What's New? with Damien Angelica Walters

DamienAngelica Walters is the author of the forthcoming The Dead Girls Club, Cry Your Way Home, Paper Tigers, and Sing Me Your Scars, winner of This is Horror’s Short Story Collection of the Year. Her short fiction has been nominated twice for a Bram Stoker Award, reprinted in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror and The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, and published in various anthologies and magazines, including the Shirley Jackson Award Finalists Autumn Cthulhu and The Madness of Dr. Caligari, World Fantasy Award Finalist Cassilda’s Song, Nightmare Magazine, Black Static, and Apex Magazine. Until the magazine’s closing in 2013, she was an Associate Editor of the Hugo Award-winning Electric Velocipede. She lives in Maryland with her husband and two rescued pit bulls and is represented by Heather Flaherty of The Bent Agency.

1) So, what’s new from you?

My forthcoming novel, The Dead Girls Club. The official cover copy from the publisher:

Red Lady, Red Lady, show us your face...

In 1991, Heather Cole and her friends were members of the Dead Girls Club. Obsessed with the macabre, the girls exchanged stories about serial killers and imaginary monsters, like the Red Lady, the spirit of a vengeful witch killed centuries before. Heather knew the stories were just that, until her best friend Becca began insisting the Red Lady was real--and she could prove it.

That belief got Becca killed.

It's been nearly thirty years, but Heather has never told anyone what really happened that night--that Becca was right and the Red Lady was real. She's done her best to put that fateful summer, Becca, and the Red Lady, behind her. Until a familiar necklace arrives in the mail, a necklace Heather hasn't seen since the night Becca died.

The night Heather killed her.

Now, someone else knows what she did...and they're determined to make Heather pay.

2) How did it come about?

I had an image of a woman receiving a half-heart necklace in the mail, a necklace she knew no one could’ve possibly sent to her. And from there, I saw four girls sitting in a dark basement, telling scary stories. It didn’t take long to realize that it was a more mainstream novel, something with a psychological suspense backbone.

3) Tell us about the process of how you created it.

The novel has two timelines – now and 1991. I wrote the opening scene as described above, which takes place now, and then wrote the entire past timeline. When that was finished, I returned to the present.

4) What was your favourite part of the process?

When the pieces of the two timelines fell into place, fitting together like a puzzle.

5) What was the toughest part of it?

The past timeline was fairly easy to write, inasmuch as any writing is easy, but the present timeline was another matter. Figuring out who was behind the central mystery and why was difficult, and then it ended up changing because it didn’t quite work. Even after that was sorted, getting all the clues and red herrings in place was tricky.

I ended up rereading many of my Agatha Christie novels during the process, taking note of how she hid things, both true and false, within the narrative.

And lastly, because of the story changes and the subsequent revisions, making sure nothing was left that referenced anything that was ultimately changed or deleted. (And never mind that I’ve gone through it with a fine-toothed comb, I’m still terrified that I missed something.)

6) Is there a theme running through it?

Indeed, but I’ll leave that for a reader to uncover.

7) If you had to sum this book up in three words, what would they be?

Every truth lies.

8) Where can/will we be able to get hold of it?

It will be released in hardcover and ebook on December 10, 2019 and is up for preorder now at Barnes & Noble and Amazon. And if you’re a NetGalley reviewer, it’s available for request.

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.

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... Damien Angelica Walters

DamienAngelica Walters’ work has appeared or is forthcoming in various anthologies and magazines, including The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2015, Year’s Best Weird Fiction: Volume One, Cassilda’s Song, The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction, Nightmare Magazine, Black Static, and Apex Magazine. Sing Me Your Scars, a collection of short fiction, was released in 2015 from Apex Publications, and Paper Tigers, a novel, is forthcoming in 2016 from Dark House Press. Find her on Twitter here.

 
1. Tell us three things about yourself.

I'm terrified of spiders.

I'm a huge fan of the movie Alien.

I still have one baby tooth.

2. What was the first thing you had published?

I had a few poems published in various places, but my first short story sale was "The Depository" to Bards & Sages Quarterly in 2010.

3. Which piece of writing are you proudest of?

I'm very proud of my collection Sing Me Your Scars and incredibly pleased with the reception it's received. I was terrified it would be released and vanish into the ether of forgotten books. With respect to individual stories, that's a hard question to answer because the stories that mean the most to me do so for personal reasons. "This is the Way I Die," published in Nightmare Magazine, is one of those stories.

But "The Floating Girls: A Documentary," which was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award, almost didn't happen because I couldn't get the format to work the way I wanted it to, and I struggled with the emotional resonance. I'm proud that I stuck with it and happy that people enjoyed reading it.

4. …and which makes you cringe?

That's another tough one to answer because if I pick something readers like, I don't want them to think my feelings negate their opinions. I'll just say that whenever I look at older work, I spot all the blemishes and flaws, all the things I'd change, but I do so with the knowledge that I'm viewing those things through the lens of the writer I am now, not then.

5. What’s a normal writing day like?

When I first wake up, I typically take care of administrative things: proofing stories, edits, answering interview questions, updating my website, etc. Then I'll work on my current project, whether it's actually writing or brainstorming. At the end of the day, when I step away from my computer, I take a notebook and pen with me and often write snippets or story ideas or what have you at night.

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

I think my collection Sing Me Your Scars would give someone a good idea of the sort of work I write. It contains several pieces of new fiction written in 2014 as well as selected reprints from 2011 through 2013. If they'd like to read something before committing to the purchase, I have links on my website to short fiction available to read free online, including the collection's title story, which was reprinted in Apex Magazine.

7. What are you working on now?

I'm working on several solicited stories for various anthologies, collating reprints for a second collection, and trying my best to keep all my deadlines in a row.