Publishers” section. I’ll do a round-up next week.
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There’s more to tell you but Mike will kill me if I don’t get this turned in to him tonight (it’s Thursday right now, an hour to tomorrow, and already the night folk are rustling along the corridors of PS Towers ) . . . and when Mike is through, Nicky will do unspeakable things to my barely warm corpse cos I haven’t packed my case. So, this really does need to be a short one—I’ll make it up to youse guys, promise.
In the meantime, enjoy the weekend and enjoy whomever you spend it with. Just like I’m gonna do. Happy reading
Pete
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