The BFS on Black Mountain

No, I don't mean that the folk who run the British Fantasy Society have been dragged to Mynydd Du and are currently being eaten,/torn limb from limb/driven murderously insane there. Although I'm sure that would make a good short story some time.

Nope - what I mean is that there are not one, but two pieces of news today that relate to both the BFS and Black Mountain. And they go something like this.

David Brzeski has reviewed my little serial novel on the BFS website. The full review is here, but the upshot is basically this bit:

'If anything, the quieter parts—where everything is inexplicably going to hell, and the protagonists have no idea why, beyond blaming each other—are scarier than the gory part, where people get ripped to shreds...  Simon Bestwick does a great job of varying the writing style throughout to suit that of the various narrators in their various periods—assuming, that is, that he did write it, rather than just transcribe them from the originals.'

Well, about that last point, I'll never tell. ;)

The second point regards awards eligibility. Being novel-length but in instalments - each one a self-contained narrative - I wasn't sure which category Black Mountain fell in (always assuming, of course, that any of you guys feel like voting for it!) So I emailed the BFS Awards Admin (thank you Steve Theaker!) and this was his reply;

'If the whole novel appeared over the course of 2014, in whatever format, then I'd say it's eligible as a novel in the current awards. The individual instalments would also be eligible as short stories.'

So there you go - you can nominate the whole thing for Best Novel if you wish, and/or your favourite individual instalment (if you have one) for Best Short Story (all the individual instalments are under 15,000 words, which makes them short stories rather than novellas from the BFS's viewpoint.)

Or, of course, you can vote for something else entirely, as you wish. :)

Thanks for your time, folks, and have a great weekend.