Time for another quick round-up of strange books, which are, we cannot deny, the cornerstone of what we do here when we’re not out with the dogs. A word from author and designer Matt Bright, news of recent publications from Amanda DeWees and others, and all that salamagundi (a hodgepodge of everything you can find, if you needed to know). Yep, it’s signpost time for many different tastes…

We read a lot. The Editor-in-Chief reads books by the kilo, old greydog does his best, and our contributors do their share. Even Chilli chews on some of the larger hardbacks. Django, we admit, is not very bookish. At the moment, the recent John Connolly has been marked as a jolly good read, but not going as far as it might. E-in-C thought it could have been even better with a clearer direction. Nadia Bulkin’s She Said Destroy collection seems to be excellent, and Enid Blyton’s Magic Faraway Tree series is as bonkers as we remember it. But here are a few examples of new and forthcoming stuff.

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First of all, Occult Detective Quarterly #4 is on the shelves, with a most magnificent cover by Argentinian artist Sebastian Cabrol. Within you will find ten stories from lots of great folk, and this issue is spearheaded by a folk-horror novelette by British writer Simon Avery, ‘Songs for Dwindled Gods’. As ever the tales range across time and space, from Roman centurions in ancient Alexandria to a druidic detective in contemporary America.

You can also read an interview with Simon Avery, who reveals that his excellent folk horror novelette in ODQ #4 is part of a planned loosely-connected series. http://www.angelaslatter.com/the-teardrop-method-simon-avery/

The full fiction line-up:

• Songs for Dwindled Gods by Simon Avery
• Black Frog and Black Scarab by Davide Mana
• Charms by Sarah Hans
• The Bascomb Rug by Josh Reynolds
• The Burning Pile by Justin Guleserian
• The Case of the Black Lodge by Aaron Vlek
• The French Lieutenant’s Gurning by Rhys Hughes
• Those Who Live in Shadow by Paul M. Feeney
• Abduction in Ash by Dale W. Glaser
• Yellow Light District by Aaron Besson
• Faultlines by Sam Gafford

And Sebastian’s widely-acclaimed cover has been featured in his exhibition in Argentina.

ODQ can be picked up here:

http://amzn.eu/5jnoZnz

http://a.co/hs5WkMZ

You can check out more about ODQ on this site, or visit the new website, which has links to ODQ merchandise:

https://occultdetectivequarterly.com/

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A SYBIL SPEAKS

Entirely by accident, this brings us neatly to a new book by Amanda DeWees, A Haunting Reprise, which is the third book in the Sybil Ingram Victorian Mystery series. ODQ #1 had the pleasure of presenting a short story in Amanda’s series, ‘When Soft Voices Die’ (http://amzn.eu/2dSASpF) and an excellent novelette will be in the forthcoming anthology ODQ Presents, from Ulthar Press.

As for the premise of A Haunting Reprise…

“…Actress-turned-medium Sybil Ingram is enjoying life in Paris in 1873 with her new husband, violinist Roderick Brooke, when her past suddenly catches up with her in the form of her pushy little sister. Polly wants Sybil to help her become an actress–which means getting the blessing of their father, who is near death.

“Back in London, Sybil’s homecoming is chilly. Even worse is her reunion with her former mentor, Gerhardt Atherton, who is still falsely claiming that Sybil embezzled from the theater troupe. When Atherton is found dead, his business partner, Ivor Treherne, is arrested for murder. But Sybil isn’t satisfied that the police have unearthed the whole story.

“Matters reach a crisis when the drama in her family takes a supernatural form. As she turns to a fellow medium to help her banish a poltergeist and determine who really killed Atherton, Sybil soon realizes that someone is trying to silence her…perhaps for good.”

https://www.books2read.com/AHauntingReprise

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This Autumn/Fall will see the release of the tenth volume in the Wilde Stories series of the Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction, from Lethe Press.

Matt Bright, writer, designer and editor, has one of his most outstanding tales therein, ‘The Library of Lost Things’, which we read as a Tor.com story and really enjoyed. He kindly shared a few personal words with us about his inclusion:

“A couple of years, after I sold my first pro story to Queers Destroy Horror, I wrote a writer bucket list. The first three entries were:
– Make a second pro sale.
– Get a story into Wilde Stories.
– Sell a story to Tor.

“The first is self-explanatory. That’s the bit that proves it wasn’t a fluke to sell your first. As for the second: at the beginning of my twenties I was pretty busy being buried under Life Stuff, and both writing and reading had become things I thought of myself as doing, but didn’t. Then I discovered the Wilde Stories collections, and they were a gateway not only into queer stories, as you might expect, but into the world of speculative fiction again. I resolved that I wanted to get into the books long before I ever had any notable friendship with their editor, Steve Berman.

“On to the third: The Library of Lost Things. I wrote this story as a birthday present for Steve. At the time he was constantly starting and then abandoning novels, and my fictional library was invented as the place where those novels ended up. In an early draft, one of the Indexers looks at a pile of Steve Berman novels and says ‘Lord, we’ve got a whole bookcase of these.’ I sent him it on his birthday, and in true Steve style he rang me up the next day to give me editorial notes because, in his words, ‘this could be your Tor story’. And he was right (even though he was wrong about cutting the talking rats. I held firm on that.) – I submitted it through slush and 19 months later (yes, 19!) got an acceptance.

“And now here it is in Wilde Stories. (And lest you think any favouritism is at play there, Steve has turned down every single other story I’ve ever sent him for it, not that I’m still sour about that, oh no.) But it’s bittersweet, because this Wilde Stories will be the last edition. I’m proud to now be able to call some of the authors from earlier volumes friends and acquintances, and I’m even prouder that I managed to tick this off my bucket list and be a part of the final volume.

“Now, on to the rest of that list, I guess.”

On a sadder note, Steve Berman, ace supremo of Lethe Press and a talented author in his own right, believes this will the final volume of Wilde Stories. The line-up is:

• Serving Fish by Christopher Caldwell
• Some Kind of Wonderland by Richard Bowes
• Pan and Hook by Adam McOmber
• The Summer Mask by Karin Lowachee
• The Library of Lost Things by Matthew Bright
• Making the Magic Lightning Strike Me by John Chu
• Salamander Six-Guns by Martin Cahill
• Cracks by Xen
• The Future of Hunger in the Age of Programmable Matter
  by Sam J. Miller
• Uncanny Valley by Greg Egan
  Love Pressed in Vinyl by Devon Wong
• There Used to Be Olive Trees by Rich Larson
• The Secret of Flight by A.C. Wise
• A Bouquet of Wonder and Marvel by Sean Eads

Pre-order Link:

https://www.lethepressbooks.com/store/p542/Wilde_Stories_2018.html

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SCARY STUFF

A regular visitor to greydogtales, Willie Meikle has just had another of his thrilling scary adventure novels, Operation: Siberia released by Severed Press:

“When Captain John Banks and his squad are sent to investigate a zoo in Siberia, he expects to find tigers, bears, maybe elk But there is something there that is new, yet very, very old. Beasts that haven’t walked the Earth since the last Ice Age have been cloned, revived, and set loose to roam free.

“And some of them are very hungry.”

We gather that Willie has also nearly finished a further collection of his cracking Carnacki the Ghost Finder stories, so we look forward to that.

http://a.co/7zRlhbK

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For a strange and darker read, we’ve been told that Farah Rose Smith’s The Almanac of Dust, recently out from Wraith Press, is an interesting one, but we haven’t got to it yet.

“A scholar and metaphysical naturalist cares for his ailing wife as he studies The Almanac of Dust, a cryptic text that documents the presence of unusual manifestations of dust around the world.”

http://www.lulu.com/shop/farah-rose-smith/the-almanac-of-dust/paperback/product-23609188.html

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But we are writing, frantically, so there we stop. Back in a couple of days…

Do you want to be an award-winning published author? Do you want to get paid for it, as well? You do? Well, you’re in luck. Here’s an exclusive no-win no-fee guide, which has worked EVERY TIME for our major client group. Yes, ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of John Linwood Grants have succeeded in selling their writing using this tried and trusted method.

And here is what you need to do:

• STEP ONE: Write large, complex drafts of novels which no one but you will ever understand. Don’t even send most of them anywhere.
• STEP TWO: If anyone does show interest, plead having to earn a living as an excuse not to do anything further about it. Lose most of the manuscripts.
• STEP THREE: Realise that you’re fifty eight years old, falling apart, and that the first two steps didn’t really help.
• STEP FOUR: Write short stories, novelettes and novellas instead.
• STEP FIVE: Decide in advance that exposure doesn’t pay for dog food, so hurl the stories at paying markets instead, and wait. Rinse and repeat.

There you go. If you doubt the value of this approach, then you only have to look at our splendid testimonials:

“Thanks to your guide, I’m anxious, overworked, and afraid to answer the telephone. Well done, greydogtales!” J Linwood Grant

“My partner throws plates at me when I fail to cover the gas and electricity bills – but now I can afford a second-hand protective helmet,” John L Grant

“Maybe I should have finished those novels after all. Bugger!” JLG

But those are just the usual whingers. What they won’t tell you, because they’re shy, unassuming authors, is that they have been published, have produced a tolerable body of work by sticking to our advice, and have more in the pipeline. What do they expect – a living wage?

Because nobody ever believes us, here’s a presentation which shows graphically what YOU can achieve with only a couple of years of mind-numbing hard work. It would have been in PowerPoint, but that’s too expensive, so we did a list instead.

A VAGUE BIBLIOGRAPHY

Due to the complex, quantum-encoded nature of Mr Linwood Grant’s record-keeping, this list is not complete, but it is at least in roughly the right order.

The Last Edwardian Cycle – Late Victorian to the 1940s

Tales of murder, madness and often the supernatural, inhabiting the same timeline in one way or another, and occasionally interconnecting. Includes non-occult stories of Sherlock Holmes and Mr Edwin Dry, as well as out-and-out weird tales of psychics, horrors and Mamma Lucy, the 1920s hoodoo-woman.

• A Study in Grey (novella), 18thWall Productions 2016
• The Meeting, in Carnacki: The Lost Cases, Ulthar Press 2016
• The Dark Trade, in Carnacki: The Lost Cases, Ulthar Press 2016
• Grey Dog, in Carnacki: The Lost Cases, Ulthar Press 2016
• The Jessamine Garden, in Beneath the Surface, Parsec Ink 2016
• The Dragoman’s Son, in Holmes away from Home, Belanger 2016
• The Jessamine Touch, in His Seed, Lethe Press 2017
• A Persistence of Geraniums, in collection of the same name, Electric Pentacle 2017
• His Heart Shall Speak No More, in Geraniums, Electric Pentacle 2017
• A Word with Mr Dry, in Geraniums, Electric Pentacle 2017
• The Workman & His Hire, in Geraniums, Electric Pentacle 2017
• The Intrusion, in Geraniums, Electric Pentacle 2017
• A Loss of Angels, in Geraniums, Electric Pentacle 2017
• On Ullins Bank, in Fearful Fathoms, Scarlet Galleon 2017
• Hoodoo-man, in Speakeasies & Spiritualists, 18thWall 2017
• The Witch of Pender, in Weirdbook: Witches, Weird Book 2017
• Affair of the Red Opium, in Holmes in the Realms of H G Wells, Belanger 2017
• The Second Life of Jabez Salt, in Eliminate the Impossible, MX Publishing 2017
• Where All is Night, and Starless, in Chthonic, Martian Migraine 2018
• Mr Aloysius Clay, in March Hare-Raisers, 2018
• The Musgrave Burden, coming in Holmes: Canonical Sequels, Belanger 2018
• Death Among the Marigolds, coming in Silver Screen Sleuths, 18thWall 2018
• The Assassin’s Coin (novel), coming from IDF Publishing 2018
• Songs of the Burning Men, coming from 18thWall 2018
• Whiskey, Beans & Dust, tba, 2018

Strange Tales from the 1970s to the Future

Everything from contemporary dark weird and Lovecraftian fiction to tongue in cheek folk horror such as St Botolph-in-the-Wolds.

• Hungery, in Giants & Ogres, Cbaybooks 2016
• Messages, in Cthulhusattva, Martian Migraine Press 2016
• Stranger Passing Through, in Blood, Sweat & Fears, Nosetouch Press 2016
• Something Annoying This Way Comes, on greydogtales.com 2016
• The St Valentine’s Day Mascarpone, on greydogtales.com 2016
• The Horse Road, in Lackington’s Magazine, 2016
• Preacher, in Ravenwood Magazine, Electric Pentacle Press 2016
• A Midwinter Night’s Carol on greydogtales.com 2016
• The Age of Reason, in The Stars at My Door, April Moon Books 2017
• With the Dark & Storm, in Equal Opportunities Madness, Otter Libris 2017
• Cinnamon and Magic, in The Monster in Your Closet, Cbaybooks 2017
• Cinderella and the Seven Penguins, on greydogtales.com 2017
• Horseplay, on greydogtales.com 2018
• On Abydos, Dreaming, coming in Survivors, Lethe Press 2018
• Hour of the Pale Dog, coming in Skelos Magazine 2018
• Those Who Stay, coming in Voices in the Darkness, Ulthar Press 2018
• Sanctuary, coming in Weirdbook 2018

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Finally, as a taster, here’s an extract from the start of ‘Where All is Night, and Starless’, published this year by Martian Migraine Press in their anthology Chthonic.

WHERE ALL IS NIGHT, AND STARLESS

 

March, 1919, Inner Hebrides

The agent tells me that the house is built on solid bedrock. It has three rooms, with bare stone walls forming a kitchen, a bedroom and a parlour. A failed farmhouse for a failed farm. The last owner died in the war, childless, and his wife soon after, in 1918. The agent has no record of how or why. He has a florid, anxious face – a Lowland Scot, desperate to please and yet ill-informed about the Western Isles. I have neighbours on the other side of the island, a handful of crofters, but he knows little about them. A boat brings supplies once a week.

“Nae so fine a place for a lassie.” He shakes his head, a sudden burst of conscience, perhaps. “And if your faither takes bad…”

I take out my cheque book, and let my pen speak for us. He swallows his doubts.

“Aye, well, there’s nae a snib on the isle, I’ll wager.”

I stare until he realises.

“No locks, Miss Allen. So I dinna have a key to gae ye.”

Our business done, he trudges to the small jetty. The sky is turning dark with promised rain, and he’s eager to be away. My father sits in his wheelchair, waiting for me.

“Inside, then,” I say. There is grass, wiry grass, under the wheels of his chair, but the soil is thin. I make him comfortable in the parlour, which will be his.

“Soon,” my father mutters.

I have waited almost two years, and seen him through four hospitals and recuperation homes. The urgent need I once had has been mellowed, and now I can wait. I can feel that his story is coming, the words which have been trapped inside him since the blast which shook the spires of half of Europe.

We settle, and for a week I let him inspect our new home. He pronounces that we are on granitic gneiss, which seems to reassure him. The term means little to me, but I notice a change in him. He walks, only a few steps, but it is heartening.

Lieutenant Robert Allen, thirty nine years old, of the 183rd Tunnelling Company in Belgium. A tall, slim figure, easily missed in a crowd – except for the way his head cocks at any unexpected noise. Like a dog, a dog which cannot settle.

When they dragged him from the remains of a tunnel-mouth, they did not know what they had. He was recovered alone and in a state of exhaustion, raving, covered in blood. Those fingernails which he retained were ragged and torn. They had no explanation for me.

His commanding officer wrote a letter which betrayed more than I think he intended. “In the finest tradition of the Army,” and “Work vital to our efforts,” – brown ink on cream paper – but in between, curious phrases concerning sudden action and “necessary haste”. By which I have come to believe that a mine was blown before its due time, and that my father and the sappers were still at work when it was done.

They call his condition shell shock. He himself denied this when I sat by him in the early months. He promised to tell me the truth, one day, when he could. This lonely isle, I believe, is what he has been seeking.

A James McAllister calls, to enquire if we need seaweed for our vegetable garden.

He takes a nip of whisky, and offers to bring a hand-cart full of it over, and my father nods, accepts. Outside, McAllister turns to me.

“Hit bad, thon?”

“Flanders. But he’s getting better.”

“Aye. Mony a soul lost; mony a guid man broken.”

He explains, haltingly, that he was on the fishing fleets, keeping the country fed. I praise his efforts, and am rid of him at last.

Father no longer drinks, but he holds up McAllister’s empty glass, watching it glint in the morning light.

“Is this the day, Emma?”

I seat myself on the window-bench, watching his scarred hands re-arrange the cheap plaid rug over his knees. He might be one hundred and thirty seven, from the look in his narrow eyes.

“Only if you wish.”

I take up the blank journal which has been ready since June 1917. I had it when I first sat by his hospital bed, and it has always been to hand. I had always wanted a record, from his own lips.

He puts the glass down.

“I… I think so.”

Bending back the spine of the journal, I lift my pen…

© John Linwood Grant 2018

Amazon UK link: http://amzn.eu/0dMzvau

Amazon US link: http://a.co/6Kf2CdJ