a knowing noah

I received my contributor’s copy of DEAD HARVEST this week, and I have to say it’s an impressive beast. When the anthology’s editor MarkParker said he had high ambitions for the book he wasn’t joking. This is a really well done book, tightly bound, neatly set out, and with great cover art that’s strikingly displayed to full effect in the trade-paperback edition.

To make things even better, there’s some seriously good writers involved in the project too. How about reading work by, among others, these guys:

Tim Lebbon

Richard Chizmar

Ronald Malfi

Benjamin Kane Ethridge

Jeff Strand

James A Moore

Tim Waggoner

I’m in there too, but I don’t think I spoil things too badly. My piece is called “A Knowing Noah” and comes in at about 15 pages long. Not too painful in a collection of 50 stories that tops out at 700 pages in length.

I suppose the anthology as a whole is – with tales leaning heavily on the autumn/fall season and for the most part featuring rural settings, rows of corn and creepy woods and totems – a folk horror collection. As far as I know, Mark Gatiss coined the term folk horror in his BBC4 horror film series when describing The Wicker Man and Witchfinder General. It’s as good a description as I can think of to fit these tales.

The book is available in a trade-paperback edition as well as in e-book format. If you have the money, I’d say you should shell out the extra for the paperback. It’s a beautiful thing, chunky and generous, and I think the publishers Scarlet Galleon have a big future ahead of them.

The trade paperback is available here in the UK.

The ebook is available in the UK for Kindle, Nook, and Kobo*.

The trade paperback is available here in the USA.

The ebook is available in the USA for Kindle, Nook, and Kobo*.

And you can get it in all e-formats here at Smashwords.

And if you want something special, some copies have been signed by contributors Richard Chizma and his son Billy Chizmar here at Cemetery Dance Publications.

The book has been out a while now, and is racking up some impressive reviews. If you’re into horror of a more rural bent, this is one to gather up. Recommended.

* Kobo readers are able to use money off vouchers on this title in both the US and UK, so keep an eye on those Kobo-run promotional contests they run.

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.

little boy, little girl, lost in the woods

I have a new short story, "Little Boy, Little Girl, Lost in the Woods", in the latest edition Midnight Echo, published by the Australian Horror Writers Association. The one and only Geoff Brown did the business editing things and generally improving my story, and has worked hard on the layout of the entire issue too.

Here's the first paragraph:

So Helena is dead as well, and
although she is so by her own hand, I
know in any sense that matters that the
act is murder. Put plainly, it is for want
of, and thus because of, them. Oh, I grant
you they may not have tied the noose
and looped the rope over the rafters;
they did not invite my new wife to dance
her last desperate jig alone in our bridal
room. Yet it is true that they did all else
but swing from her legs to hasten her
end.

The journal is available as a print copy here, as well as across e-reader platforms here (actually, if you buy it from the guys themselves, you get epub, mobi, and PDF files all in one transaction).

the rats tail

Reputations can be made with a single book. For better or worse, James Herbert’s name will always be linked with his first novel. Originally published in the UK in 1974, The Rats was an instant bestseller. Grim and relentless, with uncluttered prose that only occasionally rose above the workman-like – and subsequently obscured any greater depth the book may have contained in subtext and metaphor to those who weren’t looking for it – it came along and tore apart the gentlemanly conventions that had held sway in horror fiction to this point.

Before James Herbert the bestselling novel of the occult and horror had been the possession of Dennis Wheatley and his characters of dukes and noblemen fighting black magic in courtly dwellings. Herbert was having none of that from the off.

Mostly set in London’s East End, where Herbert grew up in slum housing that had been condemned in the wake of the Second World War, Herbert used recognisably working-class characters that were not the middle-class clichés of middle-class writers trying to “write down”. With a mix of youthful energy, violence, anger (an anger that would later turn, in subsequent books, into its more cerebral cousin outrage), and that urge to break free of convention and “tell it how it was”, it was the right book at the right time -- and as Stephen King later reflected, was an important precursor to the punk movement. Within only a few weeks of publication, it had sold over a hundred thousand copies, and Herbert’s reputation was sealed: he wrote nasties.

It didn’t really matter that in the years following the appearance of The Rats and The Fog (an even more in-your-face violence fest) Herbert wrote a gentle reincarnation fantasy (Fluke), explored Faith (Shrine), touched on fairytales (The Magic Cottage and Once . . .), wrote a careful ghost story in the manner of Shirley Jackson (Haunted), explored environmental concerns with science fiction (Portent), and wrote a sassy state-of-the-horror-novel black comedy (Creed) or that his books had become more character-driven (Others, Nobody True). His reputation was set. He was the guy who wrote horror thrillers, nasties like The Rats, you know, stuff that only appealed to kids. But that’s a lazy tag with which to label him. It doesn’t look at the work that went into the books.

While he might have stumbled occasionally stylistically, and certainly in his later books he had a tendency to overwrite, Herbert was always trying to improve, to write a better book than the one he had produced before. He was honest and hardworking and doing his best. And that showed, and was the reason he was still selling books in huge quantities long after most of his contemporaries and imitators faded from the scene.

He passed away in March of this year, 2013, aged 69, with his much troubled and much delayed final novel, Ash, freshly released in paperback in the UK after many weeks on the hardcover charts, soaring to the top of the bestsellers lists.

But as it is with reputations, it is the rats that tail after him . . .

(Herbert wrote two prose sequels to The Rats – Lair and Domain – and a short graphic novel coda to the trilogy, entitled The City. He wrote another trilogy, this one featuring his ghost hunter protagonist David Ash: Haunted, The Ghosts of Sleath, and Ash. Rumbo, from his gentler book Fluke, made cameo appearances in The Magic Cottage and Once… )