“Yes, I betrayed my children, destroyed a nation, and forgot to iron the cat, but I had a story to promote – you must understand…” Today, for October Frights – explanations, extracts, and an egg, for those who don’t know who we are…

It is a sad truth that authors strive mightily to draw attention to their work, to rise above the myriad agonised voices of other writers in a scenario reminiscent of the cries from a Circle of Hell. Embedded in the ice of insignificance, we cry out to any passing Dante or Virgil. Which gets tiring after a while.

At greydogtales we sort of gave in bothering strangers with excessive promotion about one week after starting the site. We drifted into writing about interesting weird fiction, why the Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Musgrave Ritual’ doesn’t make any sense if you analyse it, and lurchers.  Here we are mostly about exploring curiosities and enjoying yourself. And lurchers. Did we say that enough?

Thus, as we join the annual October Frights Blog Hop for the third time, it’s mainly because we get on with some of the people involved. More than thirty writers share their blog links and post something frighty, Octobery or similar. There are competitions, extracts and general celebrations – it’s like a cross between a yard sale and a vicarage tea party, but where the stall holders may be more worrying than the normal ones.

Our stall is the usual mess. There’s something nasty at the bottom of the bran-tub; when you thought you’d won a book, you ended up with a bag of out-of-date dog treats, and when you wanted a dog, you got a disturbing collection of strange stories. This is a Good Thing, if you like variety, but possibly not if you prefer your life tidy and well-defined.

John Linwood Grant, who runs this disaster, writes strange fiction and gets dragged around by large lurchers. Should you want to know about the dogs and not about the fiction (entirely understandable), you can find a lot of of lurcher fun through this Index link:

Lurchers for Beginners: The Raw Truth

JLG is a professional writer and editor, and also the lead editor of the magazine Occult Detective Quarterly. His fiction side includes over thirty published short stories, a novella and collection, with more on its way. As he tries to write the stories that interest him, the material is quite varied. Admittedly, murder features a lot, along with madness and the supernatural. A substantial chunk of his work is set between the 1880s and the 1920s, though he doesn’t need much encouragement to foray into more modern weird.

As part of the October Frights Blog Hop, we’re going to include some extracts which might give you a taste of what you can expect. We also have a feeling that an e-copy of his latest collection A Persistence of Geraniums and other worrying tales might be available to win through the Rafflecopter link and process. We’re never sure about these things.

THE BLOG HOP: Right at the bottom of the next few posts, you’ll see clickable links to all the other sites which are taking part, so you can have a browse around.

October Frights Snippets

For today, here are two very different extracts to give you a taste of what old greydog writes.

An Egg

This comes from a series of short stories about a 1920s old black conjure woman, whose hoodoo and head skills take her across Eastern America, helping folk out as the need arises and turning back at least a little of the darkness…

The old woman was down by the crossroads one late day, scratching in the dirt, when the Dark Man came by. He was taller than trees, yet fitted neat enough inside a dusty brown suit. He tilted his straw hat to one side, and leaned on his stick.

‘You laying a trick in my place?’ he asked. He had a voice like corn-pipes scraping together. “Playing the crossroads without asking, maybe?”

She clicked her big teeth, and carried on what she was doing.

The Dark Man squinted.

‘That an egg in your hand, woman? Fussing with your rootwork, and spinning your tricks. Suppose you’ve got some devilry inside that egg, ready to be buried and gone.’ He shook his head, jowls loose and flapping. “Red flannel and Damnation powder, all you little conjure-folk.”

And he laughed, none too kindly.

She looked up. The Dark Man saw a broad nose, and lips which held back teeth fit for a Kentucky Derby. One eye was darker than him; the other was milk-and-honey, and where it was looking even he couldn’t tell. His crooked cane twitched, not so sure.

“What’s your name, woman?”

She straightened her back, bones creaking.

“In Pike County yonder, they call me the Negro Lady, and they don’t spit in my sight. Elsewhere, I go by Mamma Lucy,” she said. “You aimin’ to trouble me ’bout it, boy?”

Taller than trees, sly as the smallest dog, the Dark Man tipped his red straw hat to the conjure-woman.
“No, ma’am, he said, respectful.

And the dusk was empty, except for an old lady in a faded print-dress.

Some folk go to the crossroads to make a deal, they say. Silver tongues or silver strings; fortunes to be made, loves to be slighted. Others take candles and mirrors to fix a trick and make it hold.

Mamma Lucy went there because she had an egg, and she sure as hell couldn’t leave it lying round for any fool to steal.
Tomorrow she might be hungry.

You can find Mamma Lucy around, most recently in the anthology Speakeasies and Spiritualists, curated by Nicole Petit, from 18thWall Productions, and in the Weirdbook Annual- Witches, edited by Douglas Draa. More tales of the conjure-woman are on their way.

The Jessamine Touch

This is a story rooted firmly in the Edwardian era, as are many of greydog’s pieces. Less usually for his Tales of the Last Edwardian series, this one is set in the States, in period Virginia…

Other visits to the Jessamine Garden, as I now called it, followed. He introduced me to so many plants that I lost count. It seemed that there was nothing within those red-brick walls which could not kill. Cattle grazing there would have been dead within the day, ordinary men who toyed with its contents within the hour. But the garden was less strange than the man.

My own feelings set aside, I was still fascinated as to how St Claire could be so unaffected by the poisons with which he surrounded himself. He avoided the subject at first, preferring to introduce me to other corners of his realm.

“Here, my friend.” He pointed to an attractive plant with many small leaflets. “Jequirity, or Indian licorice. Also know as the jumbie bead. If even a morsel of the small red seed is swallowed it can bring convulsions. Some Caribbean folk take this to be a sign that a jumbie, or evil spirit, has entered the person. Others say to the contrary, claiming that it wards off the jumbie.”

“You have tried it?”

He looked at me. “Of course. There is nothing here that I have not tried. Or that another bold soul could not essay for themselves with my tutelage.”

I tried to sound unaffected. “And how many have you…instructed?

“It’s been far too long. It demands utter commitment and resolve. But surely a veteran possesses these traits?”

The memory of a trooper’s parted lips; the stare of an actor outside a theater near Santa Fe. My throat became dry, and I could only nod my assent.

“Then you must gain experience,” he said, “For intellectual exploration is a sterile thing.”

“I must take poison?”

“No, I would hardly seek to end our relationship in so coarse a manner.”

“My visits are not an inconvenience, then?”

“You are curious. But I think you suffer from a malady that has curiosity as just one symptom.”

“My affliction?” I anticipated him remarking upon my leg and hip.

“Loneliness.”

I trembled.

He held up a hand. “A man who tends a garden develops an eye for rare blooms. Come, sit with me.”

An old log lay near the jequirity, and I eased myself down next to him. The afternoon sun had brought crickets and other insects to the long grass by the gravel – darnel or poison rye-grass, of course. St Claire was consistent in his plantings. The insects strummed and buzzed according to their types as St Claire rolled up his sleeves.

“Do you trust me?” His pupils were wide, despite the sun, almost eclipsing the pale blue irises of his eyes. Flexing his long fingers, he began to undo the top buttons of my shirt. I stiffened, but did not resist. I expected his touch, but when he placed the palm of his hand against my breast, I think I gave a gasp. This time he pressed down firmly and prolonged the contact. Heat again, more intense than last time. I waited, dry-mouthed, for something to happen…

“Oh.” I felt my heart flutter, its beat now unreliable, and a sense of fever, of flush. A rash had already appeared where he touched me, but more alarming was the inner disquiet, that sensation when you first feel fear–or love, I imagine. Despite my alarm I did not pull away. My pulse raced, then slowed, raced again. I knew that in some way I was being poisoned, yet I was also experiencing Julian St Claire.

“Let your heart see for you,” he whispered.

He was a fire of blood, laced with such chemicals as I could not imagine, a burning presence of fibres and arteries in a slim, quiet body…

He withdrew his fingers suddenly. Five lines of painful blisters had formed across my breast, radiating from where he had touched me. My pulse settled, faster than it had been but once more under a degree of control.

“What… what are you, sir?” I gasped.

The above extract is from the anthology, His Seed, edited by Steve Berman and published by Lethe Press. Just for a change, this happens to be an anthology of unusual gay stories. Greydog has his colourful moments.

“A tree with healing fruit is guarded by a strange creature called ‘The Wild Man.’ A new species of plant which thrives on more than water and tender loving care. These are just two of the fascinating and beautifully written stories in the latest collection from Lethe Press. From thick forests to wide-open landscapes, pumpkin patches to greenhouses, and many strange places in between, there is more to see in these author’s minds than you might expect. This is without a doubt one of the most original and well-written gay erotic anthologies I’ve read in a long time.” (Amazon review)

Buy this book and feed a lurcher!

A first collection of Tales of the Last Edwardian is now available, entitled  A Persistence of Geraniums and other worrying tales. This collection, illustrated by Paul Boswell, pulls together some of the English side of things, with creepy or scary stories set in London, Suffolk and Yorkshire. Five-star reviews on Amazon UK and US:

“A subtle treasure.”

“…Equally filled with both darkness and whimsy.”

“A delicious mixture of ghosts, horror and mystery.”

“There is much to praise about this collection–the subtlety of the storytelling, the believability of the characters and the way their actions pushed each plot forward, the elegant prose…”

“Horror stories with a heart and a conscience.”

A world where the psychic, the alienist and the assassin carry out their strange duties whilst quiet tragedies unfold. These are tales of murder, madness and the supernatural in an Edwardian England never quite what it seems. From rural Yorkshire to the heart of the City, death is on the air, and no one can sense it better than Mr Dry, the lethal Deptford Assassin.

Amazon UK http://amzn.eu/dknZvPs

Amazon US http://a.co/3Ax8qzD

Do come back for more October Frights in a day or so…

a Rafflecopter giveaway

(We’re the third ‘Leave a blog comment’ down. Maybe.)

Oh, dear listener, we are so buried under review copies and books of interest that we resort to the tactics of madness. Rather than wait, we’re going to highlight four new publications before we’ve even finished reading them. Ugly Little Things, by Todd Keisling; the Sherlock Holmes special from Mystery Weekly; the Weirdbook Annual, and The Dollkeeper by Rob Martin.

We picked these four for the variety they offer, and have started all of them, with high hopes. Here’s the information you might want to ponder if you’re looking for something to read, and there are Amazon UK and US links at the end of each section. No lurcher room today, sadly…

1) FOR THE DARK AND HORROR FANS

Ugly Little Things: Collected Horrors

By Todd Keisling

A new one on us, but the reviews so far have been good – a collection of dark tales.

“The eleven stories in Ugly Little Things explore the depths of human suffering and ugliness, charting a course to the dark, horrific heart of the human condition. The terrors of everyday existence are laid bare in this eerie collection of short fiction from the twisted mind of Todd Keisling, author of the critically-acclaimed novels A Life Transparent and The Liminal Man.

“Travel between the highways of America in ‘The Otherland Express,’ where a tribe of the forsaken and forlorn meet to exchange identities. Witness the cold vacuum of space manifest in the flesh in ‘The Darkness Between Dead Stars.’ Step into the scrub of rural Arizona and join Karen Singleton’s struggle to save her husband from a cult of religious fanatics in ‘When Karen Met Her Mountain.’ Visit the small town of Dalton in ‘The Harbinger’ and join Felix Proust as he uncovers the vile secrets rooted at the heart of Dalton Dollworks. And in the critically-acclaimed novella ‘The Final Reconciliation,’ learn the horrifying truth behind the demise of the rock band The Yellow Kings.

“With an introduction by Bram Stoker Award-winner Mercedes M. Yardley and illustrations by Luke Spooner, Ugly Little Things will be your atlas, guiding you along a lonely road of sorrow, loss, and regret. This is going to hurt—and you’re going to like it.”

“Todd Keisling is a born storyteller, drawing the reader into artfully constructed narratives that scout the darker end of the literary spectrum with skill and bravado. A pleasure to read, his stories linger well after the last page has been turned. Excellent stuff.”

John Langan, Bram Stoker award-winning author of The Fisherman

From Crystal Lake

http://amzn.eu/2ZuOIPW

http://a.co/acCtFwc

2) FOR THE CLASSIC & DETECTIVE FANS

Mystery Weekly October 2017

Edited by K Carter

C F Carter’s Mystery Weekly, which produces weekly updates and a monthly print/Kindle issue, came to our attention last year with its special Sherlock Holmes edition, which was most enjoyable. So we are fortunate enough to have a copy of this year’s similarly Holmesian double-issue  October special, and so far it looks good. We may report in more depth later, but here’s the round-up:

Contents

Vincent W. Wright “The Pastiche: A Sherlockian Necessity” Ever considered writing Sherlockian pastiche? Here are some thoughts to ponder.

Michael Mallory “The Adventure of the Lyceum Theatre Curse” At the request of Bram Stoker, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson investigate the deadly occurrences plaguing a production of Macbeth.

Ralph E. Vaughan “London After Midnight” Roger Sherrington replaces Dr John H Watson to provide invaluable assistance to Sherlock Holmes in a monster-god investigation.

David Gibb “Hercule Poirot’s Birthday” In this Agatha Christie pastiche, Hercule Poirot’s birthday dinner is interrupted by an inconvenient homicide.

Eric Cline “The Adventure of the Very Quiet American” Sherlock Holmes must discover who murdered a man. But first, he must discover who murdered a pig.

John Hearn “The So-Called Yoga Instructor” The part-time yoga instructor at an active retirement community is murdered in a fellow resident’s apartment.

John Longenbaugh “The Mechanical Detective” In a Victorian London substantially different from the one we know, no consulting sleuth is as extraordinary as Ponder Wright, the mechanical detective. Yet even his wits are tested by a murder where the suspects are all automatons.

Bruce Harris “Who Made Sherlock’s Clay Pipe?” At long last, the maker of Sherlock Holmes’s clay pipe is revealed.

From Mystery Weekly

http://amzn.eu/haBw0kx

http://a.co/3kkkkKN

3) FOR THE WITCH, WEIRD AND FOLK HORROR FANS

Weirdbook Annual #1

Edited by Douglas Draa

Another special to grab. Weirdbook the quarterly magazine of weird fiction edited by Douglas Draa, is upping its game, as they say, with its first annual, entirely themes around witches. 250 pages of witchery, with twenty one stories within, plus eleven poems on the theme.

As greydog has one of his Mamma Lucy hoodoo stories in the Weirdbook Annual, here’s a quick taster of the conjure-woman as she walks the strange world of 1920 Eastern America, and faces some very human problems as well as some witchery ones:

“A long night coming,” said the Dark Man. He stood easy on the edge of a field, red earth between his toes as he sucked on a piece of sugarcane.

Mamma Lucy didn’t hold much with visions. And as visions went, this wasn’t greatly encouraging her. She didn’t recognize the place her left eye was seeing. A great field spread across the valley bottom, and that field was sown with fingers, knuckle-end in the deep soil. Most were black fingers, waving without a breeze, though here and there a white one grew. Some had cracked, hard-worked nails, and some had none at all. Near to where she stood, one finger had died where it was planted; a crow was tearing strips of rancid flesh from the small, pale bones.

“How long?”

The Dark Man pushed back his straw hat.

“Long as a mule kicks; long as cane is sweet.”

She reached across the floor of the lean-to shack and took up the largest candle, her grip marking the soft wax.

“Don’t you game me now, boy,” she said, a husky rattle in her throat. “This ain’t New Orleans, and I ain’t one of your mamaloi, Sant-eria ladies, liftin’ their skirts when you come callin’.”

“Maybe I forget, sometimes. Long time since we talked.”

She loosened her grip on the candle.

“True enough. Ain’t been need to find you, is all. Lord knows, don’t rightly ’member askin’ for you this time.”

“Pender County,” he said. “They’ll be needing you there, by and by.”

She ran memories across the candle flame, through the scorch of hyssop burning in the bowl at her side. The name would come.

“Might’ve just said that.”

“I might.” He leaned on the sugarcane, now a bent stick with a silver head. His crumpled suit was brown, red, or maybe neither, and though he was taller than oaks, it fitted him well enough. “But I don’t get to speaking with so many folk these days. It’s all kerosene, steel and burned rubber at the crossroads. Every soul in a hurry, always in a hurry.”

He tipped his red straw hat, and her milk-and-honey eye twitched in its socket.

The vision was gone, and she was where she’d been. Four plank walls and a broken roof. A place for the night, and straw to rest her bones on. She licked finger and thumb to snuff the candle, and then it came to her.

North Carolina. That was the place…

The Witch of Pender, John Linwood Grant

Contents

Thou Shalt Not Suffer, by Matt Neil Hill
No Holds Bard, by Adrian Cole
Laying The Hairy Book, by Josh Reynolds
Here Is Where Your Proud Waves Halt, by Erica Ruppert
Vicious Circles, by Paul Dale Anderson
Assorted Shades of Red, by Franklyn Searight
Strange Days in Old Yandrissa, by John R. Fultz
Fertility Rites, by Glynn Own Barrass
The Witch’s Heart, by Rachel Bolton
Hag Race, by Andre E. Harewood
Best Friend Becky, by Wayne Faust
The Rat in the Rabbit Cage, by Ashley Dioses
Two Spells, by Neva Bryan
Pulled Over, by Paul Spears
The Witch of Skur, by L.F. Falconer
Cat and Mouse, by Duane Pesice
Last of the Ashiptu, by Paul Lubaczewski
Firestorm, by Richard H. Durisen
The Witch of Pender, by John Linwood Grant
The Nora Witch, by Brandon Jimmison
The Broken Witch, by Scott Hutchison

We’re not very clued up on recent weird poetry, so don’t usually cover that. And Ashley Dioses, better known as a weird and dark poet, has cheated by submitting short fiction. Shocking! For enthusiasts, here’s the line-up:

The Desert Rose Inn, by Maurits Zwankhuizen
The Ballad of Blighted Marsh, by David F. Daumit
The Witch-Queen, By S. L. Edwards
A Witch’s Work is Never Done, by Lori R. Lopez
Oracle Bone Script, by Frederick J Mayer
Halloween Witch, By K.A. Opperman
Remembering the Peculiar Effects from the Sugar Witch’s Goblin-Brew,
by Clay F. Johnson
Sea Witch, by Vonnie Winslow Crist
Little Youkai at the Witch House, by Chad Hensley
Mother Persephone, by Oliver Smith
A Warlock Slips Into My Dreams, by Darla Klein

From Wildside Press (the regular quarterly Weirdbook is now also available).

http://amzn.eu/0ag8yHT

http://a.co/elpxQpK

4) FOR THE WEIRD AND LITERARY FANS

The Dollkeeper

By Rob Martin

This is a fascinating novella, which we have now finished, but will be reading again before we make any more detailed comments. Containing elements of magical realism, fable and personal tragedy, it is both an easy and a difficult read – the prose flows between vivid imagery and moving, intimate emotion.

After her autistic daughter chases a butterfly over the mountainside, young Annaka exiles herself to a wilderness of guilt and shame. But when it returns a year later, the butterfly draws her from her solitude and into the shadows of her past. There she meets The DollKeeper—the mysterious guardian of a nursery deep beneath the earth, where the children are beginning to gather their crayons and colour in the void.

80% of the profits earned from The DollKeeper will be donated to the Easter Seals* charity. Art by Russell Smeaton.

*Easter Seals is a US non-profit disability organisation which addresses the needs of individuals and families throughout the lifespan – from inclusive child care to respite care – in order to help people “reach for their full potential.”

From Electric Pentacle Press

http://amzn.eu/8GYMwX3

http://a.co/fKrTmOG

We hope you find something of interest in there, and look forward to seeing you in a couple of days…

Today, not the stories but features on the supernatural writers themselves. Strange are the strands of websites. A week or so ago we published Lurchers Triumphant: The Secret Index, in the hope of linking together related articles from all over greydogtales. This time we’re mentioning a wide range of traditional creators of weird and ghostly stories, our classic chillers, so why not see who we picked, and read up on them?

As with lurchers and longdogs, there are references to early supernatural authors scattered all over the site, but the features below have a more substantial element of the classic chillers in them. And those who aren’t mentioned below are perhaps as surprising as those who are.

In general, there are loads of sites which cover M R James, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, Ambrose Bierce, E F Benson and many other resonant names. Whole swathes of verbiage consider these folk, and we have little to add at the moment. William Hope Hodgson we deal with regularly and separately.

We confess an interest in less well known writers, or in writers who had a peculiarly broad output and who are not always feted for their supernatural works.

And some have foxed us so far, known or forgotten. H R Wakefield, for example, wrote a number of excellent ghost stories, but every time we wrestle with his output as a whole, we end up in a hole, reading too many of his weaker tales. Maybe later. We also thought about adding D H Lawrence, but some of his ‘ghost’ stories are fairly badly delivered, so he never joined our classic chillers.

One who might have joined the list is Henry S Whitehead, who we have mentioned in passing, but he deserves a new post of his own one day. He edges into the zone of those writers associated with the H P Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith era, and Weird Tales, so we’re hanging on to him. Everil Worrell only just squeaked in, being a major Weird Tales player, on the strength of pieces such as her unusual old-style vampire story, ‘The Canal’.

Others must join us eventually – Perceval Landon, L T C Rolt, Oliver Onions, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and more – but we have a wish list. Saki (H H Munro) would probably top that, along with Daphne Du Maurier.

For reference, two of our favourite classic chillers, apart from Saki and M R James, are E G Swain and Jerome K Jerome – for very different reasons. Both are featured below.

Jerome’s satirical essay on the link between Christmas Eve and ghost stories, and his ruthless listing of the types of traditional story, is a must-read:

“After him comes the young man who woke up with a strange sensation in the middle of the night, and found his rich bachelor uncle standing by his bedside. The rich uncle smiled a weird sort of smile and vanished. The young man immediately got up and looked at his watch. It had stopped at half-past four, he having forgotten to wind it.

“He made inquiries the next day, and found that, strangely enough, his rich uncle, whose only nephew he was, had married a widow with eleven children at exactly a quarter to twelve, only two days ago.

“The young man does not attempt to explain the circumstance. All he does is to vouch for the truth of his narrative.”

Told After Supper

By the way, three specific stories from H R Wakefield, E F Benson and Jerome K Jerome are covered in our feature here:

http://greydogtales.com/blog/five-mountains-madness-third-twin/

Our thirteen features form a backward list, covering some twenty authors and ending in our piece on Sir Andrew Caldecott, who we believe has been overlooked far too often.

MOST POSTS CONTAIN LINKS TO WHERE YOU CAN PURCHASE OR OTHERWISE DOWNLOAD THE AUTHORS’ WORKS.

THIRTEEN CLASSIC CHILLERS

13) Out of the Silence with Bessie Kyffin-Taylor

http://greydogtales.com/blog/out-of-the-silence-with-bessie-kyffin-taylor/

An almost unknown author these days, with one particularly outstanding story, Bessie Kyffin-Taylor (d.1922).

12) Shiela Crerar, Clay-Corpses & Psychic Investigation for Girls

http://greydogtales.com/blog/shiela-crerar-clay-corpses-psychic-investigation-girls/

Ella M. Scrymsour (1888-1962), whose supernatural sleuth in Scotland is quite fun.

11) Jerome K Jerome, Ghosts and Dystopias

http://greydogtales.com/blog/jerome-k-jerome-ghosts-dystopias/

Master of drollery and the sly dig, Jerome K Jerome (1859-1927).

10) Worrell and Ward – Vampire Women Go Fishing

http://greydogtales.com/blog/worrell-ward-vampire-women-go-fishing/

A somewhat forgotten weird and speculative writer, Everil Worrell (1893-1969).

9) Edith Wharton Hears a Whooo!

http://greydogtales.com/blog/edith-wharton-hears-whooo/

Not just Edith Wharton (1862-1937), but two other supernatural writers, Mary E Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930) and Katharine Elizabeth Fullerton Gerould (1879-1944).

8) Edith Nesbit – Mother of the Dead

http://greydogtales.com/blog/e-nesbit-mother-dead/

Edith Nesbit (1858-1924) hardly needs an introduction, but is more widely known for her children’s stories.

7) The History of Women in Horror 1: A Man Explains

http://greydogtales.com/blog/history-women-horror-1-man-explains/

Perambulations around Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851), and other early writers, including those of the Gothic persuasion.

6) Sneerwell & Verjuice: The School for Weird Fiction

http://greydogtales.com/blog/sneerwell-verjuice-school-weird-fiction/

Some mutterings on the nature of weird and supernatural fiction which lead to a mention of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-73).

5) M R James and his Friend in the Fens

http://greydogtales.com/blog/m-r-james-friend-fens/

A tribute to the background of the marvellous Mr Batchel stories by E G Swain (1861-1938), and a touch of Swain’s acquaintance M R James (1862-1936)

4) Forever New: Women in Supernatural Fiction

http://greydogtales.com/blog/forever-new-women-supernatural-fiction/

Amanda DeWees’ excellent essay for us on some classic female supernatural writers, including Mrs. [Margaret] Oliphant (1828-1897), and Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

3) All Saints’ Eve: Some Seasonal Scares

http://greydogtales.com/blog/all-saints-eve-some-seasonal-scares/

Exploring the stories of Amelia B Edwards (1831-1892).

2) Casting the Prunes: Flaxman Low Triumphant

http://greydogtales.com/blog/casting-the-prunes-flaxman-low-triumphant/

A substantial but not entirely straight-faced look at the fascinating occult detective Flaxman Low, the product of mother and son team Kate O’Brien Ryall Prichard (1851-1935) and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard (1876-1922)’

1) Not Exactly Ghosts

http://greydogtales.com/blog/not-exactly-ghosts/

The clever and sometimes delightfully dry stories of Sir Andrew Caldecott (1884 – 1951), mentioned above.

NOTE: You can also find all sorts of classic supernatural articles and works at the very enjoyable site run by Michael Kellermeyer, Oldstyle Tales Press.

https://www.oldstyletales.com/

And that’s our thirteen classic chillers. Do stay tuned over the next few months as we add to the list.

Here’s a curiosity which we couldn’t fail to mention – an iconic British secret agent, a book which could only be produced under a maple leaf, and two authors who went on a Lovecraftian mission to break the boundaries. We have exclusives from those authors, Edward M Erdelac and Willie Meikle, and another from publisher Neil Baker. Captain Canuck rules, in our coverage of Bond Unknown, a new MI6 and Mythos double novella from April Moon Books in Oshawa, Ontario.

Our knowledgeable listeners will immediately go, “Oh, Oshawa!”, knowing that this was the birthplace of Albert William Tucker (1905-1995), who, in the fifties, put the final name and form to what is now known as the Prisoner’s Dilemma:

Two members of a criminal gang are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of communicating with the other. The prosecutors lack sufficient evidence to convict the pair on the principal charge. They hope to get both sentenced to a year in prison on a lesser charge. Simultaneously, the prosecutors offer each prisoner a bargain. Each prisoner is given the opportunity either to: betray the other by testifying that the other committed the crime, or to cooperate with the other by remaining silent. The offer is:

• If A and B each betray the other, each of them serves 2 years in prison
• If A betrays B but B remains silent, A will be set free and B will serve 3 years in prison (and vice versa)
• If A and B both remain silent, both of them will only serve 1 year in prison (on the lesser charge)

But that doesn’t really have anything to do with today’s feature. So we’ll turn to the publisher and the authors to give you the inside story…

The Name’s Bond. Neil Bond

A publisher’s tale

The journey to get Bond Unknown into the hands of the people who matter was as nerve-racking as a ski chase on a toboggan run. I first heard about Bond entering the public domain in Canada back in January 2015, and I recklessly posted a missive on Facebook along the lines of ‘Next from April Moon Books – James Bond vs. Cthulhu!’ My outburst was partly in jest as I was already swamped with trying to get my fledgling press off the ground, but the response was huge, and I suddenly realized I had to make a go of it, or die trying.

The legal situation was still quite murky, so I surreptitiously stretched out feelers to authors I already knew, and who I thought could have a good stab at a Bond story set in the Mythos. As I began to discuss the concept with the authors, a number of tenets came to the fore, including the films, which were off-limits. Bond may have been fair game, but the settings, gadgets and original characters from the films were still heavily trademarked. That was not an issue though, as I had already decided that I wanted stories based on Fleming’s original novels. I reminded the authors that these stories were not ‘pastiches’ or ‘deconstructions’ – they had to be written with due reverence for the originals. Other than that, the sky(fall) was the limit. I would allow Lovecraftian twists, supernatural elements, even straight adventures in the classic mold. Everyone got very excited.

Then, I hit obstacle after obstacle as I realized I would not be able to crowdfund the book as Kickstarter and Indiegogo wanted nothing to do with it. Then print on demand was off the table as I could not use Amazon at all – nor were digital versions allowed due the unenforceability of cyber borders. So, I would be paying for everything, including a limited print run, out of my puny, small-press pockets. I would have to wait until I could afford to take the risk.

Bond Unknown became my most high profile ‘on again, off again’ project, and I truly felt awful for the authors who were chomping at the bit. A couple of them went ahead with typical writerly pigheadedness and churned out stories – and I enjoyed reading these unique takes on a beloved character. Ultimately though, Ed and Willie’s contributions emerged as the front-runners for the first book, with several more tales waiting in the wings in hope of more editions. Having worked with them before, I knew what Ed and Willie were capable of, and they had nailed my vision for the book. I had my stories, next up, I needed artwork.

I’m no stranger to a bit of design myself, but I needed something special for the cover, and I reached out to Mark Maddox, whose covers for Little Shoppe of Horrors and Screem Magazine are some of the best I’ve seen. He immediately leaped at the opportunity and we hammered out a composition (although the final, gloriously eldritch image is all Mark’s design). I then turned to an illustrator who has constantly delighted me, M Wayne Miller, and he took a look at the stories before turning in a pair of stunning illustrations. His rendition of Bond is extraordinary in the way that it captures the essence of Bond without specifically referencing any actor or previous images.

All the pieces were in place, I just needed to make my move. Another year passed. What held me back? Funds? Fear? Francisco Scaramanga? A little of each (except, perhaps, the nipple-heavy hitman).

In a moment that might be considered the antithesis of a nail-biting climax, I scraped together the budget, grew a pair, and pulled the trigger. The result is a stack of boxes in the basement that is taller than my daughter, containing 200 copies of a book that I am hugely proud of, that I cannot sell outside of Canada. It’s the kind of risky move that would make Le Chiffre’s eye bleed but, as they say in O-branch, you only live once.

Neil Baker

Dry, With a Scots Twist

Willie Meikle Reminisces

I came to Bond early. I was taken to see Goldfinger way back in ’64 when I was only six and our local cinema didn’t enforce age rules. It made an impression. I even had the gold Corgi car with ejector seat and everything.

Fast forward a year or so, and I was down the front row with my pals for Thunderball, and for a few weeks after that the world was all jet packs, spearguns and trying to hold our breath in the swimming pools in the local river.

After that I saw every film in the week of release for many years, read the books until the paperbacks fell apart, and was generally a Bond fanboy, even after my disappointment when Connery gave way to Moore. I persevered through Moore’s sillier movies, and was rewarded with a return to my Bond with Dalton. I read the books some more, read the authorised sequels, and then…

I lost touch with the man for a time. Brosnan didn’t do it for me — too much like Moore’s sillier escapades for my liking, and after Goldeneye, I thought I was done with Bond.

Time passed, I rarely gave Bond a thought, then Casino Royale came along, and suddenly the years had been rolled back, and I was back in fanboy heaven again with my Bond.

I’ve mostly loved the Craig years despite some quibbles and grumbles over the direction the stories have taken, and seeing Bond return to Skyfall and the old house on the moor was a personal highlight.

When Neil asked me if I’d like to do a weird Bond story, it was that Scottish connection that came to mind, and the early Bond, Commander Bond, that I drew my inspiration from.

Skyfall also took Bond back to London, and that’s another ever present in my life and imagination, from the swinging ’60s, through a myriad of spy books and movies up to the present day, but also back to Holmes and the Ripper and beyond into the mists of time.

I worked in the old city for almost ten years, and walked past St. Paul’s Cathedral on many occasions. The memory came back to me when I was considering the big end set piece for my story and… here it is.

INTO THE GREEN is a synthesis, of my love for Bond, Scotland, spy movies, London, and weird cults in old, and new, temples.

Willie Meikle

Erdelac Royale

Edward M Erdelac pokes at some star spawn

I came late to Bond.

The first Bond movie I can remember seeing was Live And Let Die on TV with my parents, probably when I was about four or five. While I loved Tee Hee with his mechanical arm and the creepy 7up guy in the top hat and 007 running along the tops of alligators, the mushy stuff made me leave the room. From bits and pieces I saw of Roger Moore’s iteration over the years, I grew up dismissing Bond as some kind of romance series.

It wasn’t till I was about twenty years old and caught GoldenEye on home video at a friend’s place that I got heavy into Bond. It was Tina Turner’s killer track that I think sold me on it, combined with Brosnan’s bungie jump infiltration of that Russian facility and subsequent dive and Cessna escape in the beginning. No doubt the hours of delirious fun my friends and I got playing Nintendo’s classic GoldenEye shooter (Oddjob was soon disallowed) played its part too.

Suddenly, in my 20’s, I was on a Bond kick. I went back and watched the rest of the series (suffering through three quarters of the goofy Adam West-like Roger Moore years) in anticipation of Tomorrow Never Dies, and when I was out of movies, I picked my dad’s moldy old college copies of the Ian Fleming paperbacks and discovered the hard edged, pulpy, literary Bond, only barely hinted at in a few of the Connery movies (and maybe a bit in the two Dalton outings).

So finally Tomorrow Never Dies comes along…and people’s heads are popping through the floors of fighter planes, a helicopter chops up a marketplace, Michelle Yeoh is not getting the facetime I wanted to see, and I’m sitting in the theater seeing more Roger Moore than Fleming, Connery, Dalton, or the underappreciated Lazenby.

My torrid love affair with all things Bond lasts about as long as Viviene Michel’s.

Though I keep the fires smoldering with rewatches of my favorites, it’s eleven years before it’s fully rekindled with Casino Royale. Even then I’m a bit unsure. I don’t want a repeat of the second date disaster I had with Pierce Brosnan. I know at this point most of you are thinking that’s exactly what happened, but here I have to state a controversial opinion; I loved Quantum of Solace, from the gangsta opening theme song to the last shot of Vesper’s necklace in the Russian snow. This outing, more than any Bond movie since From Russia With Love, conjures for me the scarred, no-nonsense, kill or be killed paperback 007 for me. Skyfall’s really, really great, but it’s kind of a Batman movie. And don’t even ask me what I thought of Spectre.

So when Neil put out the call for Bond Unknown, I knew I positively had to shove aside whatever I was doing and turn something in, particularly for my Dad, whose books offered me a glimpse at his younger self and who continues to enjoy the character, and for my son, who kicked my butt a few times in GoldenEye Reloaded and thrills to the music and the cars of the movies the same as I do.

For my contribution, MINDBREAKER, I wanted to explore the damaged Bond of THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN. In the opening of MWTGG, Bond attempts to kill M., having been brainwashed by Russian agents in the wake of his taking revenge on Blofeld for the murder of his wife Tracy. MINDBREAKER’s Bond is still trying to bury his wife, still dealing with the lingering effects of Russian reconditioning. I wanted to explore that brief blank spot of his career. Who turned Bond into an assassin against M, and how does 007’s ability to bounce back from that mental conditioning make him peculiarly suited to facing the preternatural threats of the Lovecraftian Mythos when a shadowy subsection of MI6 comes calling?

Well, that’s a pretty cool answer. It involves Bond’s pedigree, Simone Latrelle, John Dee, a nod to Dennis Wheatley, a relic from an antediluvian war, Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, the Unione Corse, the Star Spawn, and a whole lot of other stuff I hope will appeal to fans of both Fleming and Lovecraft.

Ed Erdelac

You can only obtain Bond Unknown in print, and only directly from April Moon Books.

https://www.aprilmoonbooks.com/bond-unknown

See you soon…