Horror and Dark Fantasy Blog
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
Horror fans are well-acquainted with the work of acclaimed artist Glenn Chadbourne, of Newcastle, Maine. Widely known in the horror and fantasy genres Chadbourne has created covers and illustrated books and magazines for Cemetery Dance Publications, Subterranean Press, and Earthling Publications.
Recently Chadbourne illustrated The Secretary of Dreams: Volume 1, a graphic collection of Stephen King stories pubished by CD Publications in three limited editions. He has also illustrated the work of Joe R. Lansdale, Dave Lowell, Jack Ketchum, Bev Vincent, and many others.
Needless to say, I’m thrilled that Glenn is creating the illustrations for the new, illustrated edition of my novel The Safety of Unknown Cities, due out at Halloween 2015 from The Overlook Connection Press. Overlook editor and publisher Dave Hinchberger shared a couple of the illos with me recently, one of which was briefly banned on facebook for its (shudder) depiction of breasts.
For anyone who loves hardcore horror and dynamite graphic artwork, keep an eye out for the late 2015 release of this illustrated edition.
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
Before taking out his knife, he said, “After studying the client’s file, you must submit a brief note on how you propose to kill your first client and how you will display his body in the city. But that doesn’t mean that what you propose in your note will be approved…”
So begins the title story, a surreal and harrowing tale of murders carefully crafted and artfully displayed to evoke maximum horror. The narrator of the tale is interviewing for the position of assassin, with the caveat that his victims must be positioned in eye-catching and memorable ways. Failure to live up to the job description can only end in a grisly demise.
Blasim is a writer and filmmaker who fled persecution under Saddam Hussein in 1998 and now lives in Finland. The Corpse Exhibition is a graphic and Kafkaesque look at a nightmare world of feral young men groomed to be gangsters and killers, doomed families, desperate survivors, and death at its most gruesome and meaningless.
In “The Song of Goats”, the narrator finds himself competing with other would-be contestants to see who can tell the most horrific story and win a place on a radio game show. Shock follows absurdity as the hapless narrator vies to come up with the most appalling tale, while another contestant grumbles, “That’s a story? If I told my story to a rock, it would break its heart.”
“The Madman of Freedom Square” chronicles the miracle of two young blond men who appear in the wretched Darkness District and rejuvinate the squalid neighborhood. After their disappearance, a bloody battle ensues between the government and the locals over the fate of the statues erected to honor them.
The collection concludes with “The Nightmare of Carlos Fuentes”, in which an Iraqui escapes to Holland and does his best to embrace his new life and good fortune, but ponders the stark differences between his life then and now. “Why can’t we be peaceful like them?…Why do they respect dogs as much as humans? Why do we masturbate twenty-four hours a day?” There is, however, no refuge from the nightmares and Carlos Fuentes soon learns that there’s more to escaping one’s past than just geography.
The Corpse Exhibition is by no means an easy read. Blasim piles horror upon horror. But clearly the author writes with the authority of experience. Beneath the often fantastical narrative is a vivid and sobering look into a world most of us know only from the headlines and the evening news.
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
Overlook Connection Press publisher Dave Hinchberger is giving away two copies of the limited edition of Fatal Journeys! To be in the running just post a review of the book on Fatal Journeys’ Facebook and Amazon pages. You will authomatically be entered in a lottery to win one of the two limited editions being given away.
The limited edition includes:
*“Wingless Beasts”, a bonus story, never-before-pubished and making its first appearance in this signed limited edition
*Original cover foil-stamped design by noted horror and dark fantasy artist Glenn Chadbourne, who created new art for the front and back of this edition
*Signatures by Lucy Taylor, Jack Ketchum, and Glenn Chadbourne
*Frontispiece by Bill Munster
*Bound-in silk bookmark
There are only two hundred copies of the limited edition available, so write a review and get one for free!
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
Yesterday’s newsletter went out with Terry M. West’s novel incorrectly referred to as “Horror” in the Magic Now rather than HEROIN IN THE MAGIC NOW.
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
Even without the vampires, zombie whores, and a Frankenstein-esque crime king, the life of filmmaker and drug addict Gary Hack would be the stuff of nightmares.
Once an ambitious, aspiring writer, Gary dwells in a squalid limbo of heroin addiction, self-pity, and self-destruction. When he’s not feeding his habit, his life centers around making porn films, occasionally bickering with a bitter ex-wife, and wondering why even on a diet of heroin, he still manages to be fat.
Bad luck and worse choices seem to dog him, beginning as a school boy who earned the label of ‘deviant’ when he drew a picture of the devil with ‘tits and a penis’ and earned a beating from his mom.
That little episode, frequently recalled when the adult Gary is deep in a drug-induced haze, has set the trajectory for a life mired in drugs, porn, and the myriad degradations of life shared with the monsters that inhabit West’s bleak and seedy version of New York City.
No question but Heroin in the Magic Now is a grippingly twisted saga, in which a world full of monsters is the new reality – homeless zombies scrounge in alleyways, vampires prowl the boulevards, and shapeshifters aspire to be porn stars. A bleaker, more soul-crushing world would be hard to imagine: “Some days, Gary felt like the creatures were merely haunting his head in a metaphysical way and he could bury them if he quit his addictions, but everyone around him seemed to be in a quandary about the monsters and their rights and the dark impact they were having…the monsters were everywhere.”
An accomplished author, filmmaker, artist, and actor, West depicts this macabre world with style and dark humor. The impact is heightened by the introduction, in which West makes clear that Gary Hack’s demons have been his own,too, and that the most terrible monsters are not the ones stalking the night, but those lodged in the human heart.
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
“Seasick and shivering, Thomas Blacksburg peered out from beneath the orange life boat canopy, watching helplessly as the powerful Benguela current swept him north up the coast of Namibia. For hours, he’d been within sight of the Skeleton Coast, that savage, wave-battered portion of the West African shore stretching between Angola to the north and Swakopmund to the south.
Through ghostly filaments of fog that drifted around the boat, Blacksburg could make out the distant shore and the camel’s back outline of towering, buff-colored dunes. To his horror, the land appeared to be receding. Having been brought tantalizingly close to salvation, the current was now tugging him back out into the fierce Atlantic.”
Thus begins “Nikishi”, one of the stories in my new collection Fatal Journeys. To celebrate the launch of the book, I’m publishing the entire story on the home page of my website.
Just go to www.darkfantasy.us to read the entire tale!
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
Descansos– in New Mexico you see them everywhere – along major highways and narrow country roads, at the intersection of city streets and in lonely niches along dusty, unpaved lanes. They’re the roadside shrines marking the place where someone has died suddenly and violently, often a long way from home, and they serve as both a memorialization of the deceased and a warning to remember the fragility and impermanence of life.
In spanish, the word ‘descanso’ means respite or resting place. Years ago, when the coffin was often carried from the church to the graveyard, the bearers would have to set it down at some point and rest. The spot was then marked with a cross or ‘descanso’.
Many descansos consist of a cross with flowers, photographs, perhaps a stuffed animal of a statue of the deceased’s favorite saint. Some shrines are lovingly tended; others are neglected and overgrown with weeds.
To me, the descansos are poignant and haunting, a reminder that death can come at any hour, in the moment we least expect it. They’re the memento mori of the New Mexican roadside. Their presence carves out a sacred space and a pilgrimage site for families and friends of the departed.
Almost invariably, the descansos face the highway, so those speeding past can catch a glimpse of the spot where someone died. I always notice them,and I wonder about the person who died there, what happened, and who visits the descanso to mourn.
For a few miles at least, I drive a little slowler and appreciate my life a little bit more.
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
I don’t read enough science fiction.
Not nearly. Especially science fiction written by women.
Until the other day, though, when I read the June issue of “Lightspeed Magazine”, this wasn’t a topic that concerned me.
That’s because I didn’t realize what I was missing. Now I do. “Women Destroy Science Fiction!”, the June issue of “Lightspeed”, is a project that was funded by more than two thousand backers on Kickstarter and put together by 109 women, including authors, essayists, illustrators, copyeditors, bloggers, and many others.
The idea of an issue devoted entirely to women in science fiction was conceived in part by “Lightspeed” assistant editor Christie Yant as a way to address the perception that science fiction written by women is less “real” than that written by men. Author Pat Murphy pointed it out over 20 years ago in a speech in which she famously identified the attitude permeating science fiction that essentially says, “Women don’t write science fiction.” Or, put in less p.c. terms, “Those damn women are ruining science fiction.”
If ever such antiquated ideas were finally shelved, it should be now, with this masterful edition of “Lightspeed”. Stories that stood out for me (and really all of them did!) include, “A Word Shaped Like Bones” by Kris Millering, in which a space traveling artist shares her tiny automated spaceship with a dead man, a situation made more ghastly when the artificial gravity fails.
“Cuts Both Ways” by Heather Clitheroe features an exhausted cyborg making a Christmas trip home whose inability to forget the horrors he’s witnessed leaves him near collapse.
And in “Canth” by K.C. Norton, the captain of a runaway ship follows her vessel, with the aid of some pirates, into the lair of the mysterious Sea Monk.
There’s also some wonderful flash fiction, including “The Mouths” by Ellen Denham, where globulous creatures receive sensory input through the crackers they constantly consume.
Along with the stories, the issue includes articles and interviews reinforcing the idea that womens’ participation in science fiction continues to expand in ways benefitting us all.
As Pat Murphy writes, “The stories we read and the stories we tell shape who we are.”
And with fifty percent of the world being female, now would be a good time to listen.
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
I want to thank Michelle Augello-Page for inviting me to participate in “My Writing Process Blog Tour.” To read Michelle’s insightful Q&A last week, click on http://michelleaugellopage.wordpress.com/2014/06/16/my-writing-process-blog-tour/
Q&A with Lucy Taylor
1) What am I working on? I keep a number of projects on the fire and go back and forth, which keeps me from getting bored. At the moment, I’m finishing up a short story set in New Mexico that centers around the descansos, shrines that mark where people have been killed on the highway.
Currently, I’m also helping editor Dave Hinchburger of The Overlook Connection Press get the word out about my new book, a collection of short stories called FATAL JOURNEYS with a pub date of July 8, 14. It is a themed collection about horror in exotic places, and there’s a wonderful introduction by acclaimed author Jack Ketchum. Four of these stories have never before been published, including the novella “How Real Men Die”.
My long term project is a post-apocalyptic novel with multiple narrators set in the western U.S.
2) How does my work differ from others of the genre? My writing is a combination of horror, erotica and dark fantasy. I’ve been told some of my work has a Lovecraftian bent, for example, the short story “Extremophiles”, from the heavy metal anthology AXES OF EVIL and the title story in my collection THE SILENCE BETWEEN THE SCREAMS. At least as far as my fiction, I definitely see the cosmos as a fundamentally hostile, irrational, and menacing place where often unseen forces of destruction lurk just below the surface and where we humans, basically, haven’t a clue.
There’s also a strong erotic element to my work, some of which might be considered ‘wish fulfilment’. The story “Summerland” from FATAL JOURNEYS falls into that category.
In general, though, I don’t like to focus too much on what genre I’m writing in; I don’t really care much for labels, which I find very limiting. Let’s just say I write what comes naturally to me.
3) Why do I write what I do? Wow, what else could I write?! I love writing that is disturbing and macabre. Darkness, be it of the cosmos or the human soul, fascinates me. I still remember the first time I read a horror story. It was a copy of “Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine” and I found it enthralling. Also, on a personal level, my childhood was pure Southern Gothic. I was raised by a mother and grandmother who, to put it kindly, lived in an alternate reality, a kind of folie a deux. I survived by observing, living in my head, and protecting my inner self as best I could from the madhouse environment. There was a lot of fear, dread, and surpressed rage. Writing dark fiction allows me to explore those feelings from a position of power. Playing God, after all, can be very satisfying.
As a writer of dark fiction, I’ve sometimes compared my mind to a wonderful attic full of weird and creepy things to explore at my leisure. I’m never afraid of what I’ll find there and I never get tired of poking and prying around in the interest of creating new stories. It’s very liberating.
4) How does my writing process work? Some ideas speak to me more lyrically and powerfully than others. I get lots of ideas, but sometimes I just know that a particular one has to be turned into fiction. Sometimes that happens quickly, other times an idea germinates for years. Occasionally a title comes to me that grabs my attention so much that I have find a story to go with it. That was the case with “A Hairy Chest, A Big Dick, and a Harley”.
Another example: a couple of years ago, I found out that a friend of mine sells fireworks every summer leading up to the Fourth of July. He’s in the fireworks tent 24/7, sleeping on a cot, selling fireworks at any hour of the day or night. For some reason, this struck me as an amazing and slightly creepy thing to do, since I could only imagine who might be buying fireworks at 3 a.m. I knew I had to use that idea somehow and it became “The High and Mighty and Me” from FATAL JOURNEYS.
As far as the practical side of the process, I’m a morning person and like to write new material early in the day, then work on revising, research, playing around with new plot ideas etc. later. I find that if the writing side of my life is going well, then pretty much everything else is okay. If I’m not writing, to say that I feel restless, irritable, and discontent is putting it mildly.
Next week, June 30, 2014, “My Writing Process Blog Tour” will continue with Alex Johnson, Sabrina Kaleta, and Jim Goforth. For their viewpoints into the writing life, visit the sites below.
Alex S. Johnson is a college English instructor currently living in Sacramento, California. His books include THE DEATH JAZZ, WICKED CANDY, and BAD SUNSET. He is also the editor of the AXES OF EVIL heavy metal horror series. Read more about Alex S. Johnson at http://bizaralex.wordpress.com
Sabrina Kaleta writes: “I am a poet, music journalist, mother, performance artist, Doo-Dah Queen, reluctant debutante, punk, hostess, fortune teller…all these labels might tell a bit of my story. As a poet, I have graced the stages of The Expresso Bar, The Old Towne Pub, Sam’s Book City, the Coconut Teazer, and Highland Grounds and have been published in Flipside, Saturday Afternoon Journal, and Kether. Other publications include Guitar World, Metal Hammer, New Times, Diabolik, and BAM. In my Pasadena CA home, I continue to try to ignore the outside voices, have a good time, and create what I can. Visit Sabrina Kaleta’s blog, Household Mantras, at www.sabrinakaleta.tumblr.com
Jim Goforth has been writing tales of horror since the early 90’s. After years of detouring into working with the extreme metal community and writing reviews for hundreds of bands with Black Belle Music, he has returned to his writing love with his first book PLEBS, published by J. Ellington Ashton Press. He has stories in a couple of anthologies with a collaborative novel and a collection of his own short stories to emerge in the coming months. To learn more about Jim Goforth, visit http://jimgoforthhorrorauthor.wordpress.com/
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
I can see my grandmother now, hawk-eyed and hyper-vigilant as she looks up from her evening paper in alarm and whispers to my mother, “Did you hear something upstairs?”
As if on cue, my mother gets up, arms herself with an umbrella (hers being a generation of women that had not yet embraced the virtues of the semi-automatic) and proceeds up the stairs, to confront what sort of ghastly fate one can only imagine. The first place she would check for an intruder would be under the bed (since we all know that’s where psycho killers, rapists, and bogeymen lie in wait for us all). As a young child, it never made sense to me – it seemed we should be running out the front door rather than poking umbrellas into dangerous places.
As far as I know, my mother never found anything scarier than dust bunnies under the bed, but this and far more outrageous Southern Gothic looniness laid for me a firm belief system that, beneath a superficial veneer of grim banality, the world is actually a madhouse of danger and weirdshit depravity, much of it lurking just below the surface of one’s own family – even within one’s own mind!
Clearly the only reasonable vocation for a person raised in such a hothouse of creeping dread is that of horror writer (or possibly stand-up comic).
In a way, though, I know I received an interesting, if perhaps dubious, blessing – the compulsion to write horror fiction. It’s all in my head anyway, why not put it on paper? I love having access to the bizarre and creepy fantasies within my own imagination. It’s like having a private attic full of wondrous monstrosities and dark grimoires to explore and peruse at my leisure.
Which I’ve been doing for quite a few years now. When I wrote the novel THE SAFETY OF UNKNOWN CITIES, I got to explore extremes of erotica well beyond what I’ve known in real life. In the novella “Spree” I created a vengeance-obsessed protagonist who acts on his fury in ways few sane people would ever resort to. And in the short story “Extremophiles” for the anthology AXES OF EVIL, my characters find out the hard way what I already suspected a long time ago, that the world, in fact, the very cosmos, is definitely out to get us.
Writing about the lurid, the perverse, the unspeakable has a surprising reward – it makes the real world with all its horrors seem safer, more manageable, and definitely, in a weird way, more fun!