A new short story and a video interview

/ Monday, March 6th, 2023 / No Comments »

The dual launch for The Twice-Drowned Saint by C.S.E. Cooney and The Collected Enchantments went really well for Anita and I, despite not having a lot of time to get ready for Boskone thanks to accumulated real-world obligations. It was great to revisit our friends in Boston and touch base, if fleetingly, with people we’ve not seen in person in far too long.

There will be much more to share about those books and other projects tied into the 25th anniversary of Mythic Delirium in the near future. For now, though, I want to highlight something that feels both long-expected and unexpected: a new short story by me out there in the world.

I’m so excited to return this month to the pages of Cosmic Horror Monthly. Last April, they gave a home to my “Matres Lachrymarum,” and enabled one of the best fab reactions to a new tale that I’ve received in many a moon.

The even newer new tale they’ve premiered is called “Slow Burn,” a tongue-in-cheek (or tongue-ripped-out-of-mouth) title if I’ve ever come up with one. Like “Matres,” it’s contaminated with a Lovecraftian strain, and though “Slow Burn” is not set in the same quantum universe as “Matres,” it does tie into previous stories I have written.

“Slow Burn” brings back two of my recurring characters: John Hairston, introduced in “The Sun Saw,” brought back in “Nolens Volens,” sent off on an incendiary adventure in “The Comforter”; and Aaron Friedrich, name dropped in “Gutter” and fully introduced as Hairston’s bewildered traveling companion in “The Comforter.”

Deep cut bonus: if you’ve read “The Sun Saw” and “Nolens Volens,” either in the anthologies they were originally solicited for or in my collection Aftermath of an Industrial Accident, some (though not all) of the loose ends from those prior stories reach an end in “Slow Burn.”

I’m super-grateful to Charles Tyra and Carson Winter for letting me crawl back into their lair.

Other books in which Aaron Friedrich and John Hairston appear…

I’m also grateful, in the meantime, to Selina Lovett of Annie’s Book Stop of Worcester, who asked me at Boskone if I’d be up for a video interview via Zoom and followed through in short order.

The interview focuses on twenty-five years of Mythic Delirium and my interests as an editor and publisher, but lingers a bit on my fiction writing, too. As you can see from the collage of stills below, a significant aspect of the chat involves holding book covers close to a webcam. If listening to me talk about my creative life for an hour sounds like a nice way to while away some time, click on the image below to give the interview a watch.


 

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