Do you dare to step within? Be warned – today we crash into lots of weird new works by authors all over the world, fail to give any of them proper coverage, and then drift off to Africa. And Django resurrects a household tradition. This is indeed one of our confused mid-week medleys…
Someone asked us recently – why greydogtales? We think that they were interested in the name, rather than questioning our existence. The name bit we can answer. It’s partly because last year the first new story we wrote, a tribute to William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki, was called Grey Dog, and partly in honour of our late lurcher Jade, who was a lovely but troubled rescue.
We’ve mentioned Jade before, and boy, was she hard work. Almost impossible to train, and proof against any behaviourist we tried. She was, however, great in summer. She hated bluebottles. As we also hate the little buggers, it was a delight to find the stairs and hallway littered with dead flies. Being an agile lurcher, Jade was quite capable of leaping and catching them in mid-air. I imagine that they tasted rather bitter, so she left the bodies to be swept up later. Good dog.
It was promising, then, to find that Django, our quite sane but silly longdog, has developed the same interest in ridding the house of flying vermin. With the heat up this week, he has been patrolling the house and taking down enemy fly-craft with some success. Unlike Jade, however, he seems incapable of using insect recognition charts, and thus goes after bees as well. So we live in fear of him getting a stung nose, and at the same time we applaud him for his fly termination. Daft dog.
Note-type thing: For all the books below we’ve given a UK Amazon link for consistency. We’d like to point out that if you ask a grown-up, they will be able to find other sales links, even ones direct from the publisher. If you use the last option, the writer may get a better cut that way.
Now, weird works. That was where we were going. Let’s start with a mention of Matthew M Bartlett. Matthew seemed on the surface to be a shy, ordinary joe, the kind of dime-a-dozen guy a dame could pass in the street on her way to a cheap bourbon joint, yet that hot afternoon in Queens, something changed…
Sorry about that. We drifted. So, you should look at his stuff. We were utterly absorbed by his book Gateways to Abomination, a slightly indescribable collection of short pieces interwoven to give you clues to some deeper single vision.
With its focus on Leeds, Massachusetts, we were driven to respond with a challenge from Leeds, Yorkshire, which you can read on Brian O’Connell’s Conqueror Weird website here: john linwood grant on matthew m bartlett
Matthew has now released Creeping Waves, which is both a sequel and not a sequel – you can read it separately, but if you’ve read Gateways, you’ll probably get even more out of both of them. Hopefully we’ll pin him to the interview board later this summer.
El Bartlett also has a story in Ravenwood Quarterly’s soon-to-be-released inaugural issue, so we nudged editor/publisher Travis Neisler for a quick pitch about that endeavour:
“Hi! I’m head weirdo here at Ravenwood and I approve of this message… sorry, it’s election time here in the state. Mr. Grant offered me a moment to spotlight what we’re up to, so here I am. The magazine is coming along with the help of the most excellent Sam Gafford and we are still hopeful for a late June shipping date. After that you can expect chapbooks for John Paul Fitch’s “Sunflowers” and then Mr. Grant‘s “A Persistence of Geraniums” as well as some others. Big things happening! Another big thanks go to Sam Gafford – we seriously could not have got this far without him. Thanks for the opportunity to chitter on!”
As we’ve raised the spectre of writer John Paul Fitch now, it’s worth mentioning that John has recently written four episodes for the upcoming ‘Fragments of Fear’ TV show. The concept of Fragments of Fear is rather tempting: “From a dark and foreboding subterranean vault, a series of otherworldly narrators lead the viewer through tales of terror, horror, and suspense, offering a dark and disturbing take on Jackanory meets Tales from the Crypt.” You can find out more below:
Had enough weird yet? No? Then why not check out the new book from Michael Wehunt, entitled Greener Pastures. Michael, who dwells in sunken Atlanta (What? Ed.), has already produced over twenty disturbing and strange short stories, one of which, I Do Not Count the Hours, was included in The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu which we mentioned last week (see cthulhu may not live here any more ).
Greener Pastures, his first collection, not only pulls the best of these together but also includes some new tales written especially for the book. Well worth a look.
####
“She said that her name was Beauty, that she’d been raised in a mission beyond Lokoja. She was a liar. When you looked into her eyes, the colour of ironwood, you could see that no Jesus-man had ever been inside that head.” (jlg)
If you follow our ramblings on Facebook, you might know that we have an interest in Africa (we’ve even been there, but only to the Northern bits, sadly). The two areas most relevant to our own writing are:
- the background of events in South Africa during the Boer War, worrying events which affect the nature of some key characters in our Tales of the Last Edwardian
- our growing series of strange tales set in colonial Nigeria, mostly from a black perspective, which might also be seen as a response to the casual and unpleasant racism of Edgar Wallace and pulp writers earlier last century.
We in the greydogtales kennel believe that depicting people of colour (and exploring different backgrounds, beliefs, cultures and ethnic identities) in weird and dark fantasy fiction is important. Not only that, but it’s exciting. The idea that you can have a field called ‘weird fiction’ and then only populate it with stock white characters seems rather silly and unimaginative.
But we are very white in reality, however adventurous we might be, so we’re always interested when we find new stuff that expands our horizons. Despite the fact that we knew of the Imaro stories by black author Charles R Saunders, we’ve only recently come across the broader idea of a whole Swords and Soul sub-genre. As we love a good fantasy, the idea of heroic sword and sorcery tales based on African mythology, history and characters sounded terrific. We were already fans of writers such as the late Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart, who wrote about the oral traditions and myths of his own Igbo people – there are enough ideas in that corner alone to fill a few bookshelves. So we investigated.
As far as we can tell, author Milton J Davis seems to be one of the key proponents for taking the sub-genre forward, along with Saunders himself. So our plan is to indulge ourselves with some Sword and Soul, and if we find something cool, we shall report back. If we’re really lucky, we might be able to persuade one of the authors to come on greydogtales and say a few words. Our first stop is going to be Griots, an anthology of fourteen sword and soul stories co-edited by Mr. Saunders and Milton J. Davis. No, we don’t know what they’re like, but that’s the fun of exploring.
More books to consider can be found here at Milton’s publishing site:
####
There are more interesting people,dogs and books to mention, but they’ll have to wait until later. Time to go write fiction, pick up dead flies and earn chicken carcasses. We’ll be back soon…