New Horror Stories

As much as I like writing about big mouthed thieves and grizzly bears fighting Nazi dolphins, every so often I get the itch to try and tackle something a bit tougher and closer to the bone.

Fall From Grace was one of those stories.  It's the tale of Sarah, a volunteer aid worker who's sent out to a town in an unnamed country wracked by war and famine, and of what she discovers there.  Sarah is a basically decent person, as basically decent as most of us, anyway, but she finds herself vastly out of her depth, confronted with real horrors and real malevolence.

Fall From Grace was definitely a tough write.  I wrote it originally for an anthology titled Hell on Earth, and I took the brief perhaps too literally.  It goes to places I wasn't comfortable with visiting, and because it gives voice to a character both articulate and genuinely evil, it puts into words ideas and arguments that I'd hate for anyone to mix up with my own.  I've always figured that's one of the limbs you go out on as a writer, especially when writing horror; to talk about things that aren't supposed to be talked about, express opinions you'd never agree with in a thousand years.  Horror, after all, is supposed to kick in the doors of our comfort zones.  Still, I hesitated to send out Fall From Grace.  This was a few years ago, and I guess I was less thick-skinned about my work than now; I was worried I might be seen as trivialising the real world issues the story drew on, or reducing them to entertainment.

Anyway, I got over my doubts eventually, sent Fall From Grace out, due to the vicissitudes of publishing had it accepted not once but twice, and now, finally, it's available to read at Kaleidotrope.  After everything, it will be interesting to see what people make of it.

-O-

Prisoner of Peace was another tale that turned out difficult, on any number of levels.  It tells of a prisoner in the aftermath of a war; but the nature of that war, as well as just what is keeping the protagonist imprisoned, are revealed only slowly.  Like Fall From Grace, it draws on certain real world horrors that don't often get discussed, especially in genre fiction - and on one atrocity in particular that seems to me a peculiar blind spot for many people.  Prisoner of Peace also plays around with time, with reality and perception and memory, and tries to talk about questions like the nature of guilt and the nature of forgiveness.  Unlike most everything else I've written, it's almost wilfully obstructive; it probably defies a casual reading, and I suspect it might take a couple of runs through to fully understand.

That's perhaps the main reason it's proved such a hard sell.  I hope so, anyway, since I think Prisoner of Peace is the best horror story I've written, and I don't normally misjudge my work quite that drastically.  I was disappointed by some of the markets that turned it down, but pleased when editor Eric Guignard - whose much-acclaimed debut collection Dark Tales of Lost Civilisations I was in earlier this year - expressed an interest.  Even then, though, I dithered more than I had any right to, unsure if Eric's next anthology After Death was the right place for a story I felt so strongly about.

Now, having seen the cover art, having seen the thought and effort he's put into getting his head around and then editing and reediting Prisoner of Peace and, most recently, having seen the stunning interior artwork Eric's commissioned to accompany it, I've come to realise that it couldn't have found a more appropriate home.  After Death should be out soon, and I can't wait to see what the rest of the book look like.

One Sale, a Couple of Reviews

Just when it seemed that things were quieting down and all the eventful stuff for the year was done with, a couple of bits of good news and some other interesting odds and sods appeared to enliven my week.

Actually, that's a small fib, in that the particular bit of good news I'm typing about now arrived a week or two ago, but there were a couple of contractual doodads I wanted to clarify, and now that they're clarified I think it's okay to consider it a new bit of good news all over again.  The long and the short of it is that once print-zine, soon to be webzine Kaleidotrope have picked up my languishing horror story Fall From Grace. 

As I whimpered about here, Fall was going to appear in an exciting anthology from Northern Frights Publishing until Northern Frights enigmatically imploded.  That was decidedly sad, because they were great and so would the anthology have been, but from my point of view at least, it's cheering that Fall has found a new home so quickly.  And what a home!  Kaleidotrope introduces itself with the line, "...if you dig Martians, robots, and people with melting heads...", and who doesn't dig those things?  I mean seriously, who?  Find me the man or woman who doesn't dig those things and I'll tweak your ear and call you a liar.

Elsewhere and elsewise, I stumbled over a couple of reviews / write-ups of my stories that had somehow slipped under my radar.  Firstly, SFSite had some fairly positive things to say about The Burning Room, as published in Bull Spec:

In "The Burning Room" by David Tallerman, Miss Taversham is boarding in an attic room, and her landlady Mrs. Faraday whose odd behaviour is of deep interest to her as she surveys the room she will stay in for awhile. Mrs Faraday hides a secret about this particular room, though, and the new tenant must find out more about it, or risk losing her sanity. "The Burning room" is a haunting tale that seems to linger in the mind long after the reader moves onto another story.

Perhaps a bit more exciting - in that it really pins a few of the things I was trying to get at - is this extract on Jenny's Sick from Tangent's review of Lightspeed #7:

How do you stand out in a world where everyone is perfect? In “Jenny’s Sick” by David Tallerman, all disease has been eradicated, or so it would seem. When a college man intent on pursuing a career finds his roommate suffering from influenza, gastroenteritis, and other maladies, he discovers she’s been taking pills to make herself sick. He ignores her addiction and moves out rather than try to dissuade her from her self-afflicting tendencies. Troubled by guilt, can he find it in his heart to help his former lover and friend in her time of need, or will his life and career take precedence?

Science takes a back seat to the smooth prose and identifiable characters in “Jenny’s Sick.” Turn the disease-inducing drugs into modern illegal street drugs and the story wouldn’t change . . . much. But there is an underlying current that paints a scary picture of life where everyone can have a flawless body and the boundary between sane and insane is blurred. I recommend “Jenny’s Sick” based on the characters and its thought-provoking nature.

Many cheers to Rhonda Porrett for such a thoughtful commentary.

Fallen Antho Canned as Northern Frights Goes On Hiatus

I suppose it was inevitable that with some of the good news I've been posting lately on the writing front - and the even better news I hope to be letting out of the bag very soon - there was bound to be something really rubbish lurking round the corner.

And lo, it arrived on Friday night, in the form of an e-mail from Northern Frights Publishing editor JW Schnarr telling me that, for undisclosed personal reasons, NFP it going on hiatus, the forthcoming Fallen anthology won't see the light of day, and my story Fall From Grace is back out in the cold.

I'd try to be all philosophical about it but frankly, given my desperate lack of short fiction sales over the last few months and the tenuous states of the tiny handful of publications I've still got on the way, this was a blow - all the more so because I was hugely looking forward to this one.  The three books NFP put out in its brief life were all beautifully designed and well received, and I've not doubt that both of those things would have been equally true of Fallen. 

I wrote to Mr Schnarr asking if he could see any way around this, since he suggested he plans to consolidate NFP at some point in the future.  Personally, give how astonishingly hard it can be to find a really good home for a story, I'd rather give an editor a few months leeway than try to resell it elsewhere.  But I haven't received a reply, and perhaps, in the face of whatever crisis was significant enough for him to put to bed such an obvious labour of love, it was naive to expect one.  However it works out, I hope this isn't the end of Northern Frights.  There aren't enough, and will never be enough, great small press publishers out there.


On a more positive and completely unrelated note ... I only had to mention that I'd written a wombot into the new Endangered Weapon script and Bob Molesworth sent me a sketch of one.  How neat is that?

Fallen From Grace

Last Monday was a good day.

I got out of work early to find some seriously unseasonal sunshine waiting for me, and decided that rather than waste it, I'd head out into the countryside.  I've been doing a lot of this since I moved to Cheltenham, since I've got the Cotswolds on my doorstep and the Cotswolds are one of the most downright beautiful parts of the country I've ever come across.  But this was the first time I'd ventured out on the spur of the moment.  Luckily, I knew a short walk within reasonable biking distance, and had just enough daylight left to get there, get round and make it home again.

An hour later I was standing on the hillside above Cheltenham, looking down over the city and for miles past it, the sun beating down, a little knackered from the bike ride and the hike up there but still feeling pretty great - when my phone gave its little 'new e-mail' warble.  More spam?  Amazon trying to sell me a ton of stuff I didn't want?  Nope, it was Northern Frights Publishing, writing to tell me that my story Fall From Grace had been accepted for their forthcoming collection Fallen: An Anthology of Demonic Horror.

I've had my fingers crossed for ages on this one - because NFP have been putting out some really imaginative, exciting and stunningly designed books, and because Fall From Grace is so dark and fundamentally twisted that I wasn't sure anyone would ever agree to publish it.

So ... like I said, a good day.