Short Story News, May 2017

Not for the first time, I've been lax in keeping up with my short story news, and not for the first time that means I now have a couple of posts' worth that I'm going to have to cram into just the one.  And as usual, the reason was that I felt as though not a lot was happening until I suddenly realized that it had been and I'd just been distracted!

Anyway, let's go for the new stories first.  Casualty of Peace marks my third collaboration with award-winning editor Eric Guignard; Eric got in touch to let me know he was resuscitating the long-running Horror Library anthology series, and did I have anything that might be a good fit?  The story we settled on is something of a companion to the last one Eric bought from me, Prisoner of Peace, and came out of the World War One research that occupied so much of my first year of full-time writing.  The question I found myself asking was, what must it have been like for those wives and mothers on the home front in the latter years of the war, who'd seen so many men return mentally or physically damaged beyond all repair?  Did they hope that their menfolk would be somehow exempted?  Or did they begin to secretly dread their return?  The result, like Prisoner of Peace, is a ghost story of sorts, an extended metaphor and a puzzle with no real answer, except perhaps that war spares no-one.  You can find it in Horror Library volume six.

I feel like I've mentioned my golem sex story quite a few times here, but perhaps that's just because I like typing the phrase "golem sex story."  And perhaps I'm not doing Feet of Clay, Mind of Coal justice by focusing on one particular, brief scene in what's actually an (admittedly rather weird) love story with a background in the folklore research I drifted into for my MA dissertation.  At any rate, of everything here, the third in Pantheon Magazine's Gaia anthology series is the only book I've actually found time to read, and it was just as good as volume two, which I enjoyed a great deal.  You can grab a copy here.

My second sale to the impossibly long-running Space and Time was another older story.  I can't even remember exactly how long ago I wrote Children of Deadways, except that it came towards the end of a period when I produced a lot of work I'm particularly happy with.  I was experimenting with the possibilities of going all-in on world building, and this is maybe the culmination of that trend, an elaborately Gothic dark fantasy with a setting I could probably have squeezed a whole novel out of.  You can grab a copy of issue 128 from the Space and Time website, and it comes highly recommended; there are reasons this magazine has managed to stick around for half a century.


Lastly for the new stuff, my most recent sale turned out also to be the most recent thing to come out: Now That All the Heroes are Dead was picked up by Read Short Fiction not even a month ago and, as of the start of May, it's up to read on the site.  I wrote this one for an open anthology call asking for Lovecraftian heroic fantasy fiction and, between you and me and in my greatly biased opinion, I still think they were dumbasses not to take it!  I had great fun distilling all my favourite weird fiction into one twisted little tale, and there's even a bit of subtext in there, thanks again to all that World War One reading.  It's pretty short, too, so why not give it a read?

On the reprints side, the most exciting news is perhaps that the editors at Pseudopod got in touch to ask if they could anthologize my story Stockholm Syndrome as part of their 10th anniversary celebrations.  Obviously I said yes, but I also took the opportunity to polish up a story that, frankly, has long since stopped owing me any favours; between Pseudopod itself and the hugely successful The Living Dead anthology, this has to be the most widely read (and listened to) short story I've written.  You can find the improved new version in the For Mortal Things Unsung anthology - which, given that it was primarily an incentive for a Kickstarter campaign, isn't that widely available, but can be grabbed from Smashwords, among other places.

Meanwhile, it will surprise no-one that I've had a couple more stories out with Digital Fiction Publishing.  As well as appearing in their own adorable individual e-books, Passive Resistance can be found in the Operative Sequence science-fiction collection and Rindelstein's Monsters appears in the Digital Fantasy Fiction book Casual Conjurings - which, by slightly awkward coincidence, I also did some of the slush-reading for.  Fortunately Rindelstein's Monsters got picked up well before I started, so at least I can't be accused of being one of tham thar nepotists, and the plus side is that, even having not seen a copy yet, I can confirm that there's some cracking fiction inside.

Last up - since I can't talk yet about the highly exciting reprint sale I snagged a few weeks ago! - I have a couple more pieces in Great Jones Street, namely my two stories following master assassin Otranto Osario through the mean streets of Cold Harbour, Ill-Met at Midnight and A Killer of Dead Men.  If you're at interested in short fiction then you really need to be paying attention to Great Jones Street, their app is free to download and is absolutely stuffed with great work from some of the biggest names in the industry (and, er, me.)

Anyway, that'll do for the moment.  As I vaguely remember predicting, the sales have slowed down this year - in fact, until April they'd dried up altogether - so I don't actually have that much left to come out.  But what there is is pretty exciting, so hopefully I'll have enough material to justify another one of these posts before too long.

The Sign in the Moonlight: The Door Beyond the Water

The Door Beyond the Water is at its core another early tale, from the period when I was very much in the thrall of Lovecraft and Poe and Machen and weird tales in general - a time that provided the backbone and impetus for what would eventually end up being The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories.  Like The Facts in the Case of Algernon Whisper's Karma, it first appeared in a brief-lived and little-read market called The Willows way back when, and like The Facts in the Case of Algernon Whisper's Karma it got something of an overhaul before I felt it was ready to stand alongside more recent work.

In the case of The Door Beyond the Water, however, that work had already been done beforehand, and had been a whole lot more comprehensive.  I originally rewrote it when I was approached by editor Eric Guignard to provide a story for his anthology Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations.  (Eric, incidentally, would publish another story from the collection, Prisoner of Peace, in his next anthology.)  I had nothing new to offer him, and as a compromise I offered to revise an older piece under a new title, with the understanding that it would be a substantial enough revision to actually warrant the change of name.  Eric was okay with that, so I went back to the story - it was The Gate in the Jungle at that point - with an excuse to really set about tearing it down and building it back up again, and the goal of having something by the end that I'd feel comfortable setting alongside the kind of stuff I was producing then.

It worked out well, all told.  I was fond of the original, but I think the revision brought the things I liked about it into much sharper perspective.  I said in an earlier one of these posts that the impetus for a lot of these stories to was to write slantwise homages, pieces that stayed true to the weird tales of the early decades of the twentieth century whilst finding new ways into them, in some cases ones that maybe weren't quite so alienating to a modern sensibility.  In that sense, The Door Beyond the Water was me locking horns with the assumptions about race, and about civilization, that are prevalent in so much work from the period.  It's a tale of that classic Victorian educated white chap coming into a situation he doesn't even slightly understand and making one unholy mess of things, basically - and also, now that I think, an excuse for my to play around with some of the shamanism stuff that came out of studying Elizabethan witchcraft for my post-grad degree.

Here, anyway, is an extract:

The message came to him in dreams, before the second moon of the season: A man comes to free the imprisoned one. Nothing more than that.

But for Cha Né - who was shaman, who saw beneath the mystery of things - that sentence was enough to darken his heart with fear such as he'd never known.

The next night he confronted his spirit-guide with the inevitable questions.  "Who is this man who comes? Is he of the mountain people? Is he from the hollow tribe?"  It hardly seemed possible, unless the ancient truces had been somehow corrupted.  "I must know, Shanoctoc."

The feathered guide had hesitated long before answering.  "He is Montague Evans.  He is not of the three tribes, nor of the lands between the water and the mountains.  He is a white man, of the tribe of Henry Johnson.  He will arrive before the third moon."

Then Cha Né’s guide, his one companion in the Otherworld, sank into the waters of the lake - was swallowed amidst shivering liquid tendrils.

Cha Né knew, without knowing how, that it was the last time they would ever meet.

The Sign in the Moonlight: Prisoner of Peace

A hard one to talk about, this, since I don't want to give too much away about a tale that I suspect is best encountered with as little preliminary knowledge as possible.  I suppose I can safely say that it's a ghost story - the second in the collection after The Burning Room - and that it was originally published in the Stoker-award-winning anthology After Death, before being podcast soon after in Pseudopod.  And I perhaps shouldn't say, but will anyway, that it's my favourite of the horror stories I've written.

The reason for that is that it falls most closely in line with my own tastes in horror.  Ever since I played the video game Silent Hill 2, for me one of the masterpieces of the genre in any medium, I'd been wanting to try and capture in my own work some of what I'd found most effective there: the combination of overt violence and grotesqueness with more complex psychological subtexts and the studied build-up of a profound, almost instinctive sense of dread.   There's something fascinating for me in the way that the Silent Hill games make the deepest fears of their protagonists tangible in subtle and yet often immensely twisted ways.  They're hellscapes of the mind, basically, and while that isn't exactly an original notion, I've never seen it done quite so effectively as here.

The impulse to try and incorporate that into a horror story had been with me for a long while, but I never found the right project for it, and I certainly didn't want to end up with something that was only an imitation or pastiche.  Nor was I particularly inclined to include the blood-and-gore side of things, it was definitely more the puzzle box aspect that appealed to me, the idea of a story in which the external trappings only make sense once you come to appreciate the character's interior world.

I don't know how much those Silent Hill genes show through in Prisoner of Peace; it's a more subdued affair, sad rather than horrifying, not even really intended to be frightening or disgusting but just to try and creep inside the head and scratch away there.  It deals in tragedies both individual and societal, and the ultimate horror it finds is an all too real one from the past, one that's always haunted me as a nadir of what we as a species are capable of.

And on that note, here's a sample:

There is a tapping coming from the next room.  

I call it a room, but I know it is a cell - just as I know that my room is a cell.  The tapping is irregular, arrhythmic, and I think it is the sound of someone trying to communicate.  A pipe runs along the bottom of my wall.  If I were to strike it, just so, with the heel of a sandal or a stone perhaps, it would make a noise like the one from the next room.

But I have no sandal, no stone, nothing to rap against the pipe.  Nor do I know what the noises mean, if they mean anything at all.  If the tapping is a message, it is one I cannot understand, can't reciprocate.

I realise now that I have heard the noise before - and sometimes, other noises too.  On occasions, there is a sound of heavy, booted footsteps.  They approach from the near distance, pass my door, continue a little way and then return, recede, approach again.
It can only be someone patrolling the corridor, and I think sometimes to call out.  There are many things I could say, many questions I could ask.  The footsteps remind me that there was a time when food was left.  A bowl was placed inside my door, and later, removed.  There was rice, always, and less commonly, thin vegetable stew, a little fish.

It seems a very long time since I tasted any of these things.

Perhaps this is why I never call out.  Perhaps it is why the sounds from the neighbouring cell fill me with nothing but unease.  What frightens me - more than tapping or the echo of pacing footsteps - is the thought of the answers I might receive.

Third Sale to Pseudopod

Yes!  Pseudopod have indeed joined the tiny but worthy pantheon of markets to have accepted more than one or two of my submissions, having just now followed their purchases of Stockholm Syndrome and Prisoner of Peace with my zombie-story-with-almost-no-zombies-in-it Twitcher.   Yup, very few zombies indeed, but an awful lot of bird watching - as the title suggests - and no that's not a metaphor or a crude pun or something, it really is absolutely a zombie story about bird watching.  Possibly the first and quite probably the last, but I wrote it and Pseudopod have accepted it and that, as the saying goes, is that.

Anyway, what was especially nice about this particular sale is that it ended a quite staggering run of rejections.  I'm sure I've discussed this before*, but there are times when spells of short story rejections (and by the same measure, I suppose, spells of acceptances) seem to make absolutely no sense whatsoever.  Thanks to the might stats-providing majesty of Duotrope's Digest I can say with confidence that my acceptance ratio towards the end of October was above 13%, the highest it's ever been, and that nearly six months and maybe sixty submissions later it was sitting at less than half that.

Now experience has taught me not to worry too much and that it all balances out in the end, but what I find myself wondering is, how does this happen?  How can you be one minute comfortably selling a story a month and then going for six months without a sniff of interest?  I can think of any number of factors, but most of them would depend on me - the types of stories I was submitting, the markets I picked, the regularity with which I sent work out - and as far as I can tell my behaviour is fairly consistent.  To the best of my knowledge I haven't spent the last six months submitting crappy work or picking wildly inappropriate markets or accidentally sending out my shopping list.

Maybe the problem is that I'm looking for micropatterns when I should be looking for macropatterns.  Maybe I'm just a crappy judge of my own work.  (I'm not.)  Maybe the universe is a crazy, random place and the publishing industry is an even more crazy, random place and we're all just like dust motes in a beam of sunlight. 


No!  I believe in order, damn it, and there must be some logic here.  There must be!

But for the life I me I can't see it...




* I did and it was here.

Got a (Par)sec?

I don't pay a huge amount of attention to awards, having failed to win any since I was seven, but I got a nice e-mail from Pseudopod's Shawn Garrett the other day and I thought I'd break my rule, especially since it's not really a rule anyway but more a habit or vague inclination.

Shawn happened to mention in passing that the nominations period for the Parsec awards - a celebration of speculative fiction podcasting, as their website banner usefully points out - is open, and pointed out too that not only is Pseudopod itself eligible for "Best Speculative Fiction Magazine or Anthology Podcast" but that my story Prisoner of Peace (along with almost everything Pseudopod publishes) is potentially nominatable in the category of "Best Speculative Fiction Audio Drama (Short Form)". 

As you surely know if you listen to it on even the most semi-regular of bases, Pseuodpod is great and entirely worthy of a nomination.  However, since winning another award, or even being nominated for one, would probably just detract from that one blazing moment twenty eight years ago, I won't ask that anyone put my name forward for Prisoner of Peace. 

It is, however, surely the best horror story I've written, or at least my own personal favourite.  A tale once described as "Oldboy meets Memento in a prison cell somewhere just west of Hell," (by me, in fact, just then), it's certainly amongst the parts of my work that I'd most like to see nominated for an award or seven.  Here's the link again, in case you missed it before.

Still, like I said, it would be a genuine shame to dim the glory of that seven-year old me's triumph.  As Oscar Wilde possibly said, unless I just made it up, some moments shine too brightly to be tarnished with the tawdriness of repetition.

But you should totally nominate Pseuodpod, yes you should.  And if, while you were at it, you felt an unaccountable urge to mention my story too, well, however much the part of me that will always be that skinny seven year old, clutching his trophy or whatever the hell it was I won, standing in the floodlights and...

Wait, I'm pretty sure my school never had floodlights.  Maybe I just dreamed the whole thing.  Oh all right then, nominate Prisoner of Peace if you're so damned determined.  

I promise not to hold it against you.

Prisoner of Peace up at Pseudopod

I should probably be saying something about Nine Worlds here, but I'm still recovering, so let's come back to that one when my Con fatigue has settled down and instead I'll mention my short horror story Prisoner of Peace, which went up in podcast at Pseudopod on Friday.

There was a very good reason that it went live on that particular date, the 9th of August; it's the anniversary of the US Atomic bombing of the Japanese city of Nagasaki, an event which - without giving too much away - Prisoner of Peace is greatly informed by.  It's a subject that I have strong feelings about, a subject that it should be impossible not to have strong feelings about, and I hope I've done it some sort of justice, in however small a way.

Every time I've gone back to Prisoner, I've been surprised by how much effect it has on me: how much it creeps me out, and how wrenching I find certain scenes.  Listening to Caith Donovan's reading last night with the lights off didn't make things any better.  Caith does a great job in bringing out both the horror and the sadness of the story, and nailing the many points where the two entwine.  I'm grateful too to Al Stuart for his astute endtro, giving his own thoughts on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and their repercussions and explicitly discussing a lot that I could only nudge at in the story.

While we're on the subject, I should mention again that Prisoner is also available in Eric Guignard's terrific After Death anthology.  It's one of the best, most unusual, most lavishly illustrated anthologies I've been lucky enough to be a part of, and plenty more people should be reading it.

New Sales: Pseudopod and Beneath Ceaseless Skies

It's been a surprisingly good few weeks for short fiction sales, especially given that I haven't had a whole load of time to send stuff out lately, what with all the work on Prince Thief and Endangered Weapon and, oh, that day job thing I try not to think about.

First up recently came Pseudopod, taking my short story Prisoner of Peace - also recently accepted for Eric Guignard's very-likely-to-be-wonderful After Death anthology - and, due to some scheduling mix-ups and my usual confusion, leading to me tying myself in knots over whether a story that had been accepted but not printed could actually be called a reprint.  Fortunately it can, since After Death comes out in March / April time and Pseudopod are planning to run Prisoner on the anniversary of the Nagasaki bombing, for reasons that I can't explain without giving the whole thing away.*

Then, soon after, Beneath Ceaseless Skies editor Scott Andrews expressed interest in my Leiber-pastichingly-titled tale Ill-Met At Midnight**, with some reservations ... he wasn't entirely sold on the ending and asked me to make a few changes.  I duly went back to it, while sitting in the roof garden of our hotel in Marrakesh on a sunny December afternoon - one of the most pleasant bits of writing I've ever done.  And it did the trick!

Clearly, there's a moral here.  I now know where I've been going wrong all these years, and it has everything to do with not writing everything in beautifully sunny North African locations.  Expect this to be redressed the very moment I make enough money to emigrate...





* In fact, come to think of it, running it on the anniversary of Nagasaki already gives the game away a bit.  But it's also very appropriate, so I think it's probably okay.

** Which I recently read aloud at Fantasycon 2012, if you happen to be one of the nine people who was there.

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.

York Ghost Story Event Cancelled Due to Unexpected Ancient-Norse Apocalypse

It doesn't seem like more than a few days ago that I was explaining how I was going to spend this weekend sharing a new ghost story, Prisoner of Peace, with a bunch of fellow writers and anyone else who cared to listen, (probably because it wasn't).  And now I find myself having to report, with no small degree of sadness, that said ghost story reading event has been cancelled.

The reason?  Ragnarök.

Since York is buried beneath almost seven feet of snow, with temperatures approaching absolute zero and the sun nary more than a memory, it's hard to fault the decision to call it off.  It was probably also a factor that the national transport network has completely collapsed, perhaps because the zillions of tons of frozen water that have plunged from the sky over the last week are the wrong type of snow (hopefully, scientists somewhere are labouring right now to discover a kind that makes trains and buses run with exceptional efficiency).

Will it be rescheduled?  Not so far as I know - and really, with the world ending, what would be the point?  But maybe if the Fenris-wolf decides the sun doesn't taste that great after all and the Ice Giants realise they have something far better they could be doing, it will come along again next December - in which case I'll be ready and waiting.

York-based Spookiness 2010

If all goes to plan and the trains don't get snowed off, I will be spending next Saturday in The Minster Inn in York, drinking beer and swapping ghost stories with a group of fellow writers.  This is how I've passed the last three first-Saturdays-of-December, and I hope I get to do the same for a fair few more, because it's become one of the high points of my year.  I mean, beer, ghost stories, more beer ... it's hard to go wrong with a recipe like that.

It also means that I've had to write a new ghost story - otherwise what would I read?  So far, the results have been pretty positive.  In 2007, I read The Untold Ghost, which ended up as the editor's pick in Pill Hill Press's Haunted anthology,and in 2008 I went with The Burning Room, which should be out in Bull Spec next month.  Last year's story, Knock, Knock, is still looking for a home, but it's a strong tale and I've faith that it'll make it eventually.  Meanwhile, this year I'll be debuting a tale I put together last month and literally just finished the first redraft of, called Prisoner of Peace.  I'm really pleased with it, I think it might even be the best of the bunch, and it'll be interesting to see if anyone else likes it as much as I do.

Unfortunately, (or fortunately, I guess, depending on your perspective), I'll be trying to hold me own against some serious competition.  I'm not sure just who's going to be around for this one, but previous years have featured the likes of author / editor David Stuart Davies, the excellent Mark Valentine and my friend Mr Rafe McGregor, who introduced me to the whole thing, (and gets mentioned in this blog almost more than I do!)

So if you happen to be in the vicinity six days from now, around one in the afternoon, why not drop in and listen to a bunch of ghost stories?  Did I mention there's going to be beer?