New Acceptance for Black Static: 'The Climb'

Very pleased to announce that my short story 'The Climb' has been accepted by Black Static magazine for a forthcoming issue.

Following his wife's death, Bryan sets out to climb a bleak, craggy hill in Lancashire. But it might be more than guilt and old memories that haunt him during the climb. 

Bryan turned. Behind him, in the fading light, the footpath wound down through the farmlands and drystone walls. In the farmhouses, big sturdy boxes of biscuit-coloured stone, lights had begun to appear in the windows, warm yellow glimmers like thimblefuls of melted butter. 

A sheep’s faint, distant bleating drifted up towards him, but all else was silent and still. The wind had

suddenly dropped, and the stillness was hungry and expectant. Waiting for something to happen. 

Bryan stayed still. He watched the bushes and the long grass, the drystone walls, the distant farmhouses - waiting for something to move, waiting to catch it out. Because there was something out there, he knew. Something, or someone, watching him.

The story was inspired by Pendle Hill in Lancashire, where much of my first novel, Tide Of Souls, takes place. It's an imposing, eerie place...

And a steep hill to climb.

2nd Spectral Book Of Horror Cover Reveal

The 2nd Spectral Book Of Horror Stories, featuring my story 'Horn Of The Hunter', comes out next month at Fantasycon. Really looking forward to laying hands on a copy!

The cover illustration's been doing the rounds for a while, but now the full cover design is almost completed, so you can feast your eyes on it here. 'Horn Of The Hunter' gets quoted on the jacket, too!

The title comes from an old English folk song. That's pretty much all they have to do with one another, but here's the song anyway. It's a sight more cheery than the story is.

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NEW NOVEL: HELL’S DITCH, COMING IN DECEMBER 2015

...or, the meaning of my Twitter handle is finally revealed.

Now this is how you start the week. Well, actually, how I’ve started my week is laughing till I cried at a certain news story relating to David Cameron: if you could convert schadenfreude into electricity, I could probably take care of the entire country’s power requirements for the rest of the week. But I digress.

There’s even better news: I can at last announce that my novel Hell’s Ditch will be published later this year by Snowbooks.

The dream never changes: a moonless, starless night without end. The road she walks is black, bordered with round, white pebbles or nubs of polished bone; she can’t tell which but they’re the only white in the darkness, marking her way through the night.

In dreams and nightmares, Helen walks the Black Road. It leads her back from the grave, back from madness, back towards the man who caused the deaths of her family: Tereus Winterborn, Regional Commander for the Reapers, who rule the ruins of a devastated Britain.

On her journey, she gathers her allies: her old mentor Darrow, the cocky young fighter Danny, emotionally-scarred intelligence officer Alannah and Gevaudan Shoal, last of the genetically-engineered Grendelwolves.

Winterborn will stop at nothing to become the Reapers’ Supreme Commander; more than anything he seeks the advantage that will help him achieve that goal. And in the experiments of the obsessed scientist Dr Mordake, he thinks he has found it.

To Winterborn, Project Tindalos is a means to ultimate power; to Mordake, it’s a means to roll back the devastation of the War and restore his beloved wife to the living. But neither Winterborn nor Mordake understand the true nature of the forces they are about to unleash. Forces that threaten to destroy everything that survived the War, unless Helen and her allies can find and stop Project Tindalos in time.

I’m absolutely delighted by this. My previous novels were all written to commission, having first been pitched to a publisher; the same’s true of the upcoming Redman’s Hill. And don’t get me wrong, I love them all. But this is the first book I just wrote on spec and sent out to be snapped up; it’s a very different feeling.

Hell’s Ditch is the first in a four-part series, The Black Road. It will be released as a hardback and ebook this coming December, with the paperback to follow in March 2016. The second novel, The Devil’s Highway, will be out next October.

The Black Road started out as an idea for a screenplay when I was nineteen, and resurfaced, changing each time, as a novel in the late ‘90s and a radio play in the late 2000s. By then it had grown into something much bigger and more complex than the original.

I wrote the first half of Hell’s Ditch in 2010, before work on it was derailed by a death in the family, then picked up the threads in 2012. It spent its time looking for a home before the good folks at Snowbooks took a shine to it; till now, the rest of the story’s been in limbo, waiting to be told.

You can read Snowbooks' official announcement here - and if your appetite's really been whetted, feel free to pre-order the hardback, ebook or paperback.
 

I’m very, very excited about this. I’m really looking forward to seeing Hell’s Ditch in print, and to continuing the journey in The Devil’s Highway.

The Black Road is waiting. I hope you’ll join me on it.

Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of the Year #7: Honourable Mentions List

The seventh volume of Ellen Datlow's Best Horror Of The Year is with us! This is a good thing. Ellen's now published her full longlist of Recommended Reading/Honourable Mentions, which you can read here (A-L) and here (L-Z.)

While I'm not in it this year, I'm delighted to say that four of my short stories appear on the list:

'As White As Bone' (from Matter #13)
'Night Templar' (from Black Static #44)

'The Battering Stone' (from Horror Uncut)
'The Lowland Hundred' (from Dead Water)

Best of all, these were the only short stories I had published in 2014! I'd call that a pretty good success rate. :)


That's one of three things that's got the week off to a very good start at my end. The other two? Well, one was the story about David Cameron and the dead pig (I spent a great deal of Monday morning when I should have been working crying with helpless laughter) and the other? Well, watch this space for another announcement, coming later this morning....

The Lowdown with... Usman Tanveer Malik

Usman T. Malik is a Pakistani vagrant camped in Florida. He reads Sufi poetry, likes long walks, and occasionally strums naats on the guitar.

His fiction has won the Bram Stoker Award and been nominated for the Nebula. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, The Year’s Best YA Speculative Fiction, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Tor.com, The Apex Book of World SF,  Nightmare, Strange Horizons, and Black Static among other venues. He is a graduate of Clarion West.

In Dec 2014, Usman led Pakistan’s first speculative fiction workshop in Lahore in conjunction with Desi Writers Lounge and Liberty Books.

He tweets here.

1. Tell us three things about yourself.

One: For a while I wanted to be a singer. Then I realized I sucked at singing and quit. 

Two: I'm bad at self-discipline. 

Three: I need a night light if I'm sleeping alone.

2. What was the first thing you had published?

A letter to the editor in the children's section of a Pakistani newspaper called, surprise surprise, 'Children's Pakistan'. I must have been ten or so. When it came out, I showed the newspaper to everyone in my family and my street. I glowed with happiness for days.

Illustration for 'The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn'

3. Which piece of writing are you proudest of?

"The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn".

4. …and which makes you cringe?

Nothing that I've published professionally makes me really cringe (there are only a handful of stories I've sold so far). I do shake my head when I read any of my stories after 1-2 years and see how they could have been better.

5. What’s a normal writing day like?

Sadly, I don't have writing days. Only binges. I haven't written anything new in more or less 6 months. 

 

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

Probably either "Resurrection Points" or "Ishq". They're both short stories and give a decent idea of the kind of work I'm interested in exploring.

7. What are you working on now?

At the moment, I'm trying to work on a couple different short stories, "trying" being the key word. It's slow and arduous, but I have hope they will pan out one day.