Tag Archives: h p lovecraft

A Chill Equation – John Coulthart and More

May 1, 2016 greydogtales 2 Comments

We’re back, with bumper fun in the form of the wonderful Equation Chillers series, including Algernon Blackwood. We’re also going to enjoy the work of a couple of weird artists in the field – the renowned John Coulthart’s Lovecraftian art and the mysterious Boris Dolgov with his pulp illustrations from the forties and fifties.

We’ll start with John Coulthart, because we’ve been in touch with him recently. When we interviewed him at length on greydogtales at the end of last year (see john coulthart – axioms & other dark beasts), he alluded to various forthcoming projects, and two of these are here, or on their way soon.

The first is the new collection from Barnes and Noble, The Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales by H P Lovecraft, a massive book of six hundred pages in their Collectible Editions line. As you might expect, it contains twenty three of those Lovecraft stories which relate to what later became a whole myth cycle (for which August Derleth is mostly to be praised or blamed). The book includes six collaborative “revisions”, and has an introduction by Lovecraft scholar S T Joshi.

Mostly importantly for us (we have read a lot of HPL already, after all), it has wonderful front and back covers, plus endpapers, by John.

We haven’t yet seen a UK distributor for this, but here’s the link to the US source:

cthulhu mythos- barnes and noble

Also worth a mention is John’s work for a new collection, Out of Tune Book Two, for which he has provided fifteen new illustrations. This is due to be published by JournalStone sometime soon.

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Right, let’s go back a few years. Nearly three decades, in fact. One of our finds of the late eighties was the short-lived Equation Chillers series. Sadly, only eight books were ever produced directly under the imprint. We have battered copies of all of them which we bought at the time, thank goodness.

They were, in a way, the precursor of the Wordsworth Editions, where lost, rare or unusual stories of the supernatural suddenly became available at an affordable price. Equation revived a whole haunted house full of Victorian and Edwardian short stories, and it’s worth noting all eight volumes here, with the occasional comment from us.

1) THE FLINT KNIFE. Further Spook Stories by E.F. Benson
Selected and introduced by Jack Adrian (1988).

2) IN THE DARK. Tales of Terror by E. Nesbit
Selected and introduced by Hugh Lamb (1988).

(No, you’re right – we couldn’t find our copies of the two above to scan them. It’s that damned Magic Loft again…)

3) WARNING WHISPERS. New Weird Tales by A.M. Burrage
Selected and introduced by Jack Adrian (1988)

4) STORIES IN THE DARK. Tales of Terror by Jerome K. Jerome, Barry Pain, and Robert Barr
Selected and introduced by Hugh Lamb (1989)

An uneven but fascinating collection from the author of Three Men in a Boat and two of his friends and colleagues. Jerome and Barr founded The Idler magazine together in the late 19th century, though Barr is best remembered for his crime and detective novels. Pain was a writer and editor himself, producing a lot of non-supernatural work. Readers may already be familiar with his story The Undying Thing.

The Haunted Mill by Jerome himself is an especially wonderful example of his dry sense of humour.
5) BONE TO HIS BONE. The Stoneground Ghost Tales of E.G. Swain
Introduced by Michael Cox (1989).

We daren’t say much about this one, because we’ve often droned on about E G Swain being one of our favourite writers of the supernatural. Gentle, humorous and wonderful little stories with perfect characterisation, to be read again and again.

Uniquely, this volume not only reprinted the 1912 edition of The Stoneground Ghost Tales but included six stories by David Rowlands, excellent later pastiches of Swain’s content and style. Rowlands has also written many tales of his own, including those concerning “the endearing Father O’Connor, who is constantly brushing up against the supernatural and the uncanny in stories that range from the whimsical to the terrifying”.

6) THE MAGIC MIRROR. Lost Supernatural and Mystery Stories by Algernon Blackwood
Selected and introduced by Mike Ashley (1989)

An interesting and diverse collection, particularly as it includes a number of Blackwood’s tales for the BBC, including the text of the very first official radio ‘talk’, by Blackwood, from July 1934 – The Blackmailers. The BBC director responsible apparently commented “I don’t doubt that we shall have a good many letters from listeners saying that we are corrupting the youth of England with morbid fancies and distasteful subjects”.

Blackwood went on to make over sixty radio broadcasts, and you can listen to one of them here:

7) DRACULA’S BROOD. Neglected Vampire Classics by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, M.R. James, Algernon Blackwood and Others
Selected and introduced by Richard Dalby (1989).

A most fine collection because Dalby deliberately avoided well-known or commonly anthologised tales. His choice of twenty three stories ranges from 1867 to 1940, and includes Mary E Braddon, Vernon Lee, Alice and Claude Askew, M R James and Frederick Cowles. Worth trying to find because of its range and the rareness of some of the stories.

8) THE BLACK REAPER. Tales of Terror by Bernard Capes
Selected and introduced by Hugh Lamb (1989).

After this the series folded, rather tragically. They had announced, but never released:

FEAR WALKS THE NIGHT. Tales of Terror by Frederick Cowles
To be selected and introduced by Richard Dalby.

Equation Chillers can still be found second hand. Amazon even has a few on offer through its marketplace dealers.

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While musing on Blackwood and looking at related illustrations of his work, we were reminded of the artist Boris Dolgov. A New York artist, virtually nothing is known about him, not even the dates of his birth and (presumed) death.

Dolgov produced seven (we think) covers for the magazine Weird Tales, and numerous interior illustrations, a few of which we’ve included in this post, from the mid-forties to the early fifites.

It is known that Dolgov was a friend of the artist Hannes Bok, and he collaborated with Bok a few times under the name Dolbokov. He also produced at least one book cover, that of A E Van Vogt’s 1952 book Destination: Universe!

You can see more of Dolgov’s work here:

dolgov on monsterbrains

And to close, a mention that Equation also produced the book Ghost and Scholars: Ghost Stories in the Tradition of M.R. James. This fine collection was not under the Chillers imprint, though. Selected and introduced by Richard Dalby (as mentioned above) and Rosemary Pardoe, this came out in 1989, and included an essay by MRJ, himself, “Ghosts–Treat Them Gently!”

“Following James’s lead, the writers represented here conjure up an ordered, placid world into which the supernatural–usually in malevolent form–slowly but surely intrudes itself.”

Unfortunately, this is now both hard to find and expensive. Bums.

We’ll be back later in the week, dear listeners, with more weird fiction, weird art and even weirder lurchers…

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Cthulhu for Girls

March 25, 2016 greydogtales 1 Comment

or Where Next for Lovecraftian Fiction? In which my writing, H P Lovecraft, Ramsey Campbell, women and other strange phenomena crash into each other, and everyone goes home in tears. Or something like that. Never give a man his own website, he’ll only spoil things. Even worse, I’m on my own today. Editor-in-chief is at the gym; technical support crew and longdogs are otherwise engaged, and Twiglet, for some reason, is chewing a box of three-inch screws.

I therefore head to the trenches without tactical support. Obviously I have no actual answer to the “where next” question. This really ought to be a drunken panel at a convention hosted by a cool Jamaican woman in an armoured exoskeleton with her own cattle-prod. That would be more fun. Much of my own work is Edwardian period occult, and owes more to William Hope Hodgson and J B Priestley than it does to H P Lovecraft. But I do have a few thoughts. Oh dear…

In the past few months since the Great Re-Emergence, I’ve been monitoring anthology calls fairly keenly. After all, I might have a story on an old gum wrapper which could be swiftly adapted to current needs. You know the drill. Cross out “Kevin the Plumber”, replace with “crazed scholar” and add more eldritch bits. There’s nothing worse than a shoggoth stuck in your Non-Euclidean u-bend.

During this time I’ve seen calls for LGBT Cthulhu, Inclusive Cthulhu, Turn HPL on His Head, Post-Lovecraft Weird, Historical Mythos and a number of others. Which is fine. And I’ve read many interviews with contemporary authors (even conducted a few), interviews which considered different aspects of writing in or beyond this area, such as:

representation of women as protagonists and significant antagonists in Lovecraftian works;
countering the bleed of racism from HPL’s personal views into his fiction;
the need to re-explore his basic tropes and themes in non-Mythosian ways;
the abandonment of Lovecraftian themes altogether as having served its time, or being restrictive as a framework for modern weird fiction.

I was pondering on this lot when I accidentally came across a couple of pieces which interested me. I’m not going to comment on them as such, but I do think that both are useful to the discussion.

barracks-1203202_960_720 — the house where all lovecraft’s female protagonists live – uh oh, it’s empty…

Sean Eaton writes a blog called The R’Lyeh Tribune, which is invariably worth a browse (see link at end). He recently interviewed Ross Smeltzer, author of The Mark of the Shadow Grove, a collection published in January 2016. I haven’t read the collection yet, but the interview dwells considerably on the influence of Lovecraft. In particular I noted Smeltzer’s comment:

“In each of the novellas in The Mark of the Shadow Grove I wanted to tell stories in the weird and Lovecraftian mold that also included compelling characters, particularly female characters. Their absence in so much classic horror fiction—and their virtual nonexistence in Lovecraft’s canon—speaks to the truncated perspective of many weird fiction writers. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that Lovecraft ignored women in his fiction because his understanding of who could constitute a protagonist in a story was limited to bookish white men like himself.

“I wanted to incorporate women into a Lovecraftian framework and to do so in a way that upset gendered representations of femininity. I strove for ambiguity. I don’t think I wholly succeeded, but it’s an artistic agenda I plan on pursuing further.”

The very same day (honestly, not one of my usual lies) I found a book down the back of a shelf, a book about which I’d completely forgotten. It was Douglas E Winter’s 1985 collection of interviews with horror authors, Faces of Fear. It contained an interview with Ramsey Campbell, in which the Great Man said:

“What appealed to me about Lovecraft was that sense of enormous cosmic awe… It certainly worked for me then – not so much now, I’m afraid, although I do still like Lovecraft; I find him fascinating for various reasons.”

He then went on to add, concerning his own collection of Lovecraftian fiction, Cold Print (also 1985):

“I was attempting, very clumsily, to get at that sense of awe. But at the same time, it was also very much a means of not dealing with my own fears. It was actually a means of writing about quite different things, and probably rather comforting in some way, being able to achieve something that had nothing directly, personally, psychologically, to do with me… Only when I became impatient with the Lovecraftian structure… did I begin to get on to dealing with things that were a good deal more personal.

“Lovecraft is the most widely imitated American horror writer; M R James is the most imitated British writer; Hitchcock is the most imitated director. The reason is precisely that their technique is part of their surface – you can actually see their technique. It is in the foreground of their stories, to the extent that you can actually see it working and take it as a model.

“So Lovecraft was very much about the style being literally appropriate to the material, but I felt that there were other ways of doing it.”

Of course, Ramsey Campbell was speaking thirty years ago, and I can’t pretend to know what his views would be now, but I like what he says – excepting the suggestion that Cold Print is clumsy in any way. I still love that collection. The rest of his interview is well worth reading, by the way, as are those of the other contributors.

I wanted to present these two fragments for anyone who might have missed them, but naturally I have my own opinions. In fact, I have opinions like Twiglet has dandruff, impossible to eradicate and going all over the place.

I grew up steeped in Lovecraft, forty years ago, and given the weight of all those tentacles at the back of my mind, there is no way I can ignore HPL’s influence. So I did get tempted recently into writing a few Mythos stories. Having done so, I have no excuse for keeping silent, so what was my take?

Of least importance, my first move was with the Sandra’s First Pony series. These stories are Mythos in their roots but very non-Lovecraftian in structure and tone. Enid Blyton and the Chalet School, with a touch of folk-horror and a lot of ill-judged humour. The main protagonists are a cheerful schoolgirl with a shotgun and a violent, slightly psychotic talking pony. Sandra and Mr Bubbles do at least challenge HPL’s short-sighted stereotypes, and if there’s any agenda it’s a feminist one, so I feel reasonably good about that.

But they are only for fun, and I’ve written two serious stories in the last few months. The first, Messages*, is a deeply Mythos tale in which the protagonists are a mother and her daughter, operating beyond normal constraints and barriers. They’re sane, they’re not stereotypical cold-hearted killers or anything like that, and the tale isn’t about sex. It’s about parenting, belief and responsibility. You may or may not enjoy it, but the point was to move forward in a way which might be Mythos but new as well.

The other one is With the Dark and the Storm, which is doing the rounds at the moment, a story seen from the point of view of a small Igbo village in British colonial Africa. I worried about this one, because you don’t counter racism by having old white Yorkshiremen writing about indigenous African beliefs. At the same time, I wanted to see if a good story could be told from a viewpoint other than that of Lovecraft, Edgar Wallace and other writers of the time. The structure itself is quite traditional, the angle not. If that works, or if I should even have tried it, we shall see.

And I can understand why writers such as Ted E Grau (see a voice from the nameless dark ) and others, having contributed powerfully to the Mythos field, seek to move forward rather than dig the same fields over again and again. I sort of feel the same way myself, and yet I constantly get tempted to play among the roots.

So I thought that it might be a good idea to read Dreams from the Witch House – Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror**, and that’s my current bedside book. This collection (edited by Lynne Jamneck) contains some cracking women writers of today, and maybe they might help me decide. Will something new still grow in this strange, slightly tainted soil?

I’ll leave that with you, while I go look up the price of ammunition for a Hopkins and Allen .32 in 1908. Boys, eh?

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Whilst we’re on – or off – Cthulhu’s dad, it seemed appropriate to mention a work-in-progress by writer and editor Sam Gafford, who has graced these airwaves a number of times. Normally we touch base with him over William Hope Hodgson, but Sam kindly sent us some artwork by Jason Eckhardt, and we wanted to show it off.

He and Jason are in the process of producing a biographical graphic novel called Some Notes on a Non-Entity: The Life of H P Lovecraft. The title is from an essay by Lovecraft which formed part of Arkham House’s second HPL publication, Beyond the Walls of Sleep, 1943.

This collection is mostly minor pieces, and Some Notes was later released by Arkham in a limited edition (500 copies) twenty years later in 1963. The essay’s most recent outing was in Collected Essays, Volume 5: Philosophy; Autobiography & Miscellany edited by S. T. Joshi (2006)

It’s hoped that the graphic novel will be out by the end of 2016. If you want to keep up with progress, you can wander over to the Facebook page, where more artwork and commentary are added as the great work continues.

some notes on a non-entity facebook page

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*Messages, by me, will be available in Martian Migraine’s new anthology Cthulhusattva, coming 23 May 2016.

**Dreams from the Witch House will be available on Kindle from 12 April 2016 (we were fortunate to get a bundled special offer copy), and we may yet say more about that one.

The full article for Lovecraft, Diversity, and the Occult: An Interview with Ross Smeltzer, can be found here:

the r’lyeh tribune

Out of space, rather than outer space. Keep your wireless set on, because in a couple of days we have our super brilliant Easter special, an interview with actor Dan Starkey, the new audio Carnacki (and also, for Dr Who fans, Strax the Sontaran, of course)…

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Something Annoying This Way Comes

December 23, 2015 greydogtales 4 Comments

STORY NOW DIVERTED FROM HERE, AS IT’S DUE TO FEATURE IN THE CHARITY ANTHOLOGY CHRISTMAS LITES 2019.

As a holiday extra, greydogtales offers you an exclusive short story, Something Annoying This Way Comes, by the renowned British author J Linseed Grant. Mr Linseed Grant is well known to our listeners, and to lawyers throughout the developed world, for his charming and light-hearted tales of unspeakable abominations on the Yorkshire moors.

The history of this particular story is also well known. Written in 1982, during his enforced exile in the Orkneys, it was submitted to an American magazine, Astounding Fantasies (incorporating the Amateur Bicyclist) in the November of that year, and rejected seventeen minutes later. After a series of injunctions, Mr Linseed Grant agreed not to submit any further stories to the United States. Ever.

Fortunately the original draft, most of which was written on a discarded sheep*, found its way to us at greydogtales.

*The sheep, a ram of the North Ronaldsay variety, lived to be an astonishing twenty three years old, though it never spoke again after the incident.

greydogtales returns after Christmas, unless you’re very good…

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Ted E Grau: A Voice from the Nameless Dark

December 11, 2015 greydogtales Leave a comment

Today’s feature is a real treat – an interview with contemporary horror writer Ted E Grau. Ted was actually meant to be the classic British author H Russell Wakefield (1888 – 1964), which has probably surprised both of them. However, the talented Mr Grau responded so promptly to our outline that we decided to hold the party right here, right now. Remember listeners, carpe diem (that’s Latin for “my fish has just expired”).

For any newcomers, T.E. Grau is an author of dark fiction whose work has been featured in dozens of anthologies, magazines, literary journals, and audio platforms. The Nameless Dark, his first collection of short fiction, was released in July of 2015 by Lethe Press. The novelette They Don’t Come Home Anymore will be published in 2016 through This Is Horror. Grau lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter.

greydogtales is not a review site. That style doesn’t sit well on our ancient shoulders. We merely highlight weird writing and art that takes our fancy, and wonder at the madness of longdogs and lurchers. It is fair to say, though, that The Nameless Dark is a damned fine collection, and would be very high on our recommended list if we actually had one.

Let’s stop writing and start listening…

greydog: Hello and welcome to greydogtales, Ted.

tg: Greetings to you and your grey dogs, John, and thank you for having me. I quite enjoyed the hike up the windswept hills. Beautiful country up here round Yorkshire.

greydog: You’re even more welcome, saying nice things like that. So, we first noticed your work in 2013, and then in the 2014 anthology World War Cthulhu, with your story White Feather. Oddly enough, that anthology also included Willie Meikle and the illustrator M Wayne Miller, both of whom were interviewed here earlier this autumn. Now you have your own collection out. Have you been building up to this for a while?

tg: I have, probably longer than most. The Nameless Dark – A Collection, covers all of my short story writing starting from when I first switched from screenwriting to prose in early 2010, including my first completed piece, “Transmission,” up to my most recent (“Expat”) at the time I signed the contract with Lethe Press. Even though the earlier pieces are, well, “early” in my growth as a fiction writer, and almost exclusively deal with Mythos/Lovecraftian elements (as writing Lovecraftian fiction for anthologies was my entré into prose), I felt like it was important to include my earliest stuff all the way to the present in this first collection, if only for myself and my family and personal posterity. Basically, this collection shows my beginnings in 2010 up to 2015, covering a five year span of writing, reading, and thinking about what I wanted to say and do as a writer of dark fiction.

greydog: A number of your protagonists do not exactly make it out in one piece, either mentally or physically. Do you see yourself as a bleak writer, or is this just realism within the context of story-telling?

tg: I suppose I see myself as a writer of bleak tales, as I’m drawn to and fascinated by bleak subject matter. Abandoned places, natural decay, weathering, geologic grind, socio/psychopaths, dead enders, tragedy, a cold, uncaring universe. I do have a shade of the pessimist in my soul, locked arm in arm with a detached curiosity for the ghoulish, and a love of the dark and arcane. That Germania gene. Somehow I balance this with a pretty cheery attitude on the day-to-day. I blame my wife and daughter for that.

Happy endings in stories work, and have a time and place (take any movie about sports, for example), but I think ending on a downer or with some horrific realization, either large or small, is more interesting, and more indicative of reality.

greydog: Outside of the more obvious weird and horror writers, have you been influenced by authors in other genres, classical or contemporary?

tg: Hunter S. Thompson is one, for sure. I was referred to him by someone who noted that our styles were similar back when I was writing a snotty humor/satire column in a local arts paper in Omaha, Nebraska while in college. When I read Thompson, I realized how much of a novice I was, but also that I wasn’t alone in the vast stylistic universe. I read a lot of Thomas Wolfe, Kerouac, Kesey, Farina, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and the Beats around that time, as well, and I can still feel that particular rhythm in a lot of my writing. I have to pull it back sometimes, or chop it up, as when I really get going, some of my phrasing sounds like bad Beatnik pastiche. A lot of my rewriting is getting out of my own way, either based on my influences or just my natural verbal inclinations.

I cut my reading teeth in high fantasy and sword and sorcery in late 70’s and early 80’s, so I’m sure there’s a lot of that swirling around in the broth, as well. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard (and several Conan rip-off novels), David Eddings, Lloyd Alexander, R.A. Salvatore, Hickman & Weis, etc. Dungeons & Dragons has probably exerted the largest influence on my imagination over anything else.

In a contemporary sense, I’ve seen a bit of an influence from Laird Barron in some of my writing, and maybe some Richard Gavin, as I very much resonate with their work and masterful atmospherics and creation of authentic dread out of the seemingly mundane. I don’t find much horror fiction scary, but they are two writers (as well as Thomas Ligotti, T.E.D. Klein, Adam Nevill, Michael Marshall Smith, and a few other) who can genuinely give me the creeps. I’m so thankful for that.

Lawrence Block has influenced me in terms of the cleanness and leanness of his prose, saying what needs to be said without a whole song and dance. I heavily read Cormac McCarthy after most of my stories in the collection were finished, but I’m sure he’ll seep into my newer tales, as no one does brutality like he does. He’s a one-punch KO boxer. The Tyson of American letters.

Flannery O’Connor isn’t so much an influence as an example of an unattainable goal, in terms of her style and tone – a little humorous, a whole lot dark, possessing a keen insight into people that I don’t currently possess, and probably never will, no matter how much I listen and observe. She’s a monster in the best sense of the word. The finest writer I’ve ever read.

greydog: Thompson and Burroughs were particular favourites of ours when we had more time to read. And, please take this as a compliment, we do see fragments of Thomas Ligotti in the collection, albeit with less dense prose and a lighter touch. Are you a fan of his work?

tg: I absolutely am. For my money, he’s our greatest living (semi-working) horror writer (T.E.D. Klein would be just below, if he still wrote). Very few write like he does, or see the world in a similar way. He’s sacrificed so much for this rare world-view, and we readers are the fortunate heirs. He’s what horror fiction should be.

As for density of prose (one of my ongoing battles with myself), I would be willing to weigh out my stuff against Ligotti’s on a specially calibrated Adjective and Adverb Scale. I think the shade of my purple would stack up pretty well against his. But as I continue this journey, I hope to see him claim eventual victory. He writes lavender better than I do anyway…

greydog: Maybe we need to dust off our scales again. Going back to The Nameless Dark for a moment, some writers build on recurring locales or characters in their work. Your collection is notable for the incredibly wide range of settings and individuals we encounter. Do you have any plans for writing more ‘serial’ fiction, in the sense of connected tales?

tg: Oh yes. I have big plans for Salt Creek, Nebraska, which made its first public appearance in “The Mission.” A collection in the coming years of all prairie and rural horror tales will feature several Salt Creek tales, as will at least one novel and possibly two that I have rolling around in my head.

Another story, “MonoChrome,” which was published late last year in the sadly overlooked but exceedingly excellent King in Yellow tribute anthology In The Court of the Yellow King, edited by Glynn Owen Barrass, is set in Los Angeles, and features a hard luck ex-homicide cop/ex-reporter/current below-the-line “fixer” and professional inebriate named Henry Ganz. I want to write more about this guy and his Los Angeles.

greydog: We look forward to Salt Creek especially, being suckers for the rural nightmare. Now, we might as well mention the eldritch, non-Euclidean elephant in the room at this point. There seems to be a Lovecraftian resurrection at the moment, not that your work is limited to that area. Is this sustainable, or do you feel that the base concepts will become mined out?

tg: I think the market will become saturated, or actually already has, so one would assume that most of the targeted readership will get bored with reading the same stuff reheated over and over again. But, it doesn’t seem to be abating at all, so what do I know?

The Lovecraftian omniverse is a fun zip code in which to live, so I get why it has remained popular all these years. Stories with a cosmic horror element that Lovecraft helped build up and codify for easier digestion will always have an appeal for curious stargazers and devoted heretics like me. A reality without benevolent gods, lacking a bearded grandfather looking out for your best interests, is a very interesting (appealing?) one to contemplate. For me, it was so different in POV than the Judeo Christian certitude in which I was raised that it knocked me back a couple of steps when I first stumbled across it. As a writer, I’m stepping out of Lovecraft Country for a while, but I know I’ll be back, as in many ways it’ll always be home, even with all its dysfunction and shame.

greydog: Strangely enough, one of our favourite stories in the collection is the un-Lovecraftian Beer & Worms, an incredibly simple insight into human thinking (or inhuman thinking). Is this an isolated incident, or do you like enjoy twisting everyday life like that?

tg: I do love taking the normal and safe and twisting it into something terrible. Hitchcock was a master at doing this, and devoted to “ruining” the safety of normalcy by injecting horror into the commonplace. If I was better with plotting, you’d see more of these stories from me. Even so, I’ll be doing more of this in the coming years, especially in some of the crime/Noir fiction I’m slowly constructing. It’s fun to jump back and forth from the supernatural to the natural.

greydog: We hear that you have a new deal with This Is Horror. Are you allowed to say anything about what might be coming out from that source?

tg: I signed a publishing deal with This Is Horror a few months back, and I’m thrilled to be working with such a quality outfit that has published some of my favorite writers. The contract specifies one new work (in the novella range, but certainly allows for something longer), with an understanding that makes it a bit open-ended, meaning I could publish two or more works with them in 2016. The trust they’ve shown in my writing is humbling, and I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity to release my work with This Is Horror in the coming year.

The two pieces I’m batting around right now are They Don’t Come Home Anymore, which is my take on obsession, hero worship, legend vs. fact, and vampire culture; and a still-untitled piece set in a particularly American Doomsday Seed Vault constructed on domestic soil (patriotic Yanks certainly can’t trust those cunning, soft-bellied Euros with the future of all plant life on earth!). A third work is much more undefined and definitely Big W Weird that will be my thinly veiled tribute to Thomas Ligotti.

greydog: Clearly you are anathema to our own dark fiction ambitions. That’s why we like featuring illustrators and audio clips – we don’t do much of that sort of thing. So we’ll give you a last chance to say something nice about longdogs, lurchers and sighthounds. It might just get you off the hook.

tg: As a guy who grew up with labradors and weimaraners and pheasant-brush spaniels and all sort of farm dog mutts, who’s only seen a whippet on Los Angeles sidewalks and greyhounds in commercials, I’m afraid anything I say about longdogs will only disappoint you, so I’ll just leave this parcel of soup bones on the table and see myself out. The hills are calling for the journey back down to the sea.

greydog: Bones are always good, as long as they’re someone else’s. Many thanks, Ted E Grau.

tg: Huge thanks to you, John. It’s been fun.

Apart from his fiction, it’s always well worth dropping in on Ted’s website/blog, cosmicomicon, which can be found here:

cosmicomicon

And The Nameless Dark can be picked up now. We don’t think you’ll be disappointed (UK link on sidebar)

the nameless dark, lethe press

the nameless dark, amazon us

Coming up on greydogtales: More longdog photos, good news again from the Spiritualist Telegraph, the art of Danish folk-lore and many other related weirdnesses…

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Literature, lurchers and life