If you're still stuck for suitable seasonal reading matter, then Keris McDonald came up with a list of recommendations a few years ago, and I managed one or two myself. Ginger Nuts Of Horror has some longer-length recommendations here. (It's pure coincidence that it happens to include another book of mine!)
Thank you to every one who's helped share and signal boost over the past weeks, and a huge thank-you to Steve Shaw at Black Shuck Books for giving this story a home.
I hope you're all keeping well. I've been signed off work for a further period, which is probably for the best as the coronavirus pandemic continues - in addition to my MH issues, Cate and I are both in 'at risk' categories...
StokerCon, like most events scheduled over the next few months, has been cancelled, but the new edition of And Cannot Come Again - including the previously unpublished stories 'In The Shelter' and 'Black Is The Morning, White Is The Wand' - will still be released by Graeme Reynolds' Horrific Tales next month.
Hope these provide some enjoyment. If you have work you're making available in this way that hasn't been mentioned here or in the Fracassi article, let me know and I'll add a link below.
Keep well, take care and hold steady, and have a good weekend.
I’m Keris McDonald, horror/fantasy writer. And I’m Janine
Ashbless, writer of erotica — both
hardcore and romantic. In fact
until recently all my social media presence was under the “Janine”
name and I’ve only Come Out on Facebook in the last few weeks,
after I got a gig writing for the Chaosium games company.
So I've been thinking about Erotica v. Horror. Two separate genres,
though clearly there is a potential overlap, as there is between all
forms of genre fiction. I actually started out my career writing
horror, then switched to erotica for many years (thus, incidentally,
working my way down the literary pecking order. Some big name
horror writers do write the smutty stuff, or have done in the past.
But they like to keep that a secret). Nowadays I seem to be veering
back toward horror somewhat.
The two genres actually have a whole lot in common, I believe:
People outside your genre assume you’re some dodgy weirdo who
can’t separate their fiction from real life and probably shouldn’t
be left alone with small children or pets. Yet when you meet fellow
authors it turns out that pretty much everyone inside the genre is
unassuming, shy and rather kind.
The plot structure is often similar for both genres. They both work
really well (best, many might say) as short stories. In both Horror
and Erotica the ideal is to end at the dramatic (or literal) climax,
with no cooling off period. In longer fiction the aim is to create
an ascending ladder of excitement in the reader's mind, based on
set-piece scenes interspersed with tension-ratcheting lulls.
The author above all aims to evoke a visceral reaction - whether
fear or arousal. The best horror or erotica stories bypass the
rational brain and go straight to the body. They make the heart race
(in both cases) and they make the skin crawl or the genitals swell.
These are primaeval responses designed to cope with crisis real-life
stimuli, and to be able to evoke these reactions by the written word
alone takes a surprising amount of skill. You are wresting control
from the reader - and that thrill is exactly what fans like.
Because this is a stimulus-response reaction, even the most keen
readers in both genres can become jaded. This may lead authors
toward a dangerous trap of making the stimulus stronger (MORE BLOOD
AND GUTS! / BIGGER ORGIES! HUGE STRAP-ONS!), but this is not a game
the writer can win in the long run. Far better, in my opinion, to
sneak up on the reader with something they hadn't anticipated, and
reveal to them the depths of their vulnerability. If you can
convince readers of the devastating allure of a hole in a woollen
stocking (like in The Piano) or the terror inherent in a
closed door (like in The Monkey's Paw), then you are doing it
right as a writer.
Both genres are inherently subversive. They aim to convince you to
suspend your faith in the laws of society, in the normal tropes of
interaction between people, and to accept - temporarily - that there
might be other, often more powerful and dangerous, possibilities.
They both say "What if the world didn't work the way people
tell you it does?" Both genres draw their power from
overturning social consensus and restrictions.
Keris McDonald’s short stories have
been published in Supernatural Tales, All Hallows and
Weird Tales magazines, and in the anthologies At Ease with
the Dead, Shades of Darkness, Hauntings,
Impossible Spaces, The Alchemy Press Book of Horrors,
Genius Loci, Dark Voices, Terror Tales of Yorkshire,
The Scent of Tears, Legends vol. 3, and The
Forgotten and the Fantastical Vol.5. Her story “The Coat Off
His back” was picked up for Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the
Year #7. She is one-third of Lovecraftian collection The
Private Life of Elder Things.
Keris lives in Yorkshire with her husband, dogs and library. She’s
a keen table-top-roleplayer and LARPer and has just worked out she’s
been playing Dungeons and Dragons for forty years now. Her mother has
given up expecting better of her.
If you are interested in reading examples of Keris’ erotica
that she’d class as horror too, try:
Well, to be precise, I knew my characters would. In
Bonds of the Earth is the second in my trilogy The
Book of the Watchers, an erotic supernatural thriller about
fallen angels. My primary sources for the fallen angels and their
offspring the Nephilim was The
Book of Enoch, a truly hallucinatory text written
in the 3rdt century BCE, quoted in the New Testament
Epistles, but then excised altogether from the official canon of
Biblical literature. For thousands of years it disappeared from
Western Christianity.
But Ethiopia kept the Book of Enoch alive. Ethiopia has been,
extraordinarily, a Christian nation since the 4th
century—way before anywhere in the West become officially
Christian. It’s a unique, heavily Jewish form of Orthodoxy, perhaps
the closest imaginable to that of the Early Church (they don’t eat
pork for example, they segregate the sexes during services, and the
Holy of Holies in every church is focused not on a crucifix but a
copy of the Ark of the Covenant). And they do include the Book
of Enoch in their canon.
So at the end of the first book in the series, Cover
Him With Darkness, Azazel has been freed from his
imprisonment and vows to release all his brother Fallen Angels and
wage war on Heaven.
I knew I had to take him to Ethiopia to find the first of his
comrades. And I knew that that had to be Penemuel, Angel of the
Written Word, just because I was so amused by this quote from Enoch:
“And he instructed mankind in writing with ink and paper, and
thereby many sinned from eternity to eternity and until this day. For
men were not created for such a purpose, to give confirmation to
their good faith with pen and ink.”
So I booked a twenty-day tour, which was eye-opening and awesome,
even if it did result in terrible food-poisoning. Hey, it’s not
every author who has literally bled for their book. Rectally.
Appalling mental images aside, I found the perfect location
for Penemuel’s imprisonment; the subterranean rock-cut churches of
Lalibela:
I have learnt my lesson. For Bk 3 in the series I’m using nice
gentle locations … like the Norwegian mountains. In the middle of
winter…
“Broad
at the shoulders and lean at the hips, six foot-and-then-something of
ropey muscle, he looks like a Spartan god who got lost in a thrift
store. He moves like ink through water. And his eyes, when you get a
good look at them, are silver. Not gray. Silver. You might take their
inhuman shine for fancy contact lenses. You’d
be wrong.”
Janine
Ashbless is back with the second in her paranormal erotic romance
Book
of the Watchers
trilogy: In
Bonds of the Earth.
Unafraid
to tackle the more complex issues surrounding good and evil in
mainstream religion, Janine has created a thought-provoking and
immersive novel which sets a new standard for paranormal erotic
romance. The first in the series, Cover
Him With Darkness,
was released in 2014 by Cleis Press and received outstanding reviews.
In
Bonds of the Earth
is published by Sinful Press and is due for release on March 1st,
2017.
As
the clock ticks down towards Halloween, here are a few
recommendations for anybody looking for some suitable reading matter.
All these were written in the last decade or so, by rising stars in
the field.
Reggie
Oliver’s emerged in recent years as one of the best British writers
of weird fiction, and this 1980s-set novella draws both on his skills
in the macabre and his long and intimate knowledge of the world of
theatre. Allan Payne, a young actor, is cast in a new play by
playwright Sir Roger Carlton, alongside fading star Billie Beverley.
Carlton, along with director ‘Pussy’ Cudworth and leading man
Talbot Wemyss, are both old associates of Billie, but cruelly
conspire to push her out of the play. Shortly after, she dies in an
accident, but her presence haunts the production, and one by one,
those who wronged her fall prey to her ghostly revenge.
Okay,
now I’m biased here, as the author is my wife, but When The Moon
Man Knocks is, in my view, a stone masterpiece. This beautiful
and heartrending novelette revolves around grieving widow Olive and
the sinister Hector Wynter. Hector claims he can contact the dead,
who live on the moon and come to earth in the form of message-bearing
paper birds. But with every message, less of them remains...
From
Due’s award-winning and phenomenal collection Ghost Summer.
Georgia, 1838: escaped slaves Lottie and William seek out Lottie’s
uncle, Jim. The only free black man she knows, he even has his own
mine. Lottie begs him to hide them from their pursuers. He does, but
the only shelter he’ll offer them is in his mine. And Lottie and
William soon discover they aren’t alone down there. Just what sort
of price has ‘Free Jim’ paid for his prosperity?
Dunning
and his family visit the ruins of town lost to the sea, including the
remnants of its leper colony. Drawn there alone by night, he finds
the colony’s former inhabitants still haunt their former home.
Angela,
a painter, marries Colin, the only son of tyrannical Edward Gissons.
Edward sets out to make her life a nightmare, manipulating her Down’s
Syndrome son Josh to hurt her. But when he dies, she discovers that
the nightmare is only beginning.
Today,
Eliza is wealthy and successful. But once her name was Lola and she
lived in poverty. She changed from one thing to the other. She does
that a lot. Fabulous Beasts is her story, and it’s superb.
Hargadon’s
based in my former hometown, Manchester, and brings its seedy side
brilliantly to life. The Bury Line is a chilling and
nightmarish evocation of modern work culture. That’s really all I
can say about this story without spoiling it.
8)
The Devil Under The Maison Blue by Michael Wehunt
Sexually
abused by her father, teenager Gillian confides in her neighbour, the
dying jazzman Mr Ellings. Ellings tells her a tale from his youth, of
his journey to New Orleans and the creature he met in the crawlspace
under the Maison Blue nightclub. And then he plays her – and her
Daddy – a tune...
A
haunting, beautiful love story and horror story all in one.
Polio-stricken Parveen and shakerkandi vendor Hashim fall in love.
Even as Parveen sickens, dying slowly from bone cancer, he tends her
lovingly. Even after she dies. That description doesn’t even
begin to capture the sheer beauty and anguish of this tale.
Bored
and looking for kicks, agroup of rowdy Lake District teenagers
desecrate the Bronze Age stone circle known as Long Meg and her
Daughters. In revenge, Long Meg comes to life in the form of a
demonic crone that hunts them down in one long night of terror.
And
if you're still looking for Halloween reading matter after that,
Simon Bestwick's collection of ghost stories, A Hazy Shade Of
Winter, is available as an ebook here.
You can read a sample here if you so wish.
Conducting myself appropriately at the Alchemy Press launch.
...was an absolute blast.
I always love Fantasycon, but this was a cracker by any stretch of the imagination. There was a huge amount going on, and huge numbers of lovely people - and I only got to talk to a fraction of the ones I would have loved to catch up with! - but here are a few highlights.
Getting to talk to Frances Hardinge, whose work I've become a huge fan of, and catching her interview with Kim Lakin-Smith. Amazing writer, lovely person and very, very funny.
Meeting Catriona Ward, author of Rawblood (which won the August Derleth Award for Best Horror
Novel at the British Fantasy Awards.)
The panel 'Girls Just Want To Have Fun', about women in genre fiction, with Catriona, Maura McHugh, Ann Nicholls, Heide Goody and Priya Sharma. Which got left off the printed programme - a source of some sardonic amusement! - but was the best panel I saw that weekend.
The launch of Snowbooks' novella line, resurrecting novellas from John Llewellyn Probert, Ray Cluley, Mark Morris and, of course, Cate Gardner, that were originally published by Spectral Press, together with new work from Gary Fry and Andrew Hook.
Getting to meet Keris McDonald/Janine Ashbless properly IRL - and to sign her copy of Hell's Ditch! Keris has new stories out in The Private Life Of Elder Things, along with Adrian Tchaikovsky and Adam Gauntlett. That one's out from Alchemy Press, along with the Joel Lane tribute anthology Something Remains. Massive kudos to Pete Coleborn, Jan Edwards and Pauline Dungate for making that anthology happen.
Getting to meet the force of nature that is Georgina Bruce. Also getting to meet Emma Cosh, Sarah Dodd, Miranda Jewess and many, many other new people.
Catching up with other friends like Lynda Rucker and Sean Hogan, Alison Littlewood and Fergus Beadle (who we stalked and were stalked by en route to the Con...) Helen Marshall and Vince Haig, Gary Fry, Gary and Emily McMahon, Stephen Volk, Steve Savile, John Llewellyn Probert and Thana Niveau, Anna Taborska, Andrew Hook and Sophie Essex, Laura Mauro, Victoria Leslie, Ray Cluley and Jess Jordan, Adrian and Annie Czajkowski, Phil Sloman, Des Lewis, Jon Oliver, Dave Moore, Lydia Gittins, Nina Allan, Jim Mcleod.... the list goes on and on and I'm sure I've missed important people off....
Seeing the Karl Edward Wagner Award go to the Redshirts, past and present, who make the whole thing happen.
And best of all, seeing the lovely Priya Sharma win the Best Short Story Award for the superb 'Fabulous Beasts'.
I was on the jury for Best Collection with Carole Johnstone and Emma Cosh - the shortlisted collections were all superb, and picking a winner was a very, very tough call to make. Nonetheless, we were all unanimous in our vote: the fantastic Ghost Summer: Stories by Tananarive Due. It's a beautiful, powerful collection, and hugely recommended.
The last few days have seen me trying to get back into the groove of writing. It's been a bit weird, not least since the laptop I've had for the better part of ten years - my trusty E-System, a Christmas present from my parents in 2007! - finally appears to be dying. As laptops go, it's had a pretty good run, so I can't complain, but I'm trying to work on the purple Acer laptop I bought last year.
See, the E-System's one flaw - or its biggest advantage, from my point of view - is that it's rubbish at connecting to the internet, meaning that I can work on it pretty easily without being distracted by Facebook. The Acer is great at connecting to the internet. That wasn't so bad in Barmouth, where there was no wifi in our flat, but now we're home again.
And yes, I've installed Freedom. Thing is that, unlike the version I've used in the past where you just downloaded a programme onto the machine, Freedom is now some weird cloud-based thing. And even when I've switched it on, the damn thing still connects to the internet. So once again, the wacky world of IT has delivered an updated, upgraded, 'improved' version of something that's about as useful as a pork pie at a bar mitzvah.
Even so, my short story mojo continues unabated. I wrote another story the day after my wedding, and two more on the honeymoon with another underway. That's a total of eight short stories so far this year, most of them in the past month.
That said, I need to get back on the Devil's Highway; there's still a lot of work to do before the deadline at the end of June. It's been nice, though, to work on some again.
Writers can be divided up any number of ways - and probably shouldn't be divided up at all, but that's another story - but one of the most interesting is the old question of whether you're a Planner or a Pantser. That is, do you plan out what you write before getting started, or wing it and make it up as you go? It's more of a spectrum than an either/or thing - much like sexual orientation, which gives me something of a segue to this blog post by Janine Ashbless, also known as Keris McDonald. One of the UK's foremost erotica writers, Janine is a confirmed Pantser. (And when she gets the time, she writes some superb ghost/horror fiction under her Keris McDonald byline - highly recommended if you can track some down! You can find out more in her Lowdown.)
Until recently, I'd have described myself as a dyed-in-the-wool Planner. That's certainly how my novels have been written - with more and more detailed planning, in fact, before I set pen to paper. A few years ago, I extended the practice to short stories, as I was finding hardly any time to do them. For the past couple of years, in fact, I've hardly written any stories that weren't to commission.
And I was feeling dissatisfied.
The short fiction I did write was feeling stale, repetitive, done before. There was a time when what I'd written had come both easily and from somewhere deep in me. I believed in it and felt proud of it, and many people had liked it a lot. All without planning. I wanted to get back there.
The last few short stories have all had that quality, or some of it. I think I'm some way to go before I'm getting the same thrill from what I do as before, but I'm on the way. It'll have to be fitted in around the novels, but that's not necessarily a bad thing - and among many other things, short stories can be great playgrounds and testbeds for ideas and settings and characters you may want to do more with.
So all of that's been nice.
www.alexcf.com
Less happy was yesterday's news that the YA science fiction author Nicholas Fisk had passed away, albeit at the good age of 92. I grew up reading his science fiction - along with Dr Who novelisations, books like Time Trap, Antigrav, Space Hostages, Trillions and the classic Grinny (an odd sort of alien invasion novel that's also damned creepy) were some of the first SF I read as a boy. His story collection Sweets From A Stranger was superb too. He wrote intelligent, thought-provoking and entertaining stories and novels for young readers that still hold up today (and are worth a read by adults too.)
In other news, Laura Mauro, a very fine writer, wrote this excellent piece on magical thinking and OCD. I suspect a lot of writers have MH issues of one kind or another, if only in the form of depression caused by banging one's head repeatedly against the brick wall known as reality.
There was also this fascinating article on bodies of strange creatures allegedly found in a London basement. In fact, they're the work of writer, illustrator and sculptor Alex CF, which is going to be of great appeal to anyone who enjoys the outre, the macabre or the just plain weird. I've included two images from his collection here; go to Alex's website and see the rest.
Two final items. First, my old friend Rob Kemp, who readers of the 1990s small press may remember as r.j. krijnen-kemp, author of a small but perfectly-formed body of weird stories, wrote this article on a bit of Shropshire folklore. Which reminded me of something else.
The late Joel Lane's first novel, From Blue To Black, told the story of a fictional '90s rock band; the book included the titles and even some lyrics of the band's songs. I got very into folk music in the late 2000s, and one of the titles, 'Still And Moving Water', caught my imagination, as did a line from the fictive song. I asked Joel if I could turn it into a song of my own; he agreed, as long as he got a co-credit, and my friend Iain Mackness recorded a very rough demo of it. Working on the recent tribute anthology to Joel ended up inspiring me to make a YouTube video for the song, and I was reminded of it again by Rachel Verkade's touching and perceptive review of Joel's posthumous story collection, Scar City, over at The Future Fire. So here it is.
Keris McDonald
has a secret life: by day a mild-mannered writer of dark fantasy erotica, by
night a ravening horror author. Or possibly the other way round.
Her horror short
stories have been published in All
Hallows and anthologies by Ash Tree Press; Weird Tales, Supernatural Tales, and the anthologies Impossible Spaces and Hauntings (ed. Hannah Kate); and Terror Tales of Yorkshire (ed. Paul Finch). Her scenario ‘Master
of Hounds’ appeared in Worlds of Cthulhu.
In 2015 she has stories out in Best
Horror of the Year vol. 7 (ed Ellen Datlow) and Genius Loci (ed Jaym
Gates).
She
lives in the North of England with two rescued greyhounds and a bemused
husband. She has a degree in philosophy and a diploma in forestry, and once
worked as a Viking for five years.
1. Tell
us three things about yourself.
1)I started playing Dungeons and Dragons when I was thirteen. That’s
thirty-five years ago and no, I don’t know where the time went! I’ve just started
a character for 5th edition…
2)Most of my published work appears under the name “Janine Ashbless” and it is DIRTY. I
mean, really really. But still
fantasy / horror /spec-fic in most cases.
3)I had a Marmite conversion experience, and went from hating to
loving it in a day.
2. What
was the first thing you had published?
I’m not sure now! Probably a short story
called The Spirit Mirror, which appeared in Shadows and Silence (eds. Barbara & Christopher Roden). It’s
set in the contemporary American West, which is pretty hubristic considering I’m
not American and haven’t been there. It features some vengeful Native American
ghosts.
3. Which
piece of writing are you proudest of?
I’m writing a dark romance/ religious
conspiracy thriller trilogy about fallen angels. The first volume, Cover
Him with Darkness, was published last year and well … I genuinely think
it’s pretty good. I even let my mum read it, because it’s not too rude.She got riled at the blasphemous bits, mind.
4. …and
which makes you cringe?
When my short story All the Company of Heaven
appeared, the editor had, without asking me, made some textual changes (like
the date it was set), and managed to introduce the most incredible double
entendre. Then in the next edition of the magazine he printed a letter from a reader pointing out the mistakes and
saying how they brought the story down. I was mortified.
Can you tell that I still haven’t got over it?
5. What’s
a normal writing day like?
A never-ending battle to stop surfing
Facebook/the Net/playing Spider, and get down to some actual bloody work. It’s
like Ragnarok, only with fewer swords and more amusing yet ultimately
depressing Cracked posts.
6. Which
piece of writing should someone who’s never read you before pick up first?
Cover
Him with Darkness is the best place to start if you are wary of all the sex
stuff. But if you can stomach the idea of full-on erotica, try one of my three
collections of short stories – Dark
Enchantment, say. The various stories feature M R James-style ghosts, a
modern-day Hades, the Devil in Salem, and the ghoul-god/Death … among other
things.
7. What
are you working on now?
I’m
collaborating with fantasy author Adrian
Tchaikovsky and scenario writer Adam
Gauntlett to create a collection of Lovecraftian tales. I’m really excited
about this!
