Things of the Week: 19th August 2016

Six weeks to Fantasycon!

Nine weeks to Devil's Highway's release!

Sixteen weeks to The Feast Of All Souls' release!

Big, big thanks to everyone who pre-ordered Highway and Feast, by the way. According to Amazon, they're actually my top-selling titles right now.

*tries not to think about how this probably actually means that the already published stuff isn't selling at all*

*fails*

*thinks about how this probably actually means that the already published stuff isn't selling

at all*

*cries*

*drinks*

Um, where was I?

Seriously, folks - if you did pre-order either title, thank you. That's lovely of you, and I hope you enjoy the books when they arrive.

Books are wonderful, aren't they? I hate to admit it, but I haven't been reading as regularly as often as I should have - that's Facebook for you. Since I started keeping myself off FB during the week, though, that's begun to change - and I've been reading some particularly cool stuff over the last couple of weeks.

Cate and I went to a couple of author events at Waterstones in Liverpool - our old friends Paul Kane and Marie O'Regan were there with Barbie Wilde on the 4th, promoting Paul's new novel Sherlock Holmes and the Servants of Hell and Barbie's collection Voices Of The Damned.

The night before, US children's author V.E. Schwab was in conversation about her new novel, This Savage Song. I hadn't realised - colour me slow on the uptake - that it was the same Victoria Schwab who wrote this blog I shared a while back. Victoria's funny andf interesting, and since she's published by Titan, PR whizz Lydia Gittins was there. (Last time I saw Lydia, at Eastercon, she told me that if she wasn't wearing her pink coat, people didn't recognise her. She wasn't, and I didn't.)

Anyway: This Savage Song is urban fantasy, and YA fiction - but it never talks down to its audience

or is anything less than satisfying to a reader of any age.

This Savage Song tells the story of two teens in a broken world, where violent acts start breeding actual monsters. Some are shadows with teeth that feed on flesh and bone. Some are corpses that feed on blood. And some can pass for human. Those rare creatures feed on souls.

It’s the story of Kate Harker, the only daughter of a crime boss, and August Flynn, the son of a man trying to hold his city together. Kate is a human who wants to be a monster, and August a monster who wishes he were human.

It's that simple, and that good. Half crime-thriller, half low fantasy, with vivid characters, sharp prose and an absorbing narrative. The story is due to conclude in a second volume: I'll be picking it up.

Along with anything else I can lay hands on by Mercedes Murdock Yardley, after reading her novel Pretty Little Dead Girls earlier this week:

“Run, Star Girl.”


Bryony Adams is destined to be murdered, but fortunately Fate has terrible marksmanship. In order to survive, she must run as far and as fast as she can. After arriving in Seattle, Bryony befriends a tortured musician, a market fish-thrower, and a starry-eyed hero who is secretly a serial killer bent on fulfilling Bryony’s dark destiny.

Schwab's book is a tough and streetwise: Yardley's is fey, whimsical, wide-eyed and wry, but with a sinister edge. It has an almost fairy-tale feel - but is most definitely not for kids. It's funny, charming, and dark. You'll laugh... but don't get too comfortable.

And that brings me to the third read of the week: Frances Hardinge's Cuckoo Song.

The first things to shift were the doll's eyes, the beautiful grey-green glass eyes. Slowly they swivelled, until their gaze was resting on Triss's face. Then the tiny mouth moved, opened to speak.

'What are you doing here?' It was uttered in tones of outrage and surprise, and in a voice as cold and musical as the clinking of cups. 'Who do you think you are? This is my family.'

When Triss wakes up after an accident, she knows that something is very wrong. She is insatiably hungry; her sister seems scared of her and her parents whisper behind closed doors. She looks through her diary to try to remember, but the pages have been ripped out.

Soon Triss discovers that what happened to her is more strange and terrible than she could ever have imagined, and that she is quite literally not herself. In a quest find the truth she must travel into the terrifying Underbelly of the city to meet a twisted architect who has dark designs on her family - before it's too late . . .

I'm loving this one. More urban fantasy for young adults, this one set in the fictional city of Ellchester between the wars. It features a cunning twist on the changeling myth, and some great characters. Cate has a copy of Hardinge's latest book, The Lie Tree, which won the British Fantasy Award last year. My main memory of Hardinge's acceptance speech is of her standing at the lectern in her customary black fedora, describing a typical pitch to publishers: "Now, this might sound a little bit mad..."

And I realised the other night I was once in a magazine with her! Her first short story, 'Shining Man', appeared in issue 8 of Paul Bradshaw's The Dream Zone way back in 2001, alongside a bit of fluff by yours truly called 'The Flower And The Labyrinth.'

Katie Norris and Sinead Parker continue to conquer the world, or at least Edinburgh, chalking up another review, this time in the Guardian. Hopefully they'll be touring after this - hope so, and that I can get to see them.

One review compared them to another comedy gem I recently discovered: Phoebe Waller-Bridge's  bleak, filthy, hilarious series Fleabag. It manages to showcase a bunch of wonderfully unlikeable characters and make you give a damn about them (well, except for Olivia Colman as Fleabag's saccharinely hateful stepmother.) Fleabag herself is self-loathing and self-destructive; pathos and sadness are never far from the surface. It manages to be touching when you least expect it; the highlight of one episode is an incredibly tender and beautiful monologue from Hugh Dennis (not an actor you necessarily associate with that kind of performance.) Really worth checking out, if you haven't discovered it already.

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And finally, another advance review of Ellen Datlow's Nightmares: A New Decade of Modern Horror, from Paul St John Mackintosh:

You couldn’t wish for better evidence for the contention that weird horror is the representative genre of our time. Unreservedly recommended.

I'll take that!

Have a good weekend, everybody.

Be excellent to one another.

May Monday be a long time coming...

Things Of The Week: 10th June 2016

Bits and pieces of stuff this week. Work on Devil's Highway grinds steadily on, gathering momentum. Fingers crossed, I might just pull this one off.

In other news, the shortlist for the British Fantasy Awards was announced on Monday. Some of you may remember that I posted a few recommendations for the shortlist back in February - and a very gratifying number of them have made the shortlists! Either I'm a major trendsetter, have developed powers of mind control without realising. Or, more likely, I just felt the same way as a majority of voters. The most boring explanations are usually the likeliest.

I'm on one of the juries - for Best Collection, alongside Carole Johnstone and Emma Cosh. The nominations in that category are:

Ghost Summer: Stories, Tananarive Due (Prime Books)
Monsters, Paul Kane (The Alchemy Press)
Probably Monsters, Ray Cluley (ChiZine Publications)
Scar City, Joel Lane (Eibonvale Press)
Skein and Bone, V.H. Leslie (Undertow Publications)
The Stars Seem So Far Away, Margrét Helgadóttir (Fox Spirit Books)

We're going to have our work cut out, to say the least. I've read some of the collections, but not others - but there's no doubt it's going to be a close-run thing.

I didn't make the shortlist this year - I hadn't expected to, given the quality of work out there - unless you count The Second Spectral Book Of Horror Stories, which has nominated for Best Anthology and which includes my story 'Horn Of The Hunter.' Despite my (and others') well-documented issues with Spectral Press and issues raised in respect of its TOC, I think it's an excellent anthology and a fine achievement by Mark Morris.


However, someone else did make the shortlist, and this for me was the best news of the whole thing.

Among my recommendations back in February were a short story and a novella, 'When The Moon Man Knocks' and The Bureau Of Them, which in my admittedly biased view were two of the best things published last year. Both of them have been shortlisted, alongside (among others) Nnedi Okorafor, Mark Morris, Priya Sharma, V.H. Leslie, Adam Nevill and Usman Tanveer Malik.

Both pieces are, of course, by Cate Gardner, now also known as Mrs Bestwick. (It's still great to write that!) 'When The Moon Man Knocks,' in particular, is one of the best things Cate's ever written, a heartbreaking and unsettling meditation on grief and loss. It's also packed with oddness and invention, in a world that's half the one we know and half a surreal fairyland - somewhere between Lewis Carroll and early Tim Burton. Cate wrote it shortly after her mum passed away; today would have been Pauline's 71st birthday.

Anyway, I'm hugely proud of and happy for Cate today. Fingers crossed for the awards in September!

The Lowdown (Mr and Mrs Edition) Part Two... with Paul Kane

Paul Kane and Marie O'Regan

Paul Kane is the award-winning, bestselling author and editor of over fifty books – including the Arrowhead trilogy (gathered together in the sellout Hooded Man omnibus, revolving around a post-apocalyptic version of Robin Hood), The Butterfly Man and Other Stories, Hellbound Hearts and The Mammoth Book of Body Horror. His non-fiction books include The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy and Voices in the Dark, and his genre journalism has appeared in the likes of SFX, Rue Morgue and DeathRay. He has been a Guest at Alt.Fiction five times, was a Guest at the first SFX Weekender, at Thought Bubble in 2011, Derbyshire Literary Festival and Off the Shelf in 2012, Monster Mash and Event Horizon in 2013, Edge-Lit in 2014, plus HorrorCon, HorrorFest and Grimm Up North in 2015, as well as being a panellist at FantasyCon and the World Fantasy Convention. His work has been optioned and adapted for the big and small screen, including for US network television, plus his latest novels are Lunar (set to be turned into a feature film), the Y.A. story The Rainbow Man (as P.B. Kane) and the sequel to RED – Blood RED – from SST Publications. He lives in Derbyshire, UK, with his wife Marie O’Regan (see Monday's Lowdown), his family and a black cat called Mina. Find out more at his site, which has featured Guest Writers such as Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Charlaine Harris, Dean Koontz and Guillermo del Toro.

1. Tell us three things about yourself.

1) Incredible as it might seem, especially to me, I’ve been writing professionally for almost twenty years – there’s a ‘Best of…’ collection coming out later this year from SST called Shadow Casting to mark the occasion of my being older than I would like to be. 

2) I write film, TV and graphic novel scripts, as well as fiction and non-fiction. 

3) Before I became a writer, I wanted to be either a comic book artist or a special effects guy. Both seemed more attainable than starship captain – at least back then.   

2. What was the first thing you had published?

The first things I had published, in a non-paying market, were reviews in a small press magazine called Drone back in the early ‘90s. Mainly film and book reviews, but some model reviews, as I was heavily into making genre models at the time – because of the interest in special effects – and Drone covered a lot of that kind of stuff. I still have all kinds of oddities in the garage, from a full-sized Facehugger to a Spider-head from The Thing. I’m frightened of getting them out, though, in case I scare the cat. The first fiction story I had published was ‘Facades’ in Planet Prozak a few years later.  

3. Which piece of writing are you proudest of?

Probably a short story called ‘The Butterfly Man’, which was published in the PS collection of the same name. I wanted to write something that was a meditation on life, love and everything in-between, and think I managed to just about pull it off. I remember telling my better half Marie (O’Regan) the broad strokes of this one in the car on the way back from the shops before I’d even written a word. She started crying, in a good way thankfully, so I knew I was probably on to something. It’s one of those stories I hope I’m remembered for in years to come, and will definitely be in the ‘Best of…’ this year.

4. …and which makes you cringe?

How long have you got? The ones that used to make me cringe were the first pieces of prose I had a bash at when I was in my teens, trying to emulate horror authors like Jim Herbert. There’s a novel – if you can call it that – called Night Beast, about a killer alien that lands in a lake, which had Garth Merenghi-style rangers in choppers with Magnums hunting the thing in the Peak District. I say they used to make me cringe because now I just find them hilarious; in fact I get them out every now and again if I want to cheer myself up.

5. What’s a normal writing day like?

I’m sure a lot of writers say this, but I don’t think there actually is a normal writing day. You can try and plan what you’re going to do, but other things always crop up, some of which are infinitely more fun than being shackled to a keyboard all day. For example, I was recently invited to go and talk about Hellraiser – one of my passions for anyone who doesn’t know – at the Grimm Up North film festival, which was a lot of fun. When I’m working on something like a novel, which I was over last summer, I try keep office hours and average about 3 – 4,000 words a day, so I can usually get a first draft done in about a couple of months or less. Then comes the hard part of editing and rewriting…

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

Probably the Hooded Man omnibus of all the Arrowhead novels (published by Abaddon), as it reflects a lot of my interests – mythology, SF, horror – and I think has some of the best characters I’ve ever come up with, not to mention some rollocking action scenes. Those stories are probably what I’m best known for, and definitely changed my life. I’ve just recently revisited that universe for the e-novella Flaming Arrow, which picks up a few years after Arrowland and catches up with the characters now they’re a bit older; that will be reprinted in the mass market paperback The End of the End this August. In terms of short stories, probably my last collection Monsters (from Alchemy Press), which spans my career so far. Plus it has a really cool cover by Clive Barker and an introduction by Nicholas Vince, who played Chatterer Cenobite in Hellraiser and Kinski in Nightbreed; both people who know a little bit about monsters themselves.

7. What are you working on now?

I’ve just finished writing a short film and have been doing a lot of promo publicity for Blood RED, my sequel novel to 2008’s sellout novella RED. That’s a horror reworking of Little Red Riding Hood, which comes with a cover from Dave McKean and introduction by Alison Littlewood – out again through SST. Just before Christmas I finished edits on both my new mass market novel, Sherlock Holmes and the Servants of Hell from Solaris and the non-fiction book Hellraisers from Avalard. I also wrote a new novelette called Snow for Stormblade, which is another dark take on a certain well-known fairy tale – that’ll be out soon in print, e-book and audio. The New Year sees me hitting the ground running, doing two brand new stories for my upcoming Nailbiters collection, another graphic novel, writing a newly commissioned post-apocalyptic novella called The Rot and turning my attention to some more film work. Plus Marie and I have just taken over as co-chairs of the UK Chapter of the Horror Writers’ Association, which should keep us pretty busy this coming year.  

You can buy Monsters here.

You can buy Flaming Arrow here.

The Lowdown (Mr and Mrs Edition) Part One... with Marie O'Regan

Paul Kane and Marie O'Regan

Marie O'Regan is a British Fantasy Award-nominated author and editor, based in Derbyshire. Her first collection, Mirror Mere, was published in 2006, and her short fiction has appeared in a number of genre magazines and anthologies in the UK, US, Canada, Italy and Germany. She was shortlisted for the British Fantasy Society Award for Best Short Story in 2006, and Best Anthology in 2010 and 2012. Her genre journalism has appeared in magazines like The Dark Side, Rue Morgue and Fortean Times, and her interview book, Voices in the Dark, was released in 2011. An essay on 'The Changeling' was published in PS Publishing's award-winning Cinema Macabre, edited by Mark Morris. She is co-editor (with her husband, Paul Kane - see Friday's Lowdown) of the bestselling Hellbound Hearts, Mammoth Book of Body Horror and A Carnivàle of Horror - Dark Tales from the Fairground, plus editor of The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women. A collection, In Times of Want, is due to be published in September 2016, and Marie is currently working on a novel and various other writing projects. Marie is represented by Jamie Cowen of the Ampersand Agency.
  
1. Tell us three things about yourself.

I write short stories, screenplays, novellas, novels... always horror, at least so far, though they range from supernatural to psychological in tone.

When I was a teenager, I wanted to draw Marvel comics. Now I'm just trying to write my first graphic novel script (not for Marvel, I hasten to add!).

I was Chair of the British Fantasy Society for four years (2004-2008), a committee member for seven overall, and am now Co-Chair of the UK Chapter of the Horror Writers' Association.

2. What was the first thing you had published?

The first story I sold was 'Suicide Bridge', which appeared in Here and Now #4, edited by the lovely Jenny Barber. The first one to see print, though, was 'Alsiso', in Elastic Press' The Alsiso Project, edited by Andrew Hook - it just beat Here and Now to print.

3. Which piece of writing are you proudest of?
Probably the current novel, a supernatural tale called Lie Still; partly because it's the newest piece and therefore, hopefully, the best written if I'm progressing as I hope - but mainly because I just really love the story, and grew very fond of some of the characters as I wrote it.

4. ...and which makes you cringe?
Nothing specifically that's been published, although obviously looking back there are a few I'd like a chance to rewrite now to smooth out the bumps. So probably a couple of the earliest stories I wrote - thankfully there are a few that didn't see print :)

5. What's a normal writing day like?

I watch TV with Paul over breakfast, then around half nine I check email and answer anything that's come in and spend the morning doing admin (whether my own or something for the HWA UK chapter). Once that's done I start writing, whether that's before I break for lunch or after. I keep going until six or six thirty, then start dinner and spend the evening with the family. Those are the days that are just for writing - then there are days when Paul and I do workshops in various places, or attend events (I was a panellist at several events last year, including Double the Horror in Derby, Sledge Lit and FantasyCon).

6. Which piece of writing should someone who's never read you before pick up first?
Oh God, that's difficult. I'd say maybe the first collection, Mirror Mere? It contains some of the stories I love most, and to get them separately now would be very difficult - a number of the magazines they were published in are now defunct, sadly. If you don't want to read a whole collection, then the eponymous novella is on sale as an ebook through PS Publishing.

7. What are you working on now?
Far too much, probably :) I have two novels and a novella at various stages that are currently with my agent, so they should be going out on submission fairly soon. The one nearest to being ready is a supernatural novel called Lie Still, as I mentioned earlier. The second one is called Suthina and is also supernatural, and the novella is called Icon. I'm just waiting for notes on those. I'm currently writing a short story for an Industrial Horror anthology, then it's a novella called 'Resurrection Blues' for a couples novella project I've been asked to contribute to... and I'm doing the story notes for my second collection, In Times of Want, which should be launched at FantasyCon in September, all being well. Other than that, refining a pitch for another novel and finishing a couple of short stories. And Paul and I have just agreed to act as Co-Chairs for the UK Chapter of the Horror Writers' Association, so in between the writing we're trying to get that set up, organise what meetings we can etc. It's going to be a busy year!