Greetings, O Best Beloveds. Today, as keen supporters of independent presses, we’re pleased to have a special feature on the superb work of Canadian publisher Undertow Publications. We have on offer our own fresh-baked review of Kay Chronister’s collection Thin Places (Undertow, 2020), a reminder of Laura Mauro’s debut collection Sing Your Sadness Deep (Undertow, 2019), and a weird welcome from Michael Kelly himself, the Dark Presence behind these and other cunning volumes (plus some brilliant cover art).

Undertow (n) An underlying current, force, or tendency that is in opposition to what is apparent

So let’s start backwards, as always, and hear from Michael about his press first…

---

MICHAEL KELLY SPEAKS

 

We’re thrilled to be featured here at greydogtales. Like greydogtales, we’re endearingly weird. And proud of it.

The boring stuff:

Undertow Publications is a celebrated independent press in Canada dedicated to publishing original and unique fiction of exceptional literary merit. Since 2009 we’ve been publishing anthologies, collections, and novellas in hardcover, trade paperback, and eBook formats. Our books have won the Shirley Jackson Award; the British Fantasy Award; and we are a 4-time World Fantasy Award Finalist.

Blah, blah, yada, yada.

Fact is, we love books and stories. Strange, beautiful, macabre, transcendent, odd, scary, lush, lean, numinous, oneiric, and unclassifiable books and stories. We’re almost exclusively known for publishing short fiction, whether in our magazine Weird Horror, or anthologies and single-author short fiction collections.

https://undertowpublications.com/weird-horror-magazine

“Yeah, but what kind of stuff do you publish?”

“Uh, I don’t know… weird fiction?’

“Oh, that’s my least favourite kind.”

“Oh. Sorry. I guess.”

Our aesthetic is beauty and terror, and we believe a book can be judged by its cover.

Our occasional anthology series Shadows & Tall Trees has won the Shirley Jackson Award, and several stories from the series have been reprinted in various “Best Of” anthologies.

https://undertowpublications.com/shop/shadows-amp-tall-trees-vol-8-paperback

Two more Shirley Jackson Award-winning books — Priya Sharma’s All the Fabulous Beasts and Aickman’s Heirs, edited by Simon Strantzas — continue to sell well for us.

Both are masterfully crafted and will, I’m certain, endure. I mean, at least until my death. Please check them out.

https://undertowpublications.com/shop/all-the-fabulous-beasts-trade-paperback

https://undertowpublications.com/shop/aickmans-heirs

Finally, we’re really proud of what we accomplished with the Year’s Best Weird Fiction.

From 2014 – 2018 we produced 5 volumes, and thanks to our glorious guest-editors it showcased the breadth and diversity of the field. I’m still asked, “What is Weird Fiction?” Who knows? The first 3 volumes are out of print, but you can grab volumes 4 and 5 (which won the British Fantasy Award) still.

https://undertowpublications.com/shop/years-best-weird-fiction-vol-5-trade-paperback

That’s us! Weird. Endearingly so.

Michael Kelly, 1/21

---

SOME DAYS YOU’RE JUST A READER

(as dictated to a large dog by John Linwood Grant)

There is something odd about hyacinths; I always find their scent disturbing yet intoxicating, their appearance waxily strange, and yet beautiful. Which is, conveniently, how I feel about many of the stories in Kay Chronister’s Thin Places…

I initially picked this one up not as a reviewer or a writer, but simply because I wanted to see what weird fiction was up to. Out of pure curiosity (I don’t read in my own backyard when I’m actively writing, and I must have been drafting some murderous Edwardian shenanigans at the time).

So, without any expectations, I took a half hour off to read the collection’s opening tale, ‘Your Clothes a Sepulcher, Your Body a Grave’. And I thought it wonderful. Truly evocative weird fiction with a certain Gothicism – and an abundance of actual hyacinths in it. I could see I was going to like Kay Chronister. A few months later, I had chance to read the entire collection through in one go, and I had thoughts.

Contemporary weird fiction is the creature which you recognise when it crouches on your chest, but which you can’t always adequately describe to others. Well, the good stuff is, anyway. The poor stuff is just people being too clever, too vague, or raiding the thesaurus.

This is a book which suffers from none of the above weaknesses, with one proviso – many of the stories are about change and transformation, and the exact nature of the change, and what it might generate, is not always spelled out. Chronister brushes you with monstrosities, but doesn’t overplay her hand. It’s not that the stories don’t end ‘properly’, as is sometimes said of pieces of weird fiction, it’s that you are left to ponder. And pondering is important.

Chronister deals with generational relationships, and most of the book is concerned with lineage, especially the core matrilineal nature of the world, mother:daughter and sister:sister relationships, and their consequences. This is not to say that men are necessarily demonised or excluded herein, lest some sensitive boy-readers begin to worry – there are some intriguing male characters as well – ‘Life Cycles’, for example, deals deftly with the desires, needs and dooms of men and women, as does ‘Your Clothes a Sepulcher, Your Body a Grave’.

The yearning to give birth and the consequences of doing so are both explored within. There are touching moments, but many are of transformational horror – what we choose, what we submit to, what we become. Birth creates both victims and monsters; it creates us. The cyclical nature of this process infects the book.

‘Your Clothes…’ is an excellent example, and stories such as ‘Life Cycles’ and ‘Too Lonely, Too Wild’ also stand out. But for me, the single finest story outside of the opener is ‘The Fifth Gable’ where Chronister melds folk-tale sensibilities with the fantastical to great effect (not the only story where a folk/fairy tale grimness lies beneath). Unnamed women in a house with many gables make ‘children’, each in their own way, isolated from the world – and then comes a visitor, who wants a child of her own…

Whilst the mother:daughter axis is a big part of her core material, Chronister is very skilled with landscape and the built world; her stories are rich with psychogeography (geometaphysics, if there’s such a thing?). The very feel of people’s surroundings seeps into you. And at least half of the collection could be described as Folk Horror — ‘The Women Who Sing For Sklep’, set in Eastern Europe, is a particularly strong F/Hish example.

Reviews should not always gush throughout. If I have reservations about any of the contents, they pertain to the title story itself, ‘Thin Places’, which is again finely written, with nice characterisation in the shape of the protagonist/observer, but a little slender underneath, and ‘White Throat Holler’, whose premise doesn’t stand up as well as the writing of it. Even so, neither of these lack their satisfying moments, and would out-run many of their competitors in the overall field.

In short, Thin Places is very rewarding, and well worth picking up.

https://undertowpublications.com/shop/thin-places

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B083GZRNV7/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_VQZYHJCGRE4VRBV82G0K

---

SING YOUR SADNESS DEEP

 

An Undertow book which we’ve covered before but must mention again, is Sing your Sadness Deep, by Laura Mauro. It’s perhaps no coincidence that this collection by a skilled female writer of the contemporary weird also concerns itself much with women’s lives and transformation, though Mauro’s wings are spread wide over different landscapes from Chronister’s (the latter is perhaps more claustrophobic and tinged with the Gothic than the former).

At the time we said:

“The debut collection by Laura Mauro, Sing Your Sadness Deep, is a work of fine and accomplished writing, as near to flawless in its execution as you might wish for.”

And that is still true. Again, recommended, as is Priya Sharma’s All the Fabulous Beasts, mentioned by Michael above – another wonderful and rewarding collection.

You can read our full piece on Sing Your Sadness Deep here:

http://greydogtales.com/blog/laura-mauro-sacrifice-and-transformation/

---

---

Whilst you’re waiting for your Undertow books, why not have a look at John Linwood Grant’s own recent second collection,Where All is Night, and Starless (Trepidatio 2021). It’s not bad.

AVAILABLE NOW THROUGH AMAZON UK & US, AND THROUGH THE PUBLISHER, JOURNALSTONE

Amazon US: Where All is Night, and Starless

Amazon UK: Where All is Night, and Starless

Annnnnd… we’re back. Winter, work, COVID and all that stuff got in the way, but greydogtales is powering up for 2022. Weird literature, strange trivia, and of course, lurchers. So today let’s whet appetites, just for fun, with a new short tale of Mamma Lucy, the old hoodoo woman who travels through 1920s America, ‘adjusting’ things as she goes…

ON THE SEVENTH DAY, SHE RESTED

 

Willie Brown stole a hog.

‘Cepting he didn’t steal it – he bought it fair from Nate Rivens, when Nate had gone too far down the jug one night. But Nate, as he stuck his head under the pump the following morning, was minded that Willie had been so plumb happy at the deal, he’d left behind the bill of sale. Which got Nate thinking. Paper burned easy; Willie was only one of them colored boys, and surely Nate had the right of it through being what he was – an honest, winsome Rivens, and white as curds, no less? So he bothered his neighbors, he yelled some, and he made out that Willie Brown had gone and took the beast, never a dime in return.

Ole Casper Rivens, Nate’s uncle, had ridden with the judge, days past, and the local constable was no stranger to Ole Casper’s pockets, so it seemed set to be a clear day for the Rivens. They hauled Willie to the courtroom, the judge set a heavy fine for his thieving – it was that or a whipping and the jail at Gainesville – and they took the hog, who didn’t know master from mud-bath.

And that would have been the way of it, had an old conjure-woman not turned up in town the day after the trial. Barefoot and gangly in her faded print dress, she came with a look to her that made hats tip, even those of a few white folk. Some said she was called Mamma Lucy, and that she’d walked heavy through Barrow County once; others kept names to themselves. Whichever way, Willie Brown’s mother knew her face, and had a need.

“Y’all know my boy been wronged, Mamma.”

“That’s a steel-hard truth,” said the conjure-woman, her milk-and-honey eye staring way off from the other. “But hold them tears, girl. We’ll see this through… iffen the Good Lord wills.”

So Willie’s mother bit her cheek, wept a mite more, and went home. Around noon the same day, Mamma Lucy set herself on the crooked hickory bench by Casper Riven’s seed-store. Abe Johnson saw her clear.

“She hunkers down with roots an’ such from that there carpet-bag o’ hers,” he told the drug-store moochers. “And she spreads ‘em out in her lap, like she’s a-waitin’. Don’t use no words, though, not as I heared. Then she jess puts ‘em away, and up she goes, bound for the creek.”

In the night, rats got into the store’s cellar and made play with some of Casper Rivens’s best seed. Ole Casper woke to this bad news, and a bellyache besides, one which Doc Meredith’s powders wouldn’t shift. As for the rats, their bellies ached fit to burst too, but there weren’t a body listening to hear their side of the matter.

The noon which followed, Mamma Lucy was spotted again, squatting in the shade of a live oak, and maybe she had a green felt bag ‘tween her fingers, maybe she didn’t. The oak wasn’t that tall nor wide, but it happened to stand tidy on the edge of Casper Riven’s yard. Again, she didn’t stay long.

That night, Casper’s wife Mercy cut herself whilst peeling taters (for the help had sickened). Cut herself bad, and Doc Meredith had some sewing up to do. With all the fuss and feathers in the house, Casper’s bellyache got worse.

By now, folks all allowed that the conjure-woman was sure seen often near Casper Rivens or what he owned – and he owned plenty. Everywhere he stepped, there – but not any too close – was a dark, gangly figure. Yet she never tried to jaw with him, nor did anything that might raise a holler. Ole Casper himself wouldn’t stoop to speak to her sort; the constable passed by her a few times, all sweat and nerves, but the old colored woman had coin, talked polite, and always moved on if she was told direct.

Casper’s lumbago took a turn for the worse around that time, and his belly weren’t no better.

On the sixth day, a hand told Casper that Mamma Lucy had been seen chawing cane outside the bank where the Rivenses did their business. When the telegraph clattered a few hours later, turned out that he had lost ninety cents in the dollar on an oil claim that proved dry, sudden, out Aintry way…

Ole Casper was done with hogs. Grim as a Hessian’s horse, he strode to his nephew’s shack, and a mighty ruckus was heard. A half hour after, Nate, scrubbed and tight-collared, went calling on the judge. Seems that a bill of sale for the hog had ‘slipped clean down between two boards,’ but now was found. Right sorry was Nate, so he said, and the judge, though hardly sorry, did grumbling justice. Willie Brown got his name and his hog back by sundown.

Outside the courthouse, Doc Meredith and the conjure woman watched a thin colored boy leading away his rightful property. It weren’t no more than his due, and surely less than should have been, but in those times, matters could have been much worse.

“That’s some witchin’ you done there, Mamma,” said the doctor, soft-like. He didn’t look so bothered, though, for the Rivens always put him in mind of temples and ‘dens of thieves’.

“Ain’t no witch.” She gave him her big, horse-teeth smile. “And who says I laid a single trick all week? What folks choose t’believe, well, that’s in other hands.”

Mamma Lucy was an ornery hoodoo woman when the need arose, but she was also in the head-business. And she knew her trade, as Ole Casper Givens could attest…

---

---

Next up this week, a spotlight on Michael Kelly’s excellent independent press Undertow.

In the meantime, do have a look at my recent second collection, Where All is Night, and Starless (Trepidatio 2021), which is less Edwardian but more wide-ranging…

AVAILABLE NOW THROUGH AMAZON, AND THROUGH THE PUBLISHER, JOURNALSTONE

Amazon US: Where All is Night, and Starless

Amazon UK: Where All is Night, and Starless