Things Of The Week: Winter Tales, The First Roth-Steyr Reviews, breaking 150k and more...

Nearly three weeks since the last blog post, and things are looking up, at least for the US, who are (fingers crossed) getting rid of their current National Embarrassment. Here in the UK, sadly, ours remains firmly behind the wheel...

Still, there have been Things, and not all of them bad. At least here at Castle Bestwick.

One of them has been the appearance of the first two reviews for Roth-Steyr. The first, by Thomas Joyce over at This Is Horror, who says:

"Bestwick’s exploration of his heroine’s complicated past and conflicted feelings about duty and love is brilliant. From the first mention of her brother and what happened on that frozen lake when they were children, we are immediately invested in their relationship, such intriguing characters they make. Valerie’s reminisces of her former comrades, especially Tibor, are also very touching. The recollections of past battles and confrontations with the Black Eagles, especially the scene in a war-torn Berlin, are very well done. And the scene at the Gate, complete with sinister doctor Sindelar and his dark and mysterious 'assistants' adds just a hint of cosmic horror."

The second review comes from Matt at Runalong The Shelves, and is another very positive one:

"The tale feels like a slow-motion car crash that Valerie has to desperately get out of the way of and this makes the reading compulsive. A dark tale but also one with a key message on those who love the fight above all else.

I really enjoyed this novella. It took me back in time and made me think about where we may now be heading. Bestwick delivers a fascinating lead character who over the tale we get to know quite intimately and fully behind a battle for survival. Well worth your time!"   

Many grateful thanks to both Thomas and Matt for their reviews. 

This year has been a productive one, at least in terms of work completed. In February I finished the first draft of the novel I began in the last quarter of 2019; since then I've redrafted it and sent it out to agents, completed the first draft of another book and am currently in sight (I think) of the ending on a third. Whether any of them are any good, or find a home, remains to be seen; right now I'm finding a lot of pleasure and fulfilment in the process of writing. The weird thing is that the rule 'less is more' really seems to hold with me, as far as word count's concerned; committing to a much shorter daily than was the case for years has actually enabled me to write more, as well as (I hope) better. The current WIP cracked the 150,000 word mark last week; with luck it'll be finished before the end of the year, and something new begun.

Finally, I'm involved in something really cool, that's coming up early next month.

The Christmas season is on its way, and - as Lynda E. Rucker's ever-excellent column over in this issue of Black Static reminds us - is the perfect time for the tale of terror. My old friend Joe Freeman decided to put together an online ghost-story reading called Winter Tales, including such authors as Ramsey Campbell and Mark Morris. Benjamin Langley, another of the authors, I'm less familiar with, but I'm looking forward to acquainting myself with his work. Joe also invited me to participate, and there I am, reading my tale In The Shelter, taken from the new Horrific Tales edition of And Cannot Come Again.

Winter Tales will be available to watch from Saturday 5th December at 1pm Greenwich Mean Time, on Joe's YouTube Channel. Here's a trailer for the event:

 

Things of the Week 9th October 2020: Roth-Steyr author copies, first After Sundown review, Hannah's Bookshelf, Back to Work, Omnium Gatherum Online Panel

It's been an eventful week or three.

My author copies of Roth-Steyr have arrived. They are things of beauty and you should all want one of your own. :) (Cate took the accompanying picture of Your Humble Scribe with his books and posted them to the Twitter dot com... with the caption 'Proud boy with his books.' Which could have been better phrased and timed. But what the heck.) 

The first review of Mark Morris' anthology After Sundown is up at Booklist: "This rich and masterful collection of horror highlights both up-and-coming and established authors in an interesting twist on the standard anthology [...] Highly recommended for longstanding horror fans and those readers who may not think horror is for them. There is something for everyone in this one."

I'm being interviewed by the delightful Hannah Kate on Hannah's Bookshelf tomorrow (Saturday 10th October) between 2 and 4 pm (UK time.) I'll be talking about Roth-Steyr, as you probably guessed. It'll be available to stream at a later date, so I'll post a link when available.

I'll also be flapping my gums tomorrow on Zoom, where I'll be recording as part of a live panel for Omnium Gatherum Books, to mark the launch of new novellas by Mark Kirkbride and Tom Johnstone. The three of us will be joined by Omnium Gatherum (OG?) supremo Kate Jonez and the fantabulous Lynda E. Rucker. Watch this space for further details.

I went back to work at my day job this month, after months off sick. So far it's actually been quite all right, and I was pleasantly surprised by how much of it I remembered or came back.

In other news, my beloved friend Vicky Morris has won first place in the Aurora Prize for Poetry!  Vicky's a lovely person who has done an incalculable amount of work to encourage and develop young writers in South Yorkshire, and it's wonderful to see her getting some much-deserved recognition for her own work. Love and hugs to you, Vic! x

And my even more beloved Cate Gardner had a new short story, 'Liesel', published in Not One Of Us, a fiction market she's been trying to crack for years. Love you and proud of you, babe.

We Belong

Laura Mauro. Photograph by Michael Kelly.

So there goes another Fantasycon. Another brilliant event, another brilliant year.

Belonging is important. Finding a tribe, a group of people who share your values, the things you care about and love.

This is a time of year when absent friends come to mind. Today, the day after the con ended, Facebook reminded us all it's Graham Joyce's birthday. October was the birth month, too, of Joel Lane; November will be the fifth anniversary of his death.

Talking to the fantasy author James Bennett this weekend, he told me about his first Fantasycon. He was nervous, if not terrified - a young gay man, taking his first steps into a community he wasn't sure would welcome him or not. Joel saw that, took his hands and said, simply: "You belong here."

Yeah. That sounds like Joel.

That word came up again this morning, while I was reading different people's con reports on Facebook. The author Eliza Chan spoke about how the convention put to bed any fears that she didn't belong.

The British SFFH community gets a bad press in certain quarters, and it isn't deserved. I've always found it to be a friendly, welcoming and open community. No-one who loves the fiction we create and celebrate at Fantasycon should ever feel as though they have no place here. They do. I hope no-one has ever been made to feel otherwise.

The awards ceremony was, for me, a high point of the convention, when I got to see my dear friend, the lovely, talented and ridiculously modest Laura Mauro win the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story for the brilliant 'Looking For Laika'. I don't think I've ever seen someone more genuinely gobsmacked to win. (And I've seen a few.)

A couple of people who are normally mainstays of the convention (for me, anyway) couldn't make it this year - Lynda E. Rucker and Sarah Pinborough. The August Derleth Award went to Victor LaValle's The Changeling, but I was standing by as Sarah's stunt double in case it went to Behind Her Eyes. She sent me a short acceptance speech, and here's part of it:

"Fantasycon as ever evolves and changes and we may bicker on the internet and get riled about stupid things that mainly don't matter, but when push comes to shove, we are a family. Fantasycon has been there since the very start of my writing career, and it was through coming to Fantasycon every year that I made so many good friends, and gained so much inspiration to try harder and do better."

Yep. Exactly that.

So: if you love horror, SF or fantasy, Fantasycon is a place where you will be welcome. Doesn't matter what the colour of your skin is, your gender, your sexual orientation, whether you're cis or trans. Never doubt that you belong here. And never hesitate to let others know that they do too.

A Hazy Shade of Winter and 10 Books For Halloween

With Halloween next week, it's only natural to start casting about for suitable stuff to read and watch. You can't beat a good ghost story - although horror is more than just that, as the list below should prove.

But first, a quick plug:

My first collection, A Hazy Shade Of Winter, was published in a beautiful limited edition by Canada's Ash-Tree Press, was introduced by Joel Lane, and consisted of thirteen short stories and a 20,000 word novella.

And it's a book of ghost stories.

Matthew returns to the house where he spent an idyllic summer with a group of friends, and finds them waiting for him to join them... permanently.

The people of a small village hunt a supernatural intruder - but who are the real monsters?

An innocent walk in unfamiliar surroundings becomes a journey into a nightmare; a stranded tourist faces a bizarre challenge; a harassed employee takes a desperate revenge on her employer; and a secondhand book of ghost stories becomes the instrument of a malevolent, restless spirit....

A Hazy Shade Of Winter is now available as an ebook on Amazon in the US and UK. So if you still can't pick a Halloween read after checking out the list below...

But I have a feeling you will. (Shit, I'm talking myself out of sales here...) So here, in no particular order, are ten books for Halloween. There are a couple of well-known titles here, but I've tried to pick a few that'll be less familiar as well.

1) The Matrix by Jonathan Aycliffe
The only novel on this list. Jonathan Aycliffe is a master at producing book-length ghost stories in the M.R. James vein, but this one, a tale of black magic, may be his best. Andrew Macleod, grieving after the sudden death of his wife, takes an academic job in Edinburgh, where he begins researching occult and esoteric groups there. His researches bring him into contact with Duncan Mylne, a wealthy lawyer and occultist, and into a world of black magic and evil. Finally he discovers the true reason for Mylne's interest in him - but it might be too late. A subtle and deeply creepy novel, the kind that has you looking over your shoulder at every creak of the floorboards if you read it alone at night. Just as good is Aycliffe's first novel, Naomi's Room.

2) Alone With The Horrors by Ramsey Campbell 
There was no way there couldn't be something by Ramsey Campbell on this list; the difficulty was which book. Alone With The Horrors is a great retrospective collection, sampling tales from throughout Campbell's career up to that point (1991), from the Lovecraftian chills of Cold Print through to tales like 'Again', which is still one of his most disturbing tales. It's a fine collection of 39 stories (in the Arkham House or Hodder Headline editions; 37 in the more recent re-release from Tor) to be dipped into at random till you find the tales that suit you best.

3) Craddock by Paul Finch
Paul Finch is now a best-selling crime novelist, but his roots are very much in horror and he has a huge backlist of collections to prove it. Just about any of them are worth grabbing (Stains, Walkers In The Dark, After Shocks and the three Medi-Evil mini-collections were all close contenders for this list) but Craddock (aka Major Craddock Investigates) is my Halloween recommendation. Set in 1860s Wigan, it comprises four novelette or novella-length stories - The Magic Lantern Show, The Coils Unseen, The Weeping In The Witch Hours and Shadows In The Rafters - featuring police detective Jim Craddock, whose investigations have a tendency to bring him up against the supernatural and is both superbly readable and hugely atmospheric.

4) From Hell To Eternity by Thana Niveau 
The debut collection from one of horror's rising stars is by turns lyrical, subtle, erotic and cruel. Stories like 'The Death of Dreams' are rooted in science fiction, while 'Antlers' starts out as a grimly believable account of human viciousness before giving way to a supernatural resolution. In 'Pigs', an illicit affair brings a young couple face to face with a herd of feral porkers, while the title story brings in the most notorious serial killer of them all.

5) The October Country by Ray Bradbury 
If there's a more apt collection for this time of year, I don't know what it is. Rich and lyrical, hugely imaginative, dark and scary, it's a timeless classic, including such tales as 'The Emissary,' 'The Next In Line', 'The Jar', 'Skeleton' and one of my all-time favourites, 'The Scythe.' If you've ever read Ray Bradbury, no further introduction should be necessary. If you haven't - well, here's the perfect place to start.

6) Warning Whispers by A.M. Burrage 
M.R. James may be the undisputed king of the English ghost story, but Alfred McClelland Burrage is one of its unsung heroes. Several of his best-known stories - such as 'The Sweeper' and 'Smee' - appeared under the byline 'Ex-Private X', the name under which Gollancz published Burrage's memoir War Is War, a memoir of his experience in the Artist's Rifles during World War I, which included fighting at Passchendaele. But if you have any of those big fat anthologies of ghost stories you often find in charity shops, there'll almost certainly be at least one Burrage story. This posthumous collection includes a host of inventive and chilling tales, not least the opening story, 'The Acquittal'.

7) Scattered Remains by Paul Pinn 

The late Paul Pinn was a superb writer who deserves to be far more widely remembered, and this, his first collection, is an extraordinary tribute to his skills. Ranging back and forth across the borders of crime, SF, fantasy and horror, his stories burrow into the psyche. 'Handicapped' shows a paranoiac's persecutory fantasties building up to explosion point; the title story depicts a post-apocalyptic world where NBC-suited soldiers battle an unstoppable army of horsemen wearing robes of human skin. The opposite of a pleasing terror.

8) The Moon Will Look Strange by Lynda E. Rucker
Lynda Rucker is brilliant at crafting beautifully-written and subtly unsettling tales, where the world we know... shifts, into something strange and off-kilter. By the time you know what's going on, it's probably too late. Her debut collection is one to savour over time, like a fine whisky. A new one, You'll Know When You Get There, is out now from Swan River Press. Fans of Robert Aickman and Shirley Jackson, take note.

9) Antique Dust by Robert Westall 
Westall wrote one of the great novels for children, The Machine-Gunners, set on Tyneside during the Second World War - not to mention some fine short story collections such as Break Of Dark. This collection, his first for adult readers, centres on antique dealer Geoff Ashden. "I have known more evil in a set of false teeth than in any so-called haunted house in England," he tells us, and he should know: after all, his trade brings him into contact with the past - and the dead - on a daily basis. The whole book is something of a love letter to M.R. James, but is a fantastic collection in its own right.

10) For Those Who Dream Monsters by Anna Taborska 
Anna Taborska doesn't write enough, but when she does it's fierce and uncompromising, with an unflinching eye for the kind of savagery humans can inflict on one another. Stories such as 'Little Pig' - one of the best in the book, a short, harrowing and heart-rending tale - have nothing of the spectral about them, needing only human evil and desperation as their cause, but Taborska is at ease with the supernatural too, as in 'The Creaking'. Other tales, such as 'Buy A Goat For Christmas', show a welcome streak of dark humour. Published by Mortbury Press, the book also boasts an introduction and beautiful illustrations by Reggie Oliver.

Tomorrow's Cthulhu: Between Angels And Insects and The Hyde Hotel on Booked

Two nice things I completely forgot! In fairness, I did have a lot of nice things to talk about already on Friday.

The Booked podcast reviewed The Hyde Hotel in their latest issue. Each of the two reviewers discussing it had to pick three favourite stories - one picked my tale, 'Wrath Of The Deep', and the other picked Cate's contribution, 'The Coyote Corporation's Misplaced Song.'


Which was nice.

You can listen to the podcast here.

In other news, the Broken Eye Books anthology Tomorrow's Cthulhu: Stories At The Dawn Of Posthumanity is now available to buy on ebook! Paperback and hardcover will now be released on 15th February, but you can preorder now. In includes my story 'Between Angels And Insects'. Here's a sample:

'I remembered logging into the computer that night and thinking how the odd the patterns flickering across the screen were. They were hypnotic. Hypnotic. And then: the hive. The rage. Find a target. Destroy it. Here is the target. Kill him. Kill him. Make him kill himself. Night after night, until he broke. And - 

And there are others. Not just me – others. So many others. We are many. The many and the One. We are the One. We are the hive. We are the avatar. We are Cthulhu. Dead but dreaming.'


Tomorrow's Cthulhu: Stories At The Dawn Of Posthumanity also includes stories by: Desirina Boskovich, Lynda Rucker, Samantha Henderson, Daria Patrie, Kaaron Warren, Richard Byers, Damien Angelica Walters, Spencer Leary, Joshua L. Hood, Jeff C. Carter, Matt Maxwell, Shannon Fay, Adam Heine, Mike Allen, Darrell Schweitzer, Cody Goodfellow, Bruce R. Cordell, Pete Rawlik, A.C. Wise, Robert Brockway, Nate Southard, Molly Tanzer, Joshua Alan Doetsch, Thomas M. Reid, Clinton J. Boomer, L.A. Knight, Lizz-Ayn Shaarawi, J.M. Rozanski.

Nice Things of the Week(end)

A few other nice things have happened since I last posted on that subject, and so I thought I'd share them to bring out a bit of cheer following the last announcement.

First up, I learned from Kate Jonez at Omnium Gatherum that Lynda E. Rucker (a fantastically talented writer and a lovely person into the bargain) had contributed the following blurb for the re-release of Angels of the Silences:

"In this powerful and beautifully written novella, Simon Bestwick unerringly assumes the voice of seventeen-year-old Ems, a narrator whose voice ranges from fragile to furious. By turns stark and elegiac, Angels of the Silences is part devastating tale of an all-too-human evil and the secret lives of teenage girls, but it’s also a story of transcendence, the unassailable bonds of friendship, and the light that can sometimes survive even the darkest places."

*skips and dances round the house, making occasional squee-like noises*

Second, I found out that my short story 'The Churn' (first published in Black Static #27) has been recorded by Tales To Terrify and will be released soon!

*bounces up and down, causing minor earthquake*

Thirdly, the redoubtable Matt Fryer has reviewed Hell's Ditch over at the Hellforge:

"I applaud Simon’s vision. It’s a menacing and bleak world, made tangible by flourishes and attention to detail... It stands alone as a novel, so don’t worry that it’s just a chapter without any resolution: you don’t need to invest in the series. But I bloody well am, and I think you will too...  Like Adam Nevill’s apocalyptic “Lost Girl” released a few months ago, it can be read as a gruesome thriller but also enjoyed for its thoughtful layers and complex moral core, and I can’t wait for the next instalment."

 *sings along with CD player, shattering windows across the Wirral*

Thanks also to all who've sent messages of support in the wake of the Black Mountain announcement, bought copies of mine or Cate's stuff by way of support, or offered us a place to stay for the honeymoon! Thanks too to Neil Williams and Graeme Reynolds - they both know why. :)

Anyway, on with what's left of the weekend...

Tomorrow's Cthulhu: Stories at the Dawn of Posthumanity

My story 'Between Angels And Insects' will appear in Tomorrow's Cthulhu, a new anthology from Broken Eye Books. Edited by Scott Gable and C. Dombrowski.

Super science. Madness. Transhumanism.

This is the dawn of posthumanity. Some things can’t be unlearned. 

Gleaming labs whir with the hum of servers as scientists unravel the secrets of the universe. But as we peel away mysteries, the universe glances back at us. Even now, terrors rise from the Mariana Trench and drift down from the stars. Scientists are disappearing—or worse. Experiments take on minds of their own. Some fight back against the unknown, some give in, some are destroyed, and still others are becoming… more.

The human and inhuman are harder and harder to distinguish. Mankind is changing, whether it wants to or not, with brand new ways of thinking. What havoc is wreaked by those humans trying to harness and control their discoveries? As big science progresses and the very fundamentals of this universe are understood, what stories are being hushed up?

Of course, the Old Ones laugh at our laws, scientific and otherwise. 

These are transhumanist near-future science fiction tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. These are tales of more than merely cosmic dread. They exist in our world of the next couple years. This is the era of big science and—what is that? We’ll be right back. ​​

 

Contributors: Desirina Boskovich, Lynda Rucker, Samantha Henderson, Daria Patrie, Kaaron Warren, Richard Byers, Damien Angelica Walters, Spencer Leary, Joshua L. Hood, Jeff C. Carter, Simon Bestwick, Matt Maxwell, Shannon Fay, Adam Heine, Mike Allen, Darrell Schweitzer, Cody Goodfellow, Bruce R. Cordell, Pete Rawlik, A.C. Wise, Robert Brockway, Nate Southard, Molly Tanzer, Joshua Alan Doetsch, Thomas M. Reid, Clinton J. Boomer, L.A. Knight, Lizz-Ayn Shaarawi, J.M. Rozanski.

 

The ebook of Tomorrow's Cthulhu is available from 21st December 2015 (next week!) The hardcover and paperback are out on 21st January 2016. You can pre-order the book here.

The Lowdown with... Lynda E. Rucker

Lynda E. Rucker is an American writer born and raised in the South. She grew up in a house in the woods full of books and cats and her mother brought her old typewriters from work to play on, so she obviously had little choice but to become a writer. She has sold more than two dozen short stories to such places as The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, The Best Horror of the Year, Black Static, F&SF, Shadows and Tall Trees, and Nightmare Magazine among others. She is a regular columnist for Black Static, and her first collection, The Moon Will Look Strange, was released in 2013 from Karoshi Books. Her second short story collection is due out in 2016.

1. Tell us three things about yourself.

I get lost a lot. In new places, in places I should know well, even if I'm mapping on my phone. Whenever I am going to a foreign country where English is not spoken, one of the phrases I always teach myself is something along the lines of, “I am lost. Can you help me?” A weird corollary to this is that people constantly stop me on the street and ask me for directions.

I don't believe in ghosts, but I am sure some places are haunted, and I am always half-hoping to encounter a ghost myself. I say half-hoping because I am actually a big scaredy cat so there are very limited conditions under which I would not die of fright if such a thing actually happened. I am aware that this set of facts is entirely contradictory and yet somehow the cognitive dissonance of it all doesn't bother me.

I've wanted to be a writer since I was a very small child—I have stabs at stories dating back to the age of four or five—but growing up, I also wanted to be an actress and a war correspondent. The former ambition faded when I realized even before I set out to seriously pursue it that I lacked the same sense of crazed persistence and determination about it compared to how I felt about writing. The war correspondent ambition fell by the wayside when phoning people for interviews for something as benign as the entertainment section of my university newspaper gave me anxiety attacks. (I was fine with the whole putting my life in constant mortal danger bit, but the idea of having to ASK STRANGERS QUESTIONS completely defeated me.) I'm not sure what it says about me that writing fiction was the most practical of my vocational ambitions...

2. What was the first thing you had published?

A story about a time-traveling witch's cat in a magazine of children's writing when I was about eleven. I have this vague memory that I may have ripped off the concept from a book I'd read.

3. Which piece of writing are you proudest of?

It probably sounds egotistical, but I couldn't pick any one piece. I sometimes go through a period that lasts roughly from the time I've finished something to shortly after it's published when I'm in agony as to whether it's any good or not, but in general I'm not one of those writers who hates my work once it's out there in the world. I'm reasonably proud of all of my published work.

4. ...and which makes you cringe?

The earliest story I sent out for publication as an adult, when I was 25. I sent it to a small press magazine called Pulphouse that was big in the 1990s. Thank goodness they rejected it. In those days, I used to write lots of beginnings and middles and never finished a story, so I forced myself to just stop dithering, finish one and submit it. It was good that I made myself do that but lord, that was the only good thing about it. (I've suddenly remembered that story still exists in a box somewhere and I need to find it and burn it. And salt the earth afterwards.)

5. What's a normal writing day like?

I don't have normal writing days, although I wish I did. I'm working on having them again, but writing mostly gets eked out between other obligations and the mild chaos of my life. When I did have normal writing days, they usually consisted of getting up very early so I could write for an hour or two before work with longer stretches on weekends. My aim now is to get back to that routine.

  

6. What piece of writing should someone who's never read you before pick up first?

Well, if you've never read me and aren't sure you'd like my work, you could read “The Burned House” and “The House onCobb Street” online at Nightmare Magazine for free. My story “The Last Reel,” which can be found in my collection, in Best New Horror #18, and podcast at Pseudopod, seems to be the one that garners the most favorites from the largest number of people. In a way, though, I think this is a hard question for a writer to answer about their own work because we experience our work so differently from readers and are so close to it. It's like when someone asks me what my stories are like—if I'm with someone who's familiar with my writing when I'm asked that, I usually end up going, “Uh, you tell them what my stories are like.”

7. What are you working on now?

Some short stories and a novel based on a short story. On the horizon but not yet actively in progress are more stories, several novella projects and a film chapbook for a new cinema imprint from PS Publishing. And I'm doing two collaborations with two different people in the year ahead! Oh, and there should be a new short story collection out next year, mostly reprints but a couple of new pieces, although that's all I can say about it for the moment!