supernatural tales 44 review

I just noticed a tidy little review of Supernatural Tales 44, which as I mentioned in my previous post, contains my short story "Ghost Stories". If you're interested and fancy a read,  here's the review.

ghost stories

It's been a while since I've had a fresh story published outside of one of my own collections. And, actually, in this case it is for wont of trying. I'd been getting fed up of chasing down editors to see if that story of mine they'd had on the slush pile/ in their "going to be included some time" folder was ever going to spread its arms wide, show some teeth, and stun the world any time soon. The record for one of my pieces being on the brink of being published is eight years and counting. So I kind of gave up subbing. Too much else was going on (see blog post "housekeeping"), and anyway, I had a viable way of getting stories out if I wanted to (see here). I was content to carry on doing my thing, as and when it was possible for me to do so - admittedly to little or no noticeable effect on the wider world. But that was okay. That was fine. Things were cool. Fight all you like, but it's hard to press your shoulder against chance and circumstance - what the ancients might have called Fate - and then dig your heels in and push and expect to get a result. So yeah, I was blithely doing what I was doing, and didn't really expect anything to change.

Cue David Longhorn.

Earlier this year a notice popped up on my twitter account saying I'd a Direct Message awaiting me. Swirling the little pointer arrow around on the screen, I opened it up. It was David, wondering if I'd anything I might like to submit to his journal (and surprisingly still one of the best kept secrets in UK speculative fiction) Supernatural Tales.

I've been lucky enough to have had a few stories appear under David's stewardship of ST. You don't turn down an opportunity to submit lightly.

Straight away I opened up the files on my PC to see if I had anything of the right flavour for David's journal. A couple of pieces looked like they might - at a push - be close enough to squeeze in, but I wasn't convinced. Mm, thunked I, it's not looking good. Nearly everything I'd written recently was either SF, fantasy, or mainstreamish-slipstreamy stuff. Then I noticed a tale I'd yet to second draft, called, somewhat appropriately, "Ghost Stories." Okay, that had  to  be worth a look. I opened the file, and much to my relief, it was. I gave it a second draft, and then cut as much as I could, and polished things up, and I'm pretty sure that I had sent it to David by close of play.

The good news - for me - was that David liked it enough to include in a future issue. And now, at least for some of us, the future has arrived. Issue 44 of Supernatural Tales contains "Ghost Stories", as well as fiction by the always excellent Steve Duffy, Victoria Day, Michael Kelly, James Machen, and Sam Dawson, who has also produced the cover art.

I can't lie. It's nice to see my stuff in the company of other writers' work again.

You can buy a paperback of Supernatural Tales 44 here. Get it as an epub ebook for ereaders here. And as a Kindle ebook here.

tied up good and true

I have a new short story in David Longhorn's excellent Supernatural Tales journal. It's about 4,000 words long, and it's called "Tied Up Good and True". It's one of those stories that came about when the title popped into my head. It felt like it needed exploring.

Here's how the story starts:

Where to begin on Mulberry's cruelties?

          The list of his misdemeanours was a long one, and the reading of it fit only for those whose eyes had been hardened to the terrible deeds one human being could inflict upon another. Even then I would be loath to suggest that such a soul could come away untroubled from its study.

Some records are appalling and best consigned to lead-lined vaults, never to be opened; and yet, come the time it ended, by comparison Mulberry’s file would need burying beneath a volcano. It was already filled with the most devious of exquisite tortures, some small, some large, from his early years on into adulthood. For pages and pages that list extended in a lexicon of injustices, itemising paltry cruelties and twists of relished vindictiveness, underscoring hurts and slanders administered with volatile delight. And that was only the beginning. Come its incomplete end (and it should be said that the list was only incomplete because there was potentially so much more to come, Mulberry being not yet out of his middle years and his imagination not truly unleashed), butchers would put away their cleavers and take up brushes to paint bucolic watercolour scenes. Warmongers would plant flowers in the muzzles of their weapons and throw away their uniforms of hateful conflict for ever.

The truth was clear: to the mortal eye there was not a smidgen of loveliness about Mulberry's crimes, however original they might be and no matter how much they were performed with a creative flourish. He was an adept little monster, a practitioner of stealing dreams and replacing them with nightmares. And he did it in the worst ways he could conceive.

And it carries on after that.

If you'd like a copy, then there's a link through here.