The weird world is all about lurchers, when you get down to it. We finish off our second anniversary with some of the most popular lurcher and longdog photographs. And in between, some more generous words from guests we’ve had on during that time – two writer/publishers, Neil Baker of April Moon Books and Sam Gafford of Ulthar Press, plus writer/journalist Paul StJohn Mackintosh. Pleasingly, all three of them get the crucial importance of lurchers to our modest enterprise…
Neil Baker
Neil is a stalwart member of the small and micro-press community, those who labour to publish the stories they love. His Canadian press April Moon has released some great books, and this year he’s shooting three at the moon – Patrick Loveland’s novel A Tear in the Veil, SF with a positive twist in the collection The Stars at My Door, and a soon-to-arrive 007 spectacular, Bond Unknown, containing two novellas by Edward M Erdelac and Willie Meikle.
After being made to talk about garden furniture for some time, he relented and gave us this:
“It was with mixed emotions that I submitted to a gentle probing from JLG. He had contacted me out of the blue to ask if he could interview me for an article on small/micro/failing presses and I agreed, desperate to shill my newest book, Spawn of the Ripper. When the interview questions arrived however, I was delighted to learn that there was a dark humour behind it all, and I knew from that moment onward we would become BFFs.
Since then, I have thoroughly enjoyed the greydogtales blog. It is as eclectic as it is hilarious, and never grows stale. If it ever threatens to do so, John just chucks in an article about his dogs shitting on daffodils, and all is right again. I am delighted to finally publish one of John’s short stories in my new anthology, The Stars at my Door, and I look forward to many more years of fruitful collaboration, or at the very least, some more daffodil violation.”
— Neil Baker, author of A Picnic at the Mountains of Madness
We chatted at length with Neil about small presses http://greydogtales.com/blog/once-in-an-april-moon/ and about Spawn of the Ripper http://greydogtales.com/blog/spawn-of-the-ripper-the-true-story-pg/ . April Moon publication can be found on Amazon and/or from the press itself.
Lurchers at Large
We never expected more than mild amusement from a few listeners when we launched ‘Lurchers for Beginners’ in September 2015. And we were shocked when the series went virtually viral – it’s now had hundreds of thousands of views, and been shared all over the world.
One of the strangest aspects has been finding out that many people really don’t know what a lurcher is, especially outside the UK and Eire. We even have to explain every so often that it’s not another word for ‘lurker’.
Anyway, here are a few portraits from those two years, some ours and some from friends, to celebrate and remind our listeners that lurchers and longdogs will always be at the heart of greydogtales…
(More mock combat in Lurchers for Beginners: Bitey Face http://greydogtales.com/blog/lurcher-for-beginners-9-bitey-face/ )
Back to some words from our guests…
Paul StJohn Mackintosh
Poet, fearless fictioneer and reviewer/journalist on many subjects, the multi-talented Mr Mackintosh joined us a while back for a discussion on his collection Blowback, stories where evocative writing meets strange subjects – ritual, sadism and masochism, Lovecraftian darkness and other corners of weird fiction. He’s also a fairly outspoken commentator on the weird scene as a whole. He kindly offered this reflection for our celebration:
“More weird than Theakston’s Old Peculier. More lugubrious than the Lyke Wake Dirge. More garrulous than Mrs E, as she stood lurcher-backed at-your-servile-sir before Sir Henry Rawlinson. More farsighted than the sightliest sighthound. More contorted than a Henry Moore figure. It’s Greydogtales, bringing wuthering to the Weird, and horror to the Heights.”
– Paul StJohn Mackintosh, author of Blowback
You can read our interview with Paul here: http://greydogtales.com/blog/transgression-lovecraft-and-inner-demons-paul-st-john-mackintosh/
Blowback, the collection we discussed in the feature, is available in Kindle http://amzn.eu/94O2bWf or in paperback under its other title Black Propaganda http://amzn.eu/9JtuqNN
Sam Gafford
We’ve mentioned Sam a number of times on greydogtales, partly for his love of William Hope Hodgson, and partly for his crucial involvement in the whole Occult Detective Quarterly project. He’s also runs Ulthar Press, and his fiction has been published widely over the years. He has three – yes three – books out this year.
“When John Linwood Grant sent Gafford that innocent little email over two years ago, he’d had no idea of the horror he would end up releasing! Soon after, the poor man began a blog that grew and grew like Godzilla with a glandular problem. More and more people contacted him wanting tales of supernatural horror, to be interviewed on the blog or just demanding forever new tales of lurchers and strange, odd churches in the wilds of Yorkshire.
“Then, in the ultimate affront to his sanity, Gafford made him into that most dreadful and haunted of beings… an editor! “Clearly,” Grant thought, “the source of my pain resides with Gafford. HE is the architect of my agony. Upon him I shall centre my wrath… as soon as I finish this blog post. And then there’s that story I promised for the anthology about Medieval Clowns and those dozen new submissions calls I found this morning and the lurchers need a walk and is that the time already?
“Greydogtales is a blog that, quite frankly, has become an indispensable resource for those interested in the weird and is one that is already taking its rightful place as legendary. I owe greydogtales an unpayable debt not only for the information and knowledge it brings but for introducing me to someone who has become more than a friend. I speak, of course, of Django. I don’t know what the hell Grant does all day.”
— Sam Gafford, author of The House of Nodens
We covered all three books, with extracts and details, here http://greydogtales.com/blog/sam-gafford-quiet-avalanche-weird/. The Dreamer in Fire, his collection of short stories is also available on Amazon (print only at the moment) http://amzn.eu/huWc6Ra
And… breathe. In September we should have an interview with author Philip Fracassi, more on classic supernatural writers, a discussion of H P Lovecraft controversies, another chapter in Lurchers for Beginners itself, and some stunning folk horror photography. Amongst many other things. And next time we’ll announce the winners from our A Persistence of Geraniums competition…