Doug Talks Weird

This looks like it has the potential to turn into a great web series. In this first instalment Doug Bolden talks about one of Laird Barron's short stories; 2005's Proboscis.

Year's Best Weird Fiction Volume 3!

It was announced today that there will indeed be a third volume to the Year's Best Weird Fiction series with the 2016 release to be edited by Simon Strantzas!!!

Press release


Toronto, Canada, March 1, 2015 — Simon Strantzas, whose elegant and enigmatic stories have made him a master of the weird tale, has signed on as Guest Editor for the third volume of the Year’s Best Weird Fiction, due 2016.

Series Editor Michael Kelly says, “When I first conceived of this series, and contemplated Guest Editors, Simon sprang immediately to mind. Not only is he at the top of the weird fiction class, he has also established himself as a first-rate anthologist.”

“I’m honored and beyond flattered that Michael asked me to guest-edit a volume of Year's Best Weird Fiction,” Strantzas said. “Undertow Publications is at the forefront of world-class fiction. I love what they are doing.”

Established in 2009 by writer Michael Kelly, Undertow Publications (UP) is home to the acclaimed weird journal Shadows & Tall Trees, and Year’s Best Weird Fiction. The initial release from UP, Apparitions, was a finalist for The Shirley Jackson Award. As editor, Kelly has been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson and British Fantasy Society Awards, and his fiction has appeared in a number of venues, including Best New Horror, Black Static, and Weird Fiction Review.

Simon Strantzas is the author of four story collections, including BURNT BLACK SUNS from Hippocampus Press (2014), and editor of SHADOWS EDGE (Gray Friar Press, 2013) and AICKMAN'S HEIRS (Undertow Publications, 2015). His stories have appeared in various “best of” annuals; been translated into other languages; and been nominated for the British Fantasy Award. He lives in Toronto, Canada, with his ever-understanding wife.

Forthcoming from Undertow Publications:

‘These Last Embers’ by Simon Strantzas (March, 2015)
‘Aickman’s Heirs’ ed. By Simon Strantzas (May 2015)
‘Skein and Bone’ by V. H. Leslie (July 2015)
‘Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 2’ eds. Kathe Koja & Michael Kelly (October, 2015)

###

 

New Story: And the Filth Flows ...Always

The flooding was immense. I looked through the bedroom window at the street below. The black slime that last night had begun to seep up from the drains and to flow languidly down the gutters had risen so that neither the tarmac of the road nor the grey stone of the pavement could be seen. In their place was this slow moving river of it winding its way towards the center of town.

Cars and pedestrians alike made their way through the early morning haze seemingly not noticing the dramatic change to the street through which they passed. I wondered how they could be unaware of the viscous filth that pulled and sucked at their feet, that fouled the tires of their vehicles spraying their chassis’ with the grim substance.

The house was empty. It had been for years. Years since my daughter Kate had left home for her own life and, before that, since Alice had been taken from us. It had been so for years; yet now, faced with this strange and horrid phenomenon outside, I felt the loneliness more than ever. Since those first days after Kate left, those first days without either of the girls –without my family I felt the need to talk to someone –to anyone. To ask why they were not more perturbed, more caring, of the effluence which was now flooding the street. How could they bear to walk through it, to even drive through it?

The houses of Elderslie Road are old red brick Georgian terraces. Front doors opening directly onto the street but elevated by a couple of small steps. The blackness was flowing below the top of the first step, surely they must notice? It is only because of this tiny elevation that the horrid looking stuff was not flowing beneath doors and flooding the houses. At the rear of each house are more steps than in the front which lead down into the back yards so if the flooding was the same in the back then, at least, it would not have come into the kitchen. For now.

Read the rest here and, as ever, feedback is always most welcome. :) You can also, if you prefer, download it for Kindle and other ebook readers by clicking the links.

She Walks in Shadows: ToC and Cover Reveal

Well this is a perfectly timed announcement isn't it? The table of contents and absolutely stunning cover art, by Sara K. Diesel, for Innsmouth Free Press' She Walks in Beauty anthology have been revealed. The book will be released in autumn -in time for Halloween. :) Hopefully we'll also see two other all women anthologies released by then: Cassilda's Song, a collection of King in Yellow stories curated by Joe Pulver, and Dreams from the Witch House: Women of Lovecraft (which is still $500 short of reaching funding and $5000 short of having all interior illustrations in colour, so go fund it).

“Bitter Perfume” Laura Blackwell
“Violet is the Color of Your Energy” Nadia Bulkin
“Body to Body to Body” S. J. Chambers
“De Deabus Minoribus Exterioris Theomagicae” Jilly Dreadful
“Hairwork” Gemma Files
“The Head of T’la-yub” Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas (translated by Silvia Moreno-Garcia)
“Bring the Moon to Me” Amelia Gorman
“Chosen” Lyndsey Holder
“Eight Seconds” Pandora Hope
“Cthulhu of the Dead Sea” Inkeri Kontro
“Turn out the Lights” Penelope Love
“The Adventurer’s Wife” Premee Mohamed
“Notes Found in a Decommissioned Asylum, December 1961″ Sharon Mock
“The Eye of Jupiter” Eugenie Mora
“Ammutseba Rising” Ann K. Schwader
“Cypress God” Rodopi Sisamis
“Lavinia’s Wood” Angela Slatter
“The Opera Singer” Priya Sridhar
“Provenance” Benjanun Sriduangkaew
“The Thing in The Cheerleading Squad” Molly Tanzer
“Lockbox” Elise Tobler
“When She Quickens” Mary Turzillo
“Shub-Niggurath’s Witnesses” Valerie Valdes
“Queen of a New America” Wendy Wagner



 

#LadyHags: Women in Horror Month

It be Women in Horror Month, wahey! Don't worry lads, only another couple of weeks and we'll be back to Men in Everything 11 Months so don't be worrying your pretty little heads over it. ;) To be fair to my fairer sex all the posts from men that I've seen about WiHM have been extremely positive. However there is always someone who insists on behaving like something of a douche and, more than likely, starts speaking without engaging their brain-mouth filter.

Ridiculous cockwombles aside I think that any excuse to celebrate the fantastic fiction produced by women is a valid excuse. So I thought I would share some thoughts on some absolutely amazing women writers that I've discovered over the last few years.

Nicole Cushing



 

 

 

 

 

Nicole Cushing has been producing short fiction in the Bizarro and Weird fiction genres for a good while now but it is her two longer pieces that I really want to bring to people's attention -Children of No One (UK, USA) and I am the New God (UK, USA).

I first discovered Cushing's work when I was searching online for work by Thomas Ligotti and this name kept on cropping up. Nicole Cushing, Nicole Cushing, Children of No One. My interest was piqued and so I decided to download Children of No One from Amazon. I'm not really a fan of ebooks on account of not having an e-ink reader and so having to read on my phone -I can't read long texts on a screen and tend to even print off short stories rather than read them online. I devoured Children of No One however and went straight out to pre-order I am the New God.

Children of No One is a dark, very dark, look at the extremes to which a person can go when they are driven by a single goal and who are convinced of the overwhelming value of their desires. The story follows an extremely wealthy individual as he attempts to get access to an underground, highly illegal, art installation. Throw in a hefty dose of occult mystery and the disgusting attitude of the elite towards poor and working people and you have a disturbing, chilling, and fantastical tale of a very human darkness.

Cushing's second novella, I am the New God, is perhaps, for the most part, a more traditional horror tale of madness and murder. A highly disturbed young man is contacted by, an, equally disturbed, monk who convinces him of his divine destiny. This results in twisted experiments to test the veracity of the monk's claims, a murderous road trip, and a gloriously twisted and ecstatic finale.

Cushing has two books being released this year. A collection of short fiction  -The Mirrors from Cycatrix Press and her debut novel Mr Suicide from Word Horde.

Caitlin Kiernan



 

 

 

 

 

 

Kiernan has been producing dark fiction since the early 1990s but I first found her fiction with the publication of the sublime The Drowning Girl: A Memoir in 2012. She has produced 10 novels, a whole bunch of comic books and hundreds of pieces of short fiction. She's also a published palaeontologist to boot. The two works of Kiernan's that I want to talk about are The Red Tree (UK, USA) and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir (UK, USA).

I've discussed The Red Tree before and so I'll let that review speak for itself. Suffice to say this is one of the best pieces of cosmic horror produced in the last decade, at least the last decade.

The Drowning Girl: A Memoir is in some ways similar to The Red Tree in that it deals with an unreliable narrator who is fully aware that they are an unreliable narrator and makes no attempt to hide it. The Drowning Girl is the story of India Morgan Phelps, or Imp, a young woman with an undefined mental health issue kept stable with medication who has an encounter with a naked woman she meets by the side of a deserted road one spring, or possibly winter, who is a mermaid, or possibly a werewolf, and the affect this has on Imp and her relationship with her games journalist girlfriend.

Kiernan's prose is utterly beautiful and her ability to build a sense of disorientation and weird horror is second to none.

Livia Llewellyn



 

 

 

 

 

 

Livia Llewellyn is a writer of erotically charged weird fiction. She has one collection of her short fiction currently available, 2011's Engines of Desire: Tales of Love and Other Horrors (UK, USA), but has at least one new collection due out this year (I think).

I talked briefly about her story Furnace in my ongoing review of The Year's Best Weird Fiction -you can read that here, which first appeared in the Thomas Ligotti tribute anthology The Grimscribe's Puppets (UK, USA).

Another story of particular note that was published recently is It Feels Better Biting Down which was published in Nightmare Magazine's October 2014 special Women Destroy Horror! special issue. A story of twin sisters with a special birth defect who encounter something weird that changes them completely yet somehow makes them even more themselves. Llewellyn's language is rather erotically charged which adds to the discomfort the story instils in the reader.

***

These are just three of the prominent women currently writing wonderful weird fiction and who are some of the driving forces behind the weird renaissance that is presently underway. They are by no means alone in this however. There are some amazing women working in the field, too many in fact for me to even consider writing briefly about. We have the likes of Molly Tanzer, Gemma Files, A.C. Wise, Joyce Carol Oates, Ellen Datlow, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Allyson Bird, Kathe Koja, and so many, many more. So many in fact that it seems absurd that we should need a Women in Horror Month and it is a sad fact, considering the breath taking quality of the work produced, that we still do.

Happy Birthday to the Lovecraft Ezine

In February 2011 Mike Davis released issue one of the Lovecraft Ezine which makes this month the Ezine's fourth birthday. So happy birthday Ezine and thank you  Mike Davis for working so hard on finding fantastic fiction and nurturing the community which has grown up around the 'zine.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="272"] The man himself :)[/caption]

To my mind the Ezine has grown to take the place once held by Weird Tales as a hub for weird fiction. By taking advantage of new web technologies, most notably the use of Google Hangouts for panel shows and game playing, Mike has helped foster the growth and popularity of weird fiction and is, I feel, a key person in the persistence of the weird renaissance that we have seen emerging over recent years.

Happy Birthday Ezine, and a big thanks to Mike Davis.

Year's Best Weird Fiction Volume Two ToC and Cover Reveal

Undertow Press have revealed the table of contents and the cover of volume two of The Year's Best Weird Fiction; and here's me not having even finished my review of volume one! Yet again it looks like a fantastic roster has been put together -this time by guest editor Kathe Koja, who was interviewed recently on the Lovecraft Ezine, and who is a fine author in her own right.

Here's the table of contents, which isn't 100% finalised as Kathe is still waiting to secure rights to one last story, and the beautiful cover with art by Tomasz Alen Kopera.

“The Atlas of Hell” by Nathan Ballingrud (Fearful Symmetries, ed. Ellen Datlow, ChiZine Publications)

“Wendigo Nights” by Siobhan Carroll (Fearful Symmetries, ed. Ellen Datlow, ChiZine Publications)

“Headache” by Julio Cortázar. English-language translation by Michael Cisco (Tor.com, September 2014)

“Loving Armageddon” by Amanda C. Davis (Crossed Genres Magazine #19, July 2014)

“The Earth and Everything Under” by K.M. Ferebee (Shimmer Magazine #19, May 2014)

“Nanny Anne and the Christmas Story” by Karen Joy Fowler (Subterranean Press Magazine, Winter 2014)

“The Girls Who Go Below” by Cat Hellisen (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/August 2014)

“Nine” by Kima Jones (Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction From the Margins of History, eds. Rose Fox & Daniel José Older, Crossed Genres Publications)

“Bus Fare” by Caitlín R. Kiernan (Subterranean Press Magazine, Spring 2014)

“The Air We Breathe Is Stormy, Stormy” by Rich Larson (Strange Horizons Magazine, August 2014)

“The Husband Stitch” by Carmen Maria Machado (Granta Magazine, October 2014)

“Observations About Eggs From the Man Sitting Next to Me on a Flight from Chicago, Illinois to Cedar Rapids, Iowa” by Carmen Maria Machado (Lightspeed Magazine #47, April 2014)

“Resurrection Points” by Usman T. Usman T. Malik (Strange Horizons Magazine, August 2014)

“Exit Through the Gift Shop” by Nick Mamatas (Searchers After Horror: New Tales of the Weird and Fantastic, ed. S.T. Joshi, Fedogan & Bremer)

“So Sharp That Blood Must Flow” by Sunny Moraine (Lightspeed Magazine #45, February 2014)

“A Stretch of Highway Two Lanes Wide” by Sarah Pinsker (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March/April 2014)

“Migration” by Karin Tidbeck (Fearsome Magics: The New Solaris Book of Fantasy, ed. Jonathan Strahan, Solaris)

“Hidden in the Alphabet” by Charles Wilkinson (Shadows & Tall Trees 2014, ed. Michael Kelly, Undertow Publications)

“A Cup of Salt Tears” by Isabel Yap (Tor.com, August 2014)

Edited to add: Undertow just announced that they have now acquired the rights to reprint The Ghoul by Jean Munro (translated by Edward Gauvin) which was previously published in Weird Fiction Review.

In the Court of the Yellow King

I'm a huge fan of the mythos that has developed from Robert W Chambers' 1895 decadent collection The King in Yellow, more so even than I am a fan of Lovecraft's mythos. Lovecraft's mythos seems, to me at least, to be more codified. He produced, and inspired, a far larger body of work than Chambers' four stories and so there is a much larger canon for new tales to fit into. The Yellow Mythos, or Carcosa Mythos, of Chambers' creation however has very few things that are required in order for a tale to become a part of the mythos. There is the titular play and its locations and characters (Carcosa, Lake Hali, the black stars, the Tattered King, the Stranger, and so on) and the themes of madness and suicide as well as the prose style of the late 19th Century Decadent Movement. A story can incorporate some or all of these elements and still fit within the canon of the King in Yellow. This openness really appeals to me and so I am always keen to pick up any new collections of stories inspired by Chambers and his maddening play.



In the Court of the Yellow King was released recently by Celaeno Press in Japan, edited by Glynn Owen Barrass, and features some absolutely amazing authors including Wilum Pugmire, Robert M. Price, the late C.J. Henderson (to whom the book is dedicated), William Meikle and Pete Rawlik amongst others. It has a beautiful cover by Danielle Sera and a couple of internal plates by Eric York.

I'm going to be reading this collection, and the others that I was given for Christmas, over the next few weeks. I'll post micro-reviews of the stories here as I go.

Before I start though I should note that I find it really odd to see a King in Yellow collection without a story by Joe Pulver. Not that all Yellow books need to feature Joe but it just seems odd that one wouldn't. That said they do have an extremely fine selection of very talented authors here.

Table of Contents(Titles link to the reviews below)

These Harpies of Carcosa - W.H. Pugmire

The Viking in Yellow - Christine Morgan

Who Killed the King of Rock and Roll? - Edward Morris

Masque of the Queen - Stephen Mark Rainey

Grand Theft Hovercar - Jeffrey Thomas

The Girl with the Star-Stained Soul - Lucy A. Snyder

The Penumbra of Exquisite Foulness - Tim Curran

Yield - C.J. Henderson

Homeopathy - Greg Stolze

Bedlam in Yellow - William Meikle

A Jaundiced Light at the End - Brian M. Sammons

The Yellow Film - Gary McMahon

Lights Fade - Laurel Halbany

Future Imperfect - Glynn Owen Barrass

The Mask of Yellow Death - Robert M. Price

The Sepia Prints - Pete Rawlik

Nigredo - Cody Goodfellow

MonoChrome - T.E. Grau

 

These Harpies of Carcosa by W.H. Pugmire

Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire raises the curtain on this latest round of Carcosan tales with this brief tale that sets the stage for what is to follow. Through the medium of the dream inspired, and starving, artist we are introduced deftly to the trappings of the Yellow Mythos of R.W. Chambers. The twin moons and the dim lost city, black stars and the king and his daughters, madness, suicide and the Yellow Sign.

Pugmire's prose is as Lovecraftian as ever which works wonderfully to evoke the world of the artist and his narrating patron.

The Viking in Yellow by Christine Morgan

 I really quite liked this story, it places the origins of the tale related in the play in the 9th Century Viking expansion into the North of England(judging by the names of the human characters) and the sacking of various monasteries.

Who Killed the King of Rock n Roll? by Edward Morris

I'm afraid this story, which is set in the 1950s at the birth of rock'n'roll and conflates one King with another, didn't really do it for me. Which isn't to say that it's a bad story, it certainly isn't, I just found the 1950s American lingo a bit off putting at times.

Masque of the Queen by Stephen Mark Rainey

I loved this story. The tale of a young actress seeming to get the big break that she's been waiting for and the calamity that ensues when she truly becomes one with the character she is portraying. This was brilliantly executed and really gave me a shiver when the protagonist's fate became horribly clear.

Grand Theft Hovercar by Jeffrey Thomas

Imagine. Punktown is a horrible place to live; a far future dystopia on the planet Oasis. A melting pot of alien races the city is notorious for being riddled with crime. Now imagine that in Punktown there was a VR game, similar to our Grand Theft Auto, set in a replica of Punktown and that that game became infected by a yellow virus. That's this story and it is so good that I'm going to go and buy Jeffrey Thomas' Punktown books at the first chance I get.

The Girls With the Star Stained Soul by Lucy A. Snyder

Blood Will Have its Season | Joe Pulver

Two Pulver Posts in a row!

A couple of weeks ago I won a copy of Blood Will Have its Season by Joe Pulver through the regular book give away during the Lovecraft Ezine web show. It's a digital copy and as I don't have an ebook reader I've been dipping in and out of it on my phone -which makes for slow going as I'm not the biggest fan of reading on a screen. Last night I read the titular story and I just wanted to say HOLY FUCK NUTS BATMAN! That's probably one of the most disturbing short stories I've ever read in all ma puff! Seriously, seriously messed up. It's a story of The King in Yellow and I really can't say much more about it than that without giving anything away. Damn I do love Pulver's work.



Also: Content warning for sexual violence.

Pulver in Yellow

Joe Pulver, if you haven't already heard of him (and why the hell haven't you??), fuses beat, noir, pulp and high weird with startling skill. He's also the go to person when it comes to Robert W. Chambers' King in Yellow stories. Joe has written god knows how many King in Yellow stories over the years --well I suppose he knows how many too, as does Mike Davis of the Lovecraft Ezine as Mike is currently preparing to put out volume one in a the collected Yellow stories of Joe Pulver! Excited? You could say so!

I find it most fitting that Joe's work is being collected this year as 2015 is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Robert W. Chambers as well as the 120th anniversary of the first publication of his collection The King in Yellow. I get the feeling this year is definitely going to have a maddening yellow hue to it. :D

Keep an eye on the Lovecraft Ezine for news on when the book is going to be released. I'm sure I'll probably be posting somewhat excitedly about it here too. :)

[caption id="attachment_898" align="aligncenter" width="470"] Cover design by Steve Santiago www.illustrator-steve.com/[/caption]

 

Now, Mike Davis, a quick message for you.

Strange Fiction?

This is a really interesting article over at Nightmare Magazine by Simon Strantzas. I don't particularly agree with it in his definition of what constitutes a weird tale (I prefer Mieville's notion of the uncanny vs. the abcanny) and he seems to take cosmic horror as the defining feature of the weird tale rather than it being a facet of the weird.

"Weird fiction of this[the pulp adventure] sort seems to have had its birth in America, bursting onto the scene from Lovecraft’s pen. The exploration of the cosmic indifference (at best; malignance at worst) melded with the adventure story suits the mindset of the new world, whose mythology gravitates to philosopher-explorers."

I don't even think HPL would agree with this as he seemed to place himself into the wider cannon of the weird along with Machen, Blackwood, et al.

In the article Strantzas tries to delineate the 'strange' tale from the 'weird' tale. A distinction that I'm not sure is possible with the definitions that he gives.

"These are tales where the otherworld isn’t as much known as it is hinted at, and rather than explore the philosophies of our shared existence, the strange is more interested in the psychology of our individual lives. If the weird is cosmic, the strange is micro-cosmic, investigating the universe within our psychological existence.

[...]

It’s these feelings of disconnection that form the primary power of the strange tale, and from where it draws the bulk of its emotional power. Real life moments of loss, despair, and depression wreak a certain kind of havoc on us and can quite literally distort our comprehension of the world as we experience it. In many ways, this distortion and that of the strange’s dream-logic overlap, allowing the strange to become a proxy and providing readers the opportunity to directly confront their turmoils. That being said, it would be irresponsible to suggest the readers are then able to prevail against these forces, for with the strange no one really comes out ahead. Those that survive are ultimately scarred by the experience—which may be the most realistic and lifelike of all horror’s punishments. Existential wounds follow both the protagonists and the reader long afterward, which plays in stark relief to the weird and its sudden onset of temporary madness in the face of the impossible."

Now to me this seems as though it would fit squarely within the realm of the weird tale as written by Schulz, Kafka, Cisco, and others. It sounds, to me, like Strantzas is describing weird fiction as influenced by the surrealist movement.

I don't know, perhaps we do put too much emphasis on the cosmic horror aspect of the weird (which is no surprise being as HPL looms so large in the field) which may, or may not, be to the detriment of the wider weird. Personally I find the diversity of the weird to be extremely appealing. I love being able to slip from one tale of epic cosmic terror to a more subtle tale that teases at the frayed edges of what it is to be human.

Either that or I should, perhaps, not think about these sorts of thing before I've had my morning coffee...

Libraries Gave us Power - Save the Machen Collection in Newport

Libraries gave us power, then work came and set us free.

So goes the opening of the Manic Street Preachers' song A Design for Life, the line "Libraries gave us power" was taken from the inscription above the old Carnegie library in the Pillgwenlly area of my home town - Newport in Gwent. The old Carnegie library is no more and the residents of Pillgwenlly have to make do with a tiny library/resource centre better suited to being a corner shop than a font of learning and education.

I left Newport more than a decade ago, truth be told, I rarely visit. I haven't returned there for around three or four years. I do still however have a certain pride at coming from Newport. The city is, or maybe was, known for its thriving music scene -mostly thanks to the fantastically grimy TJs venue. It was a place where there was always something creative happening. That was always thanks to the people of Newport though, never the local council.

It seems that the local council have always had an aversion to the arts and to the heritage of the town. When a medieval ship was uncovered on the banks of the mighty River Usk it took a concerted campaign by local people to stop the council from simply building on top of it. Recently the council destroyed a marvellous mural celebrating the people of Newport's role in the Chartist Uprising of 1839 and the struggle for working class representation in parliament to make way for a new shopping centre. Friends of culture the council are not.

Now, under the guise of austerity, the council are wanting to close the city's central library, art gallery and the city's museum. The library was like a second home to me when I was a youngster. I would always spend my Saturday afternoons reading in the library or exploring the museum -which shares a building with the library and the art gallery. When I discovered the reference section of the library at the age of 9 or 10 I was in hog heaven. So many wonderful old books! I could easily lose myself there come rain or sun on a weekend.

The library is about as central to the city of Newport as it's possible to get. The building stands on John Frost Square, named for the leader of the Chartist Uprising, right in the heart of the city. It is a place that is accessible to all the people of Newport and, so far as I'm concerned, is vital to the essence of the place. A library is a place of collective self education and betterment. That this library shares a building with the art gallery and museum makes it even more of a hub for the heritage and culture of the city.

Added to that Newport library is also the home of the best collection of material by, and related to, the lauded author of the fantastic, Arthur Machen. The library houses rare items donated by family, friends, and fans of Arthur Machen and it is vital that this collection is protected. More than that it is vital that this son of Newport (Caerleon, Machen's birthplace, is separated from Newport by a couple fields is all) is celebrated by the city.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="259"] Machen c.a. 1905 Wikipedia[/caption]

Machen had an immense effect on the fantastic literature of the 20th, and 21st, Centuries. He has influenced the works of HP Lovecraft, Stephen King, China Mieville, and many, many more. His literary influence has spread beyond the world of literature though and has also been felt in the multi-billion dollar movie industry. Newport City Council should be celebrating this heritage and using it to promote Newport. They should not be slashing and hacking at the services that the people of Newport deserve and stripping future generations of the heritage and culture they too deserve.

So, what can be done?

Well, I'm sure that the people of the 'port will not be taking this lying down, they can be a feisty lot when their dander is up. However those of us that are in places rather distant from mae hen wlad fy mamau can still show our support and highlight to the council the international significance of the Machen collection.

There is a form on the council website asking for feedback on the proposed cuts. It asks where in Newport you live but you can leave that blank and then tell them that you are from elsewhere in the world on page 2 of the form. You can access the feedback form here.

You could also write to Bob Bright, the current council leader

Bob Bright
Leader of Newport City Council
80 Allt-yr-yn Road
Newport
South Wales, NP20 5EF

or contact him via the council website.

I would also recommend getting in touch with the local media. The local newspaper for Newport and the surrounding area is The South Wales Argus and you can write to them here. the lcoal radio station is Capital, South Wales and you can contact them on 02920 942940(news room) or 02920 949494(studio) or use the email form here. Local television comes from ITV Wales, who can be emailed via wales@itv.com and contacted on Facebook(click), and BBC Wales who can be contacted on 02920 323 255(news room), emailed on newsonline.wales@bbc.co.uk, or via their Facebook page(click).

Newport also has two Members of Parliament, Paul Flynn and Jessica Mordin.

Paul Flynn can be contacted on 01633 262348 / 020 7219 3478 and emailed at paulflynnmp@talk21.com.

Jessica Mordin can be contacted on 01633 841725 and emailed at jessica.morden.mp@parliament.uk

Newport also has two members of the Welsh Assembly, Dame Rosemary Butler and John Griffiths.

Dame Butler can be contacted on  01633 222 523 / 0300 200 7104 and emailed at Rosemary.Butler@assembly.wales

John Griffiths can be contacted on 01633 222 302 / 0300 200 7122 and emailed at John.Griffiths@assembly.wales

(Note: for all phone numbers replace '01, 02 or 03' at the beginning with +442 if calling internationally)

Hopefully if enough people, nationally and internationally, kick up a stink it will help those people in Newport who want to stop this happening.

Thanks to the good folks at Wormwoodiana for spreading the word about this.

Lovecraft's Bust Mk 2.0

Daniel José Older yesterday published an article on The Guardian's website where he again calls for the Word Fantasy Award to be changed from its current incarnation of a bust of H.P. Lovecraft. As I have written before I completely agree with him. I don't think it should be a bust of Octavia Butler, as I have also said before, but it should definitely not be an image of a white American man. After all it is supposed to be the World Fantasy Award is it not?

However I do tire of Older's insistence that Lovecraft was a bad writer.

Lovecraft was an uneven craftsman at best – his stories clunk along, overburdened with adjectives and stale characters. It’s his world-building and imagination that helped solidify his legacy, but even that is tainted by a failure of craft and humanity.

No, sorry Daniel but no. Lovecraft was a spectacular writer. He knew that characterisation wasn't his strong point and so he played to his skills. His imagination and his ability to build a sense of dread. Also, I'm not really willing to give that much credence to the artistic sensibilities of a person who claims to be an author yet is seemingly unable to use a dictionary.

[Older on the use of the word "cyclopean"] (And why… why why why does this word recur in damn near every Lovecraft story? What image are we to take from this? Buildings with a single window at the top? Buildings built by one-eyed giants? It means nothing to me visually, yet it’s clearly one of Lovecraft’s favorite adjectives.)

So, given the context in which the word is used, it should be fairly simple for a reader to discover quite what the author means. Hell, even before I looked the word up as a teenager I got the impression that it meant huge. When I also learned of the form of masonry, common to the Mediterranean in the Bronze Age as you ask, it added more to the story. Does Mr Older instantly discount an author who uses any words with which he is unfamiliar? In which case let's hope that he never tries to read Shakespeare or, heaven forbid, Will Self.

He detailed his rabid, paranoid racism in many letters, and it permeates his mythos. Lovecraft peopled his fiction with hordes of swarthy, child-killing and abjectly stupid black and brown people, while women are almost non-existent.

Again, this is simply either not the case or not, completely, relevant. Lovecraft's private correspondence does show his utterly wrong headed and vile opinions on race and class. However they do not permeate his work. They are there in some of his works (The Horror at Red Hook, Call of Cthulhu and Herbert West: Reanimator for example) but in his entire corpus they mostly feature not at all. I get the feeling that Older has not read much Lovecraft or has not done so since he was a teenager. Which would explain why only certain aspects of his work stand out in memory.

What I would argue is that Lovecraft's bigotry (he wasn't simply a racist) is apparent in his work in his fear that an old way of life is being wiped away by the new and emerging world. A fairly standard reactionary/right wing fear that we see reflected in the pages of The Express and the Daily Mail. The way that this fear manifests in Lovecraft's work however is not in the explicit bigotry of works like The Horror at Red Hook but in the sense of the inevitable doom that comes with the return of the Old Ones. The fear of forces 'outside' civilisation that would wipe it away in a heartbeat. I would also tie this fear to the psychic rupture that was caused by the mechanised slaughter of the First World War. The war of 1914-1918 acted as a break between the old world and the new. A lot of Lovecraft's writing, in particular his Mythos fiction, was a reaction to this break, this rupture, as was the work of many of the Modernist writers and artists.

Regardless of Older's lack of familiarity with the work of Lovecraft, or his ability to use either a dictionary or Google, the bust is entirely inappropriate and could very easily be replaced. I just wish that folk would stop stating that Lovecraft was a bad writer and making false claims about his work. The reality of his bigotry is bad enough and needs no exaggeration.

The Welsh

HPL being bang on the nose about my people. :D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sHfhuXfNJE

See more on Leeman Kessler's channel and blog.

NaNoWriMo ToMoRo

NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow. It does for me at any rate. I've been in work this weekend and so I'm already just under 3,000 words behind target. I do however have every weekday afternoon for the next few weeks free so I should be able to make up for the last couple of days soon enough.

It does however mean that I probably won't be posting on here quite as much as I ordinarily would. Not that I'm the most prolific of bloggers anyway. I will though be posting a review of my little treat to myself this week. I recently won second prize in a wee competition for a piece of flash fiction, read it here, and thought I would pick up a book I should have bought ages ago. Should have on account of being a Welshman and a Weird Fiction Freak. :)

Table of Contents

• Forword - S.T. Joshi


• Introduction - Mark Howard Jones & Steve Upham


• What Others Hear - John Llewellyn Probert


• The Bicycle-Centaur - Rhys Hughes


• The Cawl of Cthulhu - Bob Lock


• Pilgrimage - Mark Howard Jones


• Song of Summoning - Brian Willis


• The Necronomicon - Charles Black


• Un-Dhu-Milhuk Would (If He Could) - Liam Davies


• Periphery - Paul Lewis


• Stranger Crossings - Adrian Chamberlin

I've only read a few of the stories so far but I'm sure I'll have it finished in the next few days. It will make for great NaNoWriMo procrastination. :D The stories I've read so far, What Others Hear, The Bicycle Centaur, and Pilgrimage, have all been fantastic. Especially the classically Lovecraftian What Others Hear. I'm definitely going to seek out more by John Llewellyn Probert.

New Wave of the Weird?

A bit of a stream of consciousness ramble in response to a really interesting piece on Teleread:

Writer Paul StJohn Mackintosh has a fantastic little article on Teleread contrasting the New Weird with the New Wave of Fantasy/Science Fiction that emerged in the 1960/70s. The New Wave of Fantasy/SF was politically aware, experimental, and pushed at the boundaries of genre that were just then beginning to solidify into the forms in which we know them today. A phenomenon that appeared to have had its last gasp in the cyberpunk explosion of the 1980s. He lays some of the blame for this seeming stagnation in the realm of F/SF at the feet of Hollywood and its attendant marketing machine. The explosion that was Star Wars and the ensuing product branding and marketing acted as a barrier in genre, 'sentries on the walls of the sci-fi ghetto' as StJohn Mackintosh puts it, serving to brush aside and exclude those who would seek to push at those genre defining walls.

It is the opinion of StJohn Mackintosh that Dark/Weird Fiction and Cosmic Horror have stepped up to fill in the gap left yawing by Science Fiction. That it is now the Weird that is the playground for imagination that Science Fiction once was. I do believe that he is right in this. As Science Fiction and Fantasy have become ever more mainstream over the last 30+ years they have become more strictly defined. The Weird, on the other hand, defies such strict definition. Stories of the Weird can sit squat on the outskirts of any of the readily existing genres or outside of genre conventions all together.

What does it say about our society and our time that the genre best suited to it, which is producing the most striking and imaginative writers, is rank with despair, nihilism, terror, cosmic doubt and anomie, and pure and simple horror? Well, try putting a Gernsback- or even a Kurzweil-style spin on 9/11, Iraq, the GFC, Wikileaks, ebola, etc. What kind of faith can even the lay public retain in progress, science and technology that not only have failed to stop Al Qaeda and ISIS, but have even produced climate change and global warming? Let alone an America that has ceased to believe that progress is its ally.

Whilst it is undoubtedly true that much of the Weird is shot through with nihilism, terror, and despair I think that there is more to the reason for the Weird's ascendancy as the playground for the literary imagination. 

I have written before about how the First World War was a point of cultural rupture that inspired the modernists, both high and low, and which ushered in an age of great ideological conflict. An all pervasive dichotomy  defined as capitalism/communism or east/west. We see a similar dichotomy in the work of HP Lovecraft with his horror being about both the rupture as the world changes and the dichotomies of known/unknown, natural/unnatural, civilised/non-civilised, human/non-human, WASP/non-WASP. These early works of the Weird, of Cosmic Horror, are rather illustrative of the emergence of, what would become, the global stalemate of the 'cold' conflict between the USSR and the USA. Over the course of the 20th Century the conflict changed from being an ideological one, as the USSR evolved into a state-capitalist mode of production, into being a conflict between two competing forms of the same economic model. It was capitalism fighting with itself about how it worked best. 

It was in this context that the New Wave emerged as artists reacted to the potential 'hot' conflict between these two monolithic entities. They had to find new ways to express this cultural paradigm. 

The world has again changed dramatically over the last two and a half decades. The fall of the Eastern Bloc, the events of 9/11 and the various conflicts around the world which have come in its wake -Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria etc- and the increasingly apparent effects of man made climate change(me from the 1990s says "I bloody well told you so") have reshaped how we perceive our world. No longer is the threat to our civilisation an easily understandable conflict between two powers. Now there are so many factors at play it can be difficult to keep track of them all.

In Syria we have the rise of the, initially US backed, Islamic State who we are told are bad guys, and they most definitely are, yet those who are doing the best job of resisting them are the PKK who are also, we are told, bad guys. (Incidentally there have been some extremely interesting developments with the PKK and their move towards libertarian municipalism and away from left leaning nationalism) We have the increase in natural disasters caused by climate change, the resulting increase in migration. We have the rise of right wing racist organisations capitalising on the increase in migration. We have the economic cluster-fuck that is being exploited by the various ruling classes of the world to tighten their grip on their respective societies through the implementation of austerity measures. We have the increasing frequency of revelations of corruption and outright bastardry in the establishment. Chaos rather than simple conflict is the order of the day. 

It is because of this emergent obviousness of the chaos that is the world that the Weird has become the playground for those wishing to play in the literary laboratory. Science Fiction and Fantasy have become so constrained by their marketing that it becomes near impossible to use these forms to explore the constant flux and rupture of life in late capitalism. The Weird allows for near complete freedom in the artist's approach to interpreting and presenting the world to itself. A freedom that was once enjoyed by F/SF in the time of the New Wave writers.

It isn't simply the despair and nihilism that runs through the Weird that allows it to act as such a powerful tool for authors in the present age. It is the wild abandon with which authors can approach a theme that mirrors the chaos and turmoil in which we find ourselves. We no longer see the progress of humanity as being anywhere evidenced; perhaps this is because so much recent technological development of late has been personal -the mobile phone/pc, the internet, medicines. These things are all subtle and hidden from view. They may have changed the world but they haven't put people on the Moon. Now we see chaos and disorder - The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere | The ceremony of innocence is drowned | The best lack all conviction, while the worst | Are full of passionate intensity - where once we saw ourselves as part of a grand narrative.

This doesn't, however, necessitate despair or nihilism. It does however necessitate the need for an approach that is free of the constraints of genre which have developed over the last half a century or so. The new paradigm needs a new literary tool kit. The Weird is that tool kit.

Out of Skin by E.M. Carroll

Emily Carroll is a Canadian comic book author with a bunch of comic strips available to read on her website. Amongst those strips that are free to read is Out of Skin which is a thoroughly chilling tale. You can read it here.

NaNoWriMo

Shouldn't it be InaNoWriMo really?

I've decided to give NaNoWriMo a go this year and use it as a bit of a fun way to drive myself through the first draft of a story idea I've been kicking around for a year or so now. The story is, mostly, set in Glasgow and focusses on a young, working class, single mother. She experiences a tragic encounter with the supernatural and finds herself struggling both with the aftermath of the tragedy, the supernatural forces behind it and her own position as a proletarian woman. Kinda like a blend of traditional Cosmic Horror, New Weird and just a dash of Social(ist) Realism. :)

I've been thinking of it as a series of three novellas which can either stand alone or be stitched together as a longer narrative. This will be part one of Marie's Story.

I've set up a word count tracker in the left hand sidebar to try and egg me on to get my daily count done. Should be fun.

Free Weird Story - Men of the City

On Deviant Art the renowned Liverpuddlian author and artist Clive Barker is reading short fiction based on a painting of his - Men of the City - and so I submitted a short piece which I've also posted here.

Enjoy :)

Well, hopefully you will. :D

[caption id="attachment_671" align="aligncenter" width="470"] ©2014 CliveBarker[/caption]

More Lovecraft WFA Brouhaha

This latest HPL brouhaha really is going on and on. Strangely it doesn't seem to be gaining the momentum in the way that other such issues have. It certainly doesn't appear to be transforming into the internet shit storm that some people probably hoped it would. Possibly this is down to the majority of fans of Weird Fiction, and Lovecraft in particular, having a slightly more nuanced appreciation for his work than simple fannishness. For sure there are some people who are extremely invested in Lovecraft to the point that they feel pointing out the flaws of the man are an attack on both themselves and Lovecraft's entire body of work. From my experience most Lovecraftian's are aware of his deep seated bigotry and, to one extent or another, how this influenced his writing.

Personally I feel that Lovecraft's racism was important in the creation of his work and that it does permeate it. Not in the manner that some may expect though, especially those who either haven't read Lovecraft or who haven't read him since they were much younger. I have written about this elsewhere so won't go on here. Suffice it to say that even if Lovecraft wasn't explicitly referring to people of colour in the most derogatory of ways the fear and alienation from 'the other' does run as a theme throughout his work. It should also be highlighted that this 'other' wasn't necessarily simply people of different skin colours to himself but also to Catholics, Eastern European, Portuguese, Italians, the rural poor and so on. From what I can read in his texts, rather than any biographical works, his alienation was rather extreme with regards anything that didn't fit with his closeted upbringing.

The widely respected fantasy author Jim Hines posted an article yesterday on his blog about the brouhaha and, in particular, about a counter petition to keep the World Fantasy Award as a bust of Lovecraft. The petition itself is rather crude and, to my mind, offers a rather stunted understanding of both the works of H.P. Lovecraft and the reasons for wanting to change the form of the award to something aside from a bust of Lovecraft. I'll come to the petition shortly. First I want to respond a little to Jim Hines and some of the commenters on his blog.

First of all, I’m sorry, but I find the trophy to be almost obscenely ugly. I get that it’s intended to be a caricature, and artist Gahan Wilson is obviously a skilled sculptor and artist. But Wilson’s style is described as “fantasy-horror” and “playful grotesque,” and I just don’t think one of the top awards in our field should be embodied by the word “grotesque.”

The World Fantasy Award was initiated by people from what developed into the horror fiction community. It does not belong to the modern 'fantasy' community any more than it does the modern horror community. The award was begun decades ago when the various genre fields were still evolving, merging, and separating into what we know today. The grotesque has always been a part of the literature of the fantastic all the way back through Tolkein, Lovecraft, Poe, Spenser, and right back to the dawn of literature. There is no reason, aside from personal aesthetics, for the award to not embody any particular aspect of the fantastic. I noticed a couple of people mentioning the possibility of changing the award to Aslan, the Christ figure from apologist C.S. Lewis' Narnia children's series. Why not just go the whole hog and have Jesu hanging above the hill of Golgotha? Now that would be grotesque.

Jim, quite rightly, dismisses the claim that Lovecraft was a man of his time with the scorn that it deserves. however he then goes on to say.

Lovecraft was a product of his time, and spewed an awful lot of hateful, racist shit in his fiction and in his personal writing. There are a lot of other authors who were a product of that same time, and they somehow managed to avoid dousing every page in fetid, over-the-top racism.

Now I've read, and re-read, Lovecraft many times over the decades and I can only think of a handful of examples of "fetid, over-the-top racism" -The Horror at Red Hook, Herbert West Reanimator, and a small portion of Call of Cthulhu. There may be others that I'm forgetting but not many. You see I notice racism when I read it. I find it really jarring when I stumble across some of his more vile references to those against whom he is bigoted and I haven't noticed it dousing every page. A lot of his work, if you know what you are looking for, does convey the fear that fuels his personal racism but that requires a specific reading of the work that seeks to tease out and understand the heart of the work. In other words, a literary reading that the vast majority of people are not interested in partaking in. I'm thinking here of works like At the Mountains of Madness where the ancient alien beings and the relentless tide of cosmic time are a reflection of the author's anxiety over the changes being wrought in his society at the time. I'm also thinking of The Shadow Over Innsmouth with his fear of a generalised acceptance of race mixing. I should also note that The Shadow Over Innsmouth can also be read, in the protagonists acceptance of his mixed nature, as an example of Lovecraft's anxieties lessening.

Now to the petition...

Jebus H Corbett. OK, I'm always waxing on about how people in the Weird Fiction community, including Cosmic Horror/Lovecraft fans, are a much more nuanced lot that many would expect. Then stuff like this rolls along and I crack my head off my desk.

Steven Stevenson's petition states that the desire to change the form of the award is

due to his 'racism.'

'racism'. Really? Sorry but as a reader and massive fan of Lovecraft there is absolutely no way on this meaningless blue rock that you can put the word racism in scare quotes when talking about Lovecraft. He was racist. His racism informs his work. he privately wrote some abysmally racist things. He was racist. There are no two ways about it. His racism was extreme, even 'for his time', and putting the word in scare quotes does a disservice to the man. After all a person should be remembered for who they are and what they did rather than who we want them to be and what we want them to have done. It also minimises the experiences of those who have been the subject of racism and bigotry.

Except in rare, very early, immature pieces, Lovecraft did not use his stories as a vehicle for racism. Claims to the contrary demonstrate a negligible knowledge of Horror literature, which aims to instil fear in its readers. One of the major human fears is the fear of that which is most different to ourselves.

Nope nope nope nope nope. Sorry. Whilst I readily accept that expressions of Lovecraft's overt racism were rare; many of his stories reflect his anxieties about non-WASP populations. Also it was not exclusively his earlier stories on which his racism manifests. The Horror at Red Hook was written in 1925, The Call of Cthulhu '26, At the Mountains of Madness '31, The Shadow Over Innsmouth '31, The Haunter of the Dark '35. He died in 1937 so we can see that more than the last decade of his writing featured stories which were vehicles for expressing his bigoted anxieties.

It is true that the aim of horror literature is to instil fear and discomfort in its readers but this is rather besides the point. Poe, Bierce, and many more manage to write horror literature without that horror being based in a a fear of other races. Also he's misquoting Lovecraft somewhat.

'The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown'

HPL story devices such as remote tribes making unspeakable sacrifices to alien gods, and isolated harbour village dwellers breeding with things-that-are-not-quite-right from the ocean depths, should be viewed as just that, fictional story devices promoting pleasant temporary unease, rather than as pro-racist treatises to be coldly dissected, abused, then banned by the politically correct, including non-Fantasy-loving control freaks. Many of us who oppose racism had read Lovecraft for years with no intimation of any discriminatory content.

See, he's really not getting it here. Lovecraft's work does promote a pleasant temporary unease. It really does. Unfortunately he also has a tendency to go off on one about people of colour occasionally which is rather discomfiting for the modern reader. I've been reading Lovecraft for around 20 years and I've always been jarred by his racism. Always. Whilst I didn't know the full extent of his racism until recently it was always clearly there in some of the texts. The deeper narrative of much of his work is also, as I've said, permeated with xenophobia. It isn't that they are 'pro-racist treatises', just that they reflect, sometimes candidly, the author's racism. If you do not see any intimation of discriminatory content in his work then you clearly haven't read it for a long time.

No one could accuse me of being a 'non-Fantasy loving control freak', not by any stretch of the imagination, yet I am fully supportive of the World Fantasy Award being changed from a caricature of Lovecraft. I'll outline my reasons for this briefly below.

Firstly. The award is supposed to be given to those who produce the greatest works of fantastic literature in a given year. Many, many, of those works are going to be created by people whom Lovecraft would have despised. For that reason alone the award should be changed. it is not right to offer someone a bust of a person who would hold them in contempt. It is not inclusive and inclusivity is something that should be at the heart of an award that is supposed to be global in nature.

Secondly. The bust of Lovecraft was decided upon as the first World Fantasy Convention was held in Providence, Rhode Island. Lovecraft's birthplace and somewhere that often features in his work. So for that first award it was fitting. However the field has grown and changed considerably over the decades and now it should represent both the long history of fantastic literature and the global scope of the work being created. A single person's image could never do this.

Some of us are of the Left, yet oppose political correctness in its various forms as being deeply prejudiced philosophies aimed at the simple minded.

Whilst I would characterise many of the more vocal of the internet's 'social justice warrior' crowd as being rather simple minded and only having a crude, at best, analysis of society political correctness is, at its heart, simply an attempt to not act like a dick and to treat people with respect. Handing someone who has been affected by racism and bigotry a bust of a racist bigot as an award is not treating those people with respect.

What would be correctly labelled as fascist acts if the equivalent was performed by the extreme Right too often goes lamentably unchallenged amongst the Left.

Translates as: the author here has no understanding of the terms Left, Right, or Fascist. Calling for the Word Fantasy Award to be redesigned is not fascist. It has nothing to do with the elevation of the nation state nor a fetishisation of the military. To be honest it doesn't tick any of the boxes with regards the defining features of fascism.

So, as you may have guessed, I'll not be signing that petition and I think that it is an embarrassment to the weird fiction community that this sort of attitude has any traction in the 21st Century. It's true that the petition only has, at present, 179 signatories. That's still 179 people making me face palm.

Anyway, keep it weird. :)