Interzone Review of Mad Hatters and March Hares

Thanks to Andy Hedgecock for his review of “Mad Hatters and March Hares” (edited by Ellen Datlow) in Interzone 274.

“Ellen Datlow will have soon edited 100 anthologies. An impressive achievement in itself, but one accentuated by the positive critical reception those books have elicited. In her introduction to “Mad Hatters and  March Hares”, Datlow reveals her lifelong fascination with Lewis Carroll’s Alice books and the enduring pleasure she has taken in the art and films they have inspired. So it’s just as well that this is a stimulating, rich varied collection of stories….there’s whimsy, dirty realism, surrealism, dark fantasy and metafiction.”

Hedgecock describes “Moon, and Memory, and Muchness” by Katherine Vaz as a tour de force. Of Kaaron Warren’s “Eating the Alice Cake” that it’s a harrowing tale but an emotionally gripping and necessary one. Stephen Graham Jones’  horrific “Alis” is a tightly controlled piece of writing and Jones produces an interesting riff on the notion of minatory mirror and its inverted realities. 

“In terms of drawing inspiration from Carroll’s Alice and gheading off somewhere entirely unexpected, Priya Sharma’s “Mercury” sets the bar exceeding highly…using fiction to explore the boundaries between madness and imagination is an activity fraught with pitfalls relating to coherence, plausibility and taste, but Sharma’s liminal tale wanders between the debatable lands of historical fantasy and historical realism with quiet assurance.”

“Mad Hatters and March Hares is an impressive and consistently original collection that includes several exceptionally good short stories – then contributions from Priya Sharma, Jeffrey Ford and Richard Bowes are three of then best stories I’ve read in the last couple of years. Another rich, varied and entertaining anthology from Ellen Datlow.”

Interzone 274

Mad Hatters and March Hares

 

A Pick of Six

Aliya Whiteley Alert!

Aliya Whiteley

There are six covers by Darren Hopes in the Eden Book Society project, and they make an eerie and stylish collection. I helped to prepare* one of the novellas in this series (although I’m not allowed to say which one) and I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on the entire set.

The other authors involved are Gary Budden, Alison Moore, Andrew Michael Hurley, Jenn Ashworth and Richard V Hirst, and Sam Mills, so that should make for a very interesting selection of horror-based writing if that’s your bag. Click here to read the blurbs and see if you can guess which one is mine…

*wrote under a pseudonym but don’t tell anyone

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Museum of the Moon

I am excited that the Museum of the Moon is coming to Liverpool in 2018. It’s a installation by Luke Jerram. His moon is seven metres in diameter, featuring a 120dpi detailed NASA imagery of the lunar surface. At an approximate scale of 1:500,000, each centimetre of the internally lit spherical sculpture represents 5km of the moon’s surface.

• UZ Arts, Glasgow, Scotland, 11 May – 24th June
• Kelburn Garden Party, Scotland, 29 June – 1st July
• Tintern Abbey, Wales, 14 – 20 May
• Tall Ship Regatta, Liverpool, 24th May – 7th June
• Polytech Festival, Moscow, Russia, 19 – 20 May
• Azkuna Zentroa, Bilbao, Spain, 30 May – 3 June
• Kimmel Center, Philideliphia, USA, 31 May – 10 June
• Scene Nationale de Gap, France, 1 – 3 June

Follycon

Follycon will be the 69th British National Science Fiction Convention, or Eastercon. It will be held at The Majestic Hotel in Harrogate, from 30 March – 2 April 2018.

Sadly, I won’t be there but I’d like say a big thanks to Roy Gray and TTA who have kindly agreed to put a few copies of  “All the Fabulous Beasts” on the stand. These will be at a special con rate of £10 for the paperback and £16 for the hardback edition.

Even if you don’t like the look of my collection, I’d urge strangers to TTA to check out their stock. If you’ve not read “Skyshine” buy Carole Johnstone, do yourself a favour and buy Black Static Issue 60. It’s a bumper issue that also contains the sterling work of Tim Lees, Stephen Hargadon and Ray Cluley.

paperback

 

Interview

James Everington has kindly done a mini-interview with me on his blog regarding “All the Fabulous Beasts”. He’s focused on the two new stories in there- “A Son of the Sea” and “Small Town Stories”.

Read it here.

paperback

 

 

Maw

The sea was now in retreat. The air smelt swept clean. Water collected in the ripples on the sand and reflected the blue sky overhead.
Donald, Magnus’s younger son, saw the dead seal first. Magnus squatted beside it. Its neck was badly bruised and one of its eyes had gone. A flipper was missing.
“What happened to it, Dad?”
Magnus rolled it over. His cursory post-mortem was inconclusive.
“I don’t know.”
They followed the curve of the beach, and there lay mackerel, herring and ugly monkfish, dull eyes wide in surprise at their fate. Some were whole, but most were torn up, the clumsy dissection revealing guts and flesh already starting to rot.
“Shame. What a waste.”
They picked their way through more seal carcasses. These had fared less well. Most were missing great chunks. Some looked bitten down to bone, the edges black and high.
“Rank.” Peter covered his nose.
“It’s nature.” Magnus loved his sons too much to coddle them. “We all end up like this.”
Magnus meant rotting, not chewed up. Donald screwed up his face.
They found pieces of oars too, beaten and worn. A rowing boat with a hole in its hull. A length of fearsome looking chain. The ocean bed had been dredged and deposited on the shore.
After a quarter of a mile, the soft ascent of beach onto land was replaced by vertical columns of rock. The container was in the cliff’s shadow.

From “Maw”

***

“Maw” is a new story of mine that will appear in NEW FEARS 2, edited by Mark Morris. It’s not in my new collection from Undertow Publications.

Mark Morris has posted this on his Facebook feed with regards to NEW FEARS 3-

“Despite the amazing feedback, NEW FEARS hasn’t *yet* sold enough copies in the UK and the US for Titan to commit to any further volumes of the series, which means there almost certainly *won’t* be a NEW FEARS 3 next year. I’m pretty gutted about this, as I dearly wanted NEW FEARS to be an annual anthology in the tradition of the old Pan and Fontana paperbacks.

Every cloud has a silver lining, however, and Titan have not yet cancelled the series outright, but merely put it on hiatus while they assess the situation. What this basically means is that NEW FEARS needs to sell more copies if it’s to have any chance of continuing beyond a mere two volumes. So if you’ve been thinking of buying the book, but haven’t got around to it yet, could I please urge you to take the plunge and order a copy? Alternatively, if you’ve already got the book, then please tell others about it, or buy copies for friends and family as presents (whether they like horror fiction or not).

I’ve had *so much* feedback from people telling me that an annual, non-themed, mass-market horror anthology of original fiction is what the genre has been crying out for for years – but the bottom line is that in order for the series to continue each volume needs to earn out for the publisher.” Mark Morris

This mades me sad, not as a writer, but as a reader. Horror is being squeezed. So is the small press. Without them, I wouldn’t have venues to send my work to for consideration but more importantly I wouldn’t have places to go and read new stuff, the really challenging, beautiful and subversive stuff that’s hard to find in mainstream publishing. Even if you don’t like “Maw”, NEW FEARS is a buffet, so something else will be to your taste. Not sure about NEW FEARS? Try  TTA Press, Undertow Press, Unsung Stories, Black Shuck Books or Fox Spirit.

Money is getting tighter for everyone except Kim Kardashian. If you can buy just one book, it will mean these hardworking people will be able to continue publishing wonderful fiction. Ask someone to order one for you as a birthday present instead of them buying you a pack of socks (unless you need a pack of socks). Socks get holes in them. Books are forever.

NEW FEARS 1 is still available and you can pre-order NEW FEARS 2 now (links below).

 

Preorder New Fears 2 on AmazonUK or AmazonUS

Order New Fears on AmazonUK or AmazonUS

 

 

 

Black Feathers Edited by Ellen Datlow

“Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales” is now out in paperback and is available from Amazon UK (currently £10.99), Amazon US (currently $15.95) and Barnes & Noble.

With stories by Joyce Carol Oates, Seanan McGuire, Pat Cadigan, Richard Bowes, Paul Tremblay, A. C. Wise, Usman T. Malik, Jeffrey Ford, Sandra Kasturi, Mike O’Driscoll, Priya Sharma, Alison Littlewood, M. John Harrison, Nicholas Royle, Livia Llewellyn, and Stephen Graham Jones.

 

 

 

Kickstarter campaign by The Dark Magazine

Horror fans will be familiar with The Dark.

Co-editers Sean Wallace and Silvia Moreno-Garcia are looking to “help finance the magazine for two more years to allow us to increase the subscription base, increase the pay rate, and increase the amount of fiction we bring to you. Because we don’t just like dark fantasy, horror, or weird fiction . . . we love it.”

The campaign offers art prints, signed manuscripts and limited edition books, subs to The Dark and Gamut magazine, and story critiques. Contributers to this include Damien Angelica Walters, Michael Wehunt, Matthew Bennardo, Kali Wallace, Douglas Smith, Erin Roberts, Angela Slatter, Emily B. Cataneo, Bruce McAllister, Erica Satifka, Nin Harris, Kaaron Warren, E. Catherine Tobler and A.C. Wise.

I offered a critique, which has gone (thank you, whoever you are!)

Support The Dark’s Kickstarter Campaign.

 

Mark West’s Stephen King Mixtape

I really like Mark West’s Mixtape posts. So far he has compiled Brit Horror, American Horror and Women In Horror tapes and he’s kindly included me in all of them.

The mixtape project is, in Mark’s words, harking back to the 80s glory days of the homemade mixtape but he’s invited lots of different people to pick a “track” to go on there. They’re all full of the joy of discovering the short stories that other writers love and work you might not have heard of.

Now Mark has turned his attention to the shorter works of Stephen King. Is your favourite in there?

All the Fabulous Beasts paperback out now

“All the Fabulous Beasts” is now available directly from Undertow Publications now and to pre-order from Amazon UK (to ship on 1st May 2018).

It should also soon migrate to all the other online sellers, like Barnes
& Noble, and Book Depository.

Details of the hardback edition are to follow soon.

Order from Amazon UK

Order from Undertow Publications