I am delighted that my story The Telling, which won the 2013 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story, will appear in a Mandarin Chinese translation in the June issue of Science Fiction World. This is, as far as I know, the first translation of any of my work in Chinese.
My story The Hearts of All is out Black Static #73 from TTA Press, along with stories from Keith Rosson, Maria Haskins, and Jack Westlake. The issue is, as always, beautifully illustrated and filled with great non-fiction as well.
Here’s a sample of The Hearts of All:
It was only after the horse had turned that they saw that it was still on fire. A rim of thin blue flame outlined the patch where the skin had burned away, from flank to jaw. A tendon in its neck quivered like a plucked string, shockingly white against the blackened flesh.
Fallow clenched his fingers in his beard, and tried not to think of the candle’s flame gone that same blue against the spoon.
The horse’s head trembled, every muscle in its jaw ridged as if carved by a dull tool, but its eye was steady on them.
The Realtor raised her phone again, as if it were a gun, as if a report could evict the horse from this misery.
Fallow said, “He must be wicked to deserve such pain.”
My story Dear Boy is out now in Weird Fiction Review #10 edited by John Pelan and published by Centipede Press. It’s an absolutely beautiful volume, 392 pages, filled with color illustrations, with fiction by D. P. Watt, Anna Tambour, Richard Gavin, Marc Laidlaw, Gemma Files and others, and a slew of non-fiction articles including a history of Mexican horror comics by Silva Moreno-Garcia. On sale now for a great price.
Here’s a sample from Dear Boy:
Ernst Vul struggled to explain how he could be so haunted by a story that he barely remembered. He could not even recall when he had read it; decades ago at the very least. Had he been in school? Would the school library have carried a work so unsettling, one set so deeply in the grotesque?
It might have been a comic, one of those rare prizes plucked from an old sibling and passed from seat to seat while the teacher’s back was turned, or read by flickering light under bedcovers. The images in Ernst’s head, as torn and faded as they were, were certainly vivid enough: a cast of intricately depicted deformities; perspectives of unsettling angles, as if the viewer had suffered some dreadful dislocation; the colors, the lurid, unnatural colors, nothing like the bright primary colors of the art class, as if refracted from some other light, distilled from pigments of some obscure and esoteric source.
I am delighted to announce that my story The Empyrean Light, originally published in Conjunctions #71, will be included in Paula Guran’s Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror from Prime Books, alongside works from some of my favorite authors.
Announcing The Unquiet Dreamer: A Tribute to Harlan Ellison, edited by Preston Grassmann with illustrations by Yoshika Nagata, coming out this August from PS Publishing. I am delighted that my story With Frank and Lucinda Brewer at the East Pole is part of this anthology.
It’s available for preorder now, in both hardcover and a signed limited-edition slipcased version. And the release party will be at WorldCon in Dublin—look for me there!
Here’s a peek at the backstory behind the anthology, and at some of the included artwork and stories.
And here are details on the limited edition.
My story The Empyrean Light from Conjunctions:71 A Cabinet of Curiosity is available to read online. Or you can buy the full issue in trade paperback book format at selected bookstores or online here.
Something was lying in the street. Ms. Wronski thought she saw it move, but by the time she had juggled her way up the stairs with her keys and the bag with the milk and the crumple of supermarket flyers and her satchel of ungraded homework, she was no longer certain. Curious, she peered down at it through the brittle curtains. Between the steep angle and the dim light of the street lamp, all Ms. Wronski could make out was a featureless black lump of undecided shape or size. As she watched, it moved, slowly up like a hand raised in hesitant recognition, then uncertainly down again. She stepped back from the window with a vague sense of embarrassment, and went to put the kettle on.
“It’s a bag, one of those green trash bags for the leaves,” she said to the teapot.
But this explanation didn’t sit well in Ms. Wronski’s stomach; something about the motion she’d seen was too deliberate to be the wind, more like the pouring of the milk than the way it swirled afterward in her cup. An image came to her, so vivid and visceral that she spilled her tea, of an infant escaped from one of the houses that lined the other side of the street, its little hands and knees bruised and filthy from the asphalt.
Here’s an amazing concept design by artist Leilani Joy for The Scout from my story The Tale of the Scout and the Pachydormu, out now at Beneath Ceaseless Skies.
My novelette The Tale of the Scout and the Pachydormu is out now on the Beneath Ceaseless Skies website, as part of their tenth anniversary issue. This is my fourth story at BCS, and I am proud to be able to be a part of the celebration of ten years of truly great fantasy.
I am delighted to announce that I’ve sold my novelette “The Tale of the Scout and the Pachydormu” to Beneath Ceaseless Skies. This is my fourth sale to that excellent venue, and I’m every bit as thrilled as I was for the first sale. Here are my previous stories there:
The Telling — my first published fantasy story and winner of the 2013 World Fantasy Award
The Leaves Upon Her Falling Light
And here’s the opening of the story:
Like you, I grew up with the telling of the Tale of the Scout and the Pachydormu. That telling, on the night of first new moon of winter, marked my years between toddler and twelve like tree rings.
The warm spice smell of the Butter Punch, the weight of that punch on your tongue and in your throat, the sugar crunch of the cookies–the slumped star of their legs and heads, the soft meringue of their shell hiding a spoonful of jam or a candied nut or the startling crackof the one uncooked bean that appointed the finder the night’s Governor–the giggles and gasps as the night’s Governor was hefted overhead and passed hand to hand around the room, the soft-hard of flannel blankets quilting the floor, pillowcases still filled with last year’s smells and last year’s crumbs, the knock and groan of the radiators whose warmth grew more welcome as the night stretched out. And of course the soft solemn tones of ‘Uncle Willow’ reciting the Tale.
I’m delighted to have sold my short story “The Empyrean Light” to Conjunctions, for their Fall 2018 issue “A Cabinet of Curiosity”.
Here’s a taste:
Something was lying in the street. Ms. Wronski thought she saw it move, but by the time she had juggled her way up the stairs with her keys and the bag with the milk and the crumple of supermarket flyers and her satchel of ungraded homework, she was no longer certain. Curious, she peered down at it through the brittle curtains. Between the steep angle and dim light of the streetlamp, all Ms. Wronski could make out was a featureless black lump of undecided shape or size. As she watched, it moved, slowly up like a hand raised in hesitant recognition, then uncertainly down again. She stepped back from the window with a vague sense of embarrassment, and went to put the kettle on.