New year, three new stories

/ Sunday, January 24th, 2016 / No Comments »

issue-8-coverThree eerie new stories of mine are available online, two of them free to read, the third acquirable via Kindle.

Lackington’s first published my short surreal piece “The Spider Tapestries” in November. This month editor Ranylt Rachildis posted all the stories from Issue 8 to the magazine site. You can now read “The Spider Tapestries” here.

(The illustration, I think, is a bit misleading. I swear this isn’t a horror story—at least it doesn’t fit my definition of one—nor are the protagonists exactly human.)

I have more to reveal about “The Spider Tapestries,” but that’s for another post.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies released my dark fantasy story “Longsleeves” as the first story in the first issue of 2016. What an honor!

You can read it online here.

longsleevesI’ve written about the story’s origins in this post. To what I wrote there I’ll add something even more arcane. “Longsleeves” was the first story I wrote after finishing my novel The Black Fire Concerto, and in a way the story is a kind of evil-funhouse-mirror reflection of the book, not unlike Stephen King’s Desperation and its companion novel The Regulators, just on a smaller scale.

(Adding a bit to the strangeness: Part Two and Part Three of The Black Fire Concerto are themselves a kind of funhouse mirror distortion of the characters and especially the plot of my far future short story “Twa Sisters” — so I see the three works as a kind of thematic trilogy. I don’t know if anyone else would be able to detect the elements that link them.)

Tangent Online gave “Longsleeves” a positive review. “Longsleeves” is also a companion piece to my previous Beneath Ceaseless Skies outing, “The Ivy-Smothered Palisade.”

TC-coverAnd finally, anthology Tomorrow’s Cthulhu has been released on Kindle. It contains my short story “Drift from the Windrows,” a story rooted in the not at all far-fetched premise that beings from Lovecraft’s Mythos might find a use for genetically-modified organisms (and the companies that make them).

I know I’m building a reputation as a horror writer, but believe it or not, this is only the second explicitly Lovecraftian story I’ve written to see print. (The first was “Her Acres of Pastoral Playground” in Cthulhu’s Reign.)

I’m someone who believes that writing in that form is better accomplished with theme, mood and imagery than by sowing Lovecraft’s made-up words throughout the story, so just like in my first outing, you won’t find any Unnameable Ones mentioned by name.

If you check ’em out, let me know what you think.

#SFWApro

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