Short Fiction News June 2020

Due mostly to reasons of being crazy busy, I've been pretty lax with getting news out about my short story appearances, and only now do I realise that it's been more than six months since I last posted on the subject, which is all the worse because I actually have a ton of stuff to discuss, and a lot of it really deserved to be properly promoted at the time.  Sorry, publisher folks!

Most exciting for me, because I hardly ever get the time to write and / or edit up new fiction, I've sold a couple of brand new stories.  One of those has already been out, in the first issue of the magazine Hybrid Fiction way back in February.  As the name suggests, Hybrid's gig is fiction that mashes multiple genres together, and my piece was definitely that.  Originally written on spec for an anthology of steampunk ghost stories, the editors of which I guess didn't consider it steampunky or ghosty enough, Ghost Drive ran off with that brief to some mad places, imagining an alt-historical Victorian England waging war against its former colonies and dangerously obsessed with the Matter of Britain.  There's spiritualism and dog-fighting and airships and, in retrospect, this one was probably never going to find a home except in a market that was specifically on the look-out for demented mashups, so no doubt things worked out for the best.

My other new sale is something else entirely, though I suppose it's still not exactly a story that slots neatly into a single genre.  I mean, it's going to be appearing in the fantastic Nightmare - the first market I tried, making for one of the easiest, most satisfying sales I've ever had! - so you'd assume that it's basically horror.  And sure, that's true, but in common with a lot of my horror fiction, it's much more about people and the messes they get involved in inside their own heads than it is about blood and guts.  Not Us is my take on the Invasion of the Body Snatchers template, and I dare say it's rather different from the usual approach.  Beyond that, I'd better keep schtum, because I suspect this one works better if you come at it without too much foreknowledge.  Er, not that it's out yet anyway!  More news as I have it and all that.

The rest is all reprints, but there's been a fair few of them and they're in some exciting places, so I'm not grumbling.  Top of the list has to go to Casualty of Peace - my sort-of-First-World-War sort-of-ghost story - appearing in the March issue of The Dark, in part because it was a rare occasion of being approached for a story and in part because the one I picked is high on my list of personal favourites.  Between this, its original appearance in the sixth Horror Library anthology, and popping up in Flame Tree's Lost Souls collection, I'm really pleased that it's done so well for itself - plus, this time around, it's available to read for free, so go take a look at the link above.

Elsewhere, UK zine The Future Looms has released its first-ever best of, and it contains not one but two of my stories, which happens to be the precise number of stories I've had appear in The Future Looms.  Glamorous Corpses finds reality TV taken to horrifying extremes, then mixes in a hefty dose of cyberpunk noir because why not?  And Life, Without Possibility envisages a future society that's effectively cured death and asks, what do they do with those who don't belong and who want nothing less than to live forever?  Indeed, much like life itself, they're both nasty, bleak and short - but, you know, in a good way!  Anyway, I haven't seen a copy of the collection outside of the proofs, but I've been impressed by the 'zine itself, so if you're into cyperpunk, I'm willing to bet it's worth a look.

Next up, we have my one and only crime short story in the one and only crime anthology I've appeared in - well, okay, mystery anthology, strictly speaking, what with it being called The Black Beacon Book of Mystery and everything!  And Step Light - originally picked up through some mad fluke by the excellent and venerable Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, who still send me a Christmas card to this day - is definitely a mystery, but of a rather convoluted sort.  It's actually more of a why-dunnit, and the misdeed that was misdone isn't clear until right near the end, at which point the whole shebang transforms into something else altogether.  I've only had the opportunity to glance through my contributor copy, but I was impressed by what I saw.  You can find Black Beacon Books here, and there's a brief interview here that I took part in as part of the promotion.

The next one was a real blast from the past: nearly the first magazine I was published in was The Willows, a compendium of classic-style weird tales of the sort I wrote quite a lot of in the early days (enough, anyway, to produce an entire collection out of them!)  I had three stories appear there, The Gate in the Jungle, The Facts in the Case of Algernon Whisper's Karma, and what ended up being titled The God Under the Church, and The Burning Room would have appeared there too had they not closed.  Anyway, out of the blue last year I got an e-mail from editor Ben Thomas asking if I wouldn't mind my three tales appearing in a reprint anthology of all the issues.  I wouldn't have been thrilled at the thought of early work being put out as was, but fortunately all of them had been rejigged in the time since, and Ben was happy to take the more recent versions.  My contributor copy got temporarily mislaid in the postal system, but that made it all the more of a treat when it eventually arrived, because it's awfully impressive.  The presentation is lovely and the thing is absolutely massive; you could bench press the paperback, so I daren't imagine what the hardback weighs!  You can grab either (or both) here, and if classic weird fiction is your bag, the collection's certainly a worthy investment.

And to finish on a high note, I've made it into NewCon Press's Best of British Science Fiction for the second year running!  Last year was cool and all, but that story, Cat and Mouse, as much as I was fond of it and glad to see it reprinted, was an older piece and submitted primarily because it happened to be the one science fiction story I'd had out.  This time around, I got to go with a piece I legitimately think is one of the better science fiction stories I've produced and just maybe deserves to be in the sort of fabulous company these collections provide.  Parasite Art originally appeared in Interzone, and that makes sense because it's a very Interzone-y sort of story.  My good friend and beta reader Tom Rice's response to it was "You were really channelling Phillip K Dick that day!" which is either the nicest praise or the least scathing criticism I've ever had.  It's a piece about art, and creativity, and gatekeepers, and possibly me trying to work out all of my many issues with those subjects ... but, you know, it also has a bunch of weird aliens in it, because sci-fi.  The book's out in mid-July and available for pre-order, and as ever with the NewCon anthologies I've been a part of, the line-up's one I'm thrilled to be associated with.