Bards and Sage, Some Zombies and Dying

Yes, it may seem like a horribly contrived post title, not to mention a lousy pun, but look past those minor imperfections and you'll see that, with a little assistance from those goofy funsters Simon and Garfunkel, I've perfectly summed up two fairly disparate bits of news into one punchy headline.  You get it now, right?  No?  Possibly you're reading the words in the wrong order or something.  Try squinting.  Maybe rub your stomach a little.

Or ... wait ... perhaps it would make more sense if I actually wrote what the post was about?  That could work.  Well, the first part refers to the fact that my A Stare From the Darkness came out just recently in Bards and Sages Quarterly - a fact cleverly hidden by their website, which doesn't seem to have been updated since the mid-nineties.  Stare is another of my older, much-redrafted stories; turning three pages of flashback into two lines of dialogue was one of those weird "oh, so that's how you do it," moments that come along every so often in writing.  It's about monsters real and created, mixed up with some of the anthropology theory I picked up during my MA on 17th century witchcraft and a fair bit of Hammer Horror.  Actually, its original, even clunkier title of A Stare From the Void and the overly-quoted Nietzsche blurb it's ripped from gives a good idea of what it's about.

As for the bit about zombies and dying, that's obviously a reference to the fact that the Slices of Flesh anthology came out a week or two ago, with my Wetback amongst the absolutely mammoth list of flash stories contained therein.  The line-up for this one is just staggering, with so many big names that I can't bring myself to pick any particular ones out, it's got a Mike Mignola and Dave Stewart cover and the proceeds are going to various literacy charities, so I feel really good about recommending it.

Right, there we go.  Bards and Sage ... that's almost the name of the magazine, yes?  And then the "some zombies and dying"?  That's a reference to Wetback, in which there are zombies and a load of people get horribly killed.  And if you read it really quickly and squint, it sort of sounds a bit like "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme", right?  You know, the song?  It's a pun ... or perhaps more accurately, a play on words.

Although, now that I think about it, possibly not a very good one.