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.

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/

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

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

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

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.”