Not being someone who keeps close tabs on periodic landmarks in my personal life, it came as a bit of a shock when I realized that next year will mark the 25th anniversary of the existence of Mythic Delirium. This quarter century incorporates all of the gradually evolving phases of Mythic Delirium, from its beginnings as a tiny but mighty twice-yearly poetry zine (which, I’m still proud to say, was ultimately honored with a World Fantasy Award nomination) to its current status as a tiny but mighty publisher of books, ha ha!

For multiple reasons, these past couple of years have been especially challenging for Mythic Delirium, but we hope to come back with an epic flourish in the new year, and this announcement provides proof. In February 2023, we’ll be releasing two gorgeous books by authors whom we have wonderful creative partnerships with, C. S. E. Cooney and Theodora Goss. They and we will be in Boston for Boskone to premiere these treasures in person.

Feast your eyes on these spectacular covers that exquisitely embody the words these pages contain.

Cover art by Lasse Paldanius

Claire Cooney’s phantasmagorical novel The Twice-Drowned Saint first appeared, in slightly different form, in our 2020 anthology A Sinister Quartet, and generated a lot of buzz. We’re re-releasing this wildly imaginative gem as a standalone novel, fully illustrated outside and in by Lasse Paldanius, whose dreamlike cover art gathers the key characters and their destinies in the story symbolically together.

The black-and-white interior illustrations build tension to C. S. E. Cooney’s rich storytelling by providing mystical glimpses to the story’s key elements or scenes. Combining figurative, abstract and symbolic expression, not only do Lasse’s drawings illustrate, but also offer enjoyable visual riddles to the reader. You can solve the visual codes by reading the story.

Available Feb. 7 in trade paperback and e-book editions.

Pre-order The Twice-Drowned Saint

Trade Paperback: Barnes & Noble | Amazon | Amazon UK | Amazon CA | Amazon FR | Amazon DE | Amazon AU | Bookshop

Ebook: Amazon | Amazon UK | Amazon CA | Amazon FR | Amazon DE
Amazon AU | Nook | iBooks | Kobo | Google Play

 

Cover art by Catrin Welz-Stein

This huge gathering of 24 stories and 49 poems spans the length of Theodora Goss’s enchanting career, putting the best of her poetic and moving adventures in magic and her graceful re-imaginings of fairy tales and folklore all in one volume. The Collected Enchantments combines selections from her award-nominated and award-winning collections In the Forest of Forgetting, Songs for Ophelia and Snow White Learns Witchcraft with previously uncollected and all-new creations. This beautiful cover piece from Catrin Welz-Stein perfectly matches the otherworldly yet historically grounded mood and tone that Goss evokes, while interior illustrations by frequent Mythic Delirium collaborator Paula Arwen Owen further emphasize the potent blending of nature, sorcery and storytelling.

Available Feb. 14 in hardcover, trade paperback and e-book editions.

Pre-order The Collected Enchantments

Hardcover: Barnes & Noble | Amazon | Amazon UK | Amazon CA | Amazon FR
Amazon DE | Amazon AU | Bookshop

Trade Paperback: Barnes & Noble | Amazon | Amazon UK | Amazon CA | Amazon FR
Amazon DE | Amazon AU | Bookshop

Ebook: Amazon | Amazon UK | Amazon CA | Amazon FR | Amazon DE
Amazon AU | Nook | iBooks | Kobo | Google Play

 

More art from The Twice-Drowned Saint

 

More art from The Collected Enchantments

 
More news to come soon!
 

Cross-posted from Mythic Delirium

Posted in 25th anniversary Mythic Delirium, Editing, Fiction, Mythic Delirium, Poetry, Signal boosts

The time of year has once again come around to remind folks of the original publications produced by Mythic Delirium Books, and in 2022 that’s a simple task. (It’s also, you know, a great excuse to remind people to check out a terrific, thought-provoking read, in case they missed it, or to revisit a terrific, thought-provoking read, in case they didn’t.)

This past February we debuted C. S. E. Cooney’s fantastic story collection Dark Breakers, brimming with five luscious tales set in a milieu wherein the world of humans, the world of the gentry (think of the fae in their most powerful, dangerous incarnations) and the world of the goblins all co-exist in the same space, separated by supposedly impermeable magical veils. Naturally, these veils get permeated in the course of these gorgeous, at times eerie, at times romantic, at times heart-moving stories. The debut included a reading and dealer room hand sales at Boskone, our first in-person events as a press since the arrival of COVID-19.
 

 
As we’ve noted before, Dark Breakers contains a number of Easter eggs that will be appreciated by fans of her World Fantasy Award-winning debut collection Bone Swans.

Dark Breakers was the only book we released this past year. Of Cooney’s five stories, three are original to the collection, and one of those, the novella “Salissay’s Laundries,” we’ve shared free on our site for all to read.
 

“Salissay’s Laundries”

For SFWA members, we’ve also shared the stories in the Nebula Award forums. Links to everything below:

Novella “Salissay’s Laundries” (read for free on Mythic Delirium site) (download copy in SFWA forum, membership/login required)

Novelette “Longergreen” (download copy in SFWA forum, membership/login required)

Short story “Susurra to the Moon” (download copy in SFWA forum, membership/login required)

 
We want to play a few extra congratulatory notes for Claire Cooney, because Ellen Datlow selected “Salissay’s Laundries” for her longlist of honorable mentions in the run-up to the most recent installment, Volume 14, of her Best Horror of the Year anthology series.

As with The Twice-Drowned Saint, Claire’s short novel included in our anthology A Sinister Quartet, we don’t think Cooney precisely intended “Salissay’s Laundries” to be a horror tale, but some unnerving events to occur, and it is great to see that acknowledged in such a prestigious way.

Cross-posted from Mythic Delirium Books

Posted in Awards, Mythic Delirium, Short stories, Signal boosts

Six dark fantasy and horror titles
discounted to 99¢
for an early Halloween start

See a map of how my stories and upcoming novel connect

Read the beginning of my 30th anniversary interview

Read the second part of the interview

Read part three

Reflecting on your published works, what pieces are you most proud of? What pieces do you still think about reworking?

It’s hard to pick favorites: so many of these pieces represent some sort of milestone, little or huge, at least to me.

An obvious choice is “The Button Bin,” which remains, fifteen years after Lawrence Watt-Evans first picked it for publication in Helix, the story of mine that has caused the biggest stir. Any time a creepy image involving buttons starts making the rounds, I’m going to get tagged, it’s inevitable. (It had not occurred to me until typing this paragraph just now that the “The Button Bin” came out right at the midpoint of these thirty years — fascinating!)

Another story that came out in 2007, a fateful year for me, was “The Hiker’s Tale,” which served as the seed that grew into my dark fantasy novel Trail of Shadows, which Broken Eye Books plans to unleash next year. Both of those stories took a long time to gestate, and both have generated multiple sequels, prequels and spin-offs. (As the map shows!)

I’d be remiss if I did not take a moment to plug “The Sun Saw,” which in July at last became available in the anthology wherein it was intended to debut, The Leaves of a Necronomicon, edited by the late, great Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. The publisher, Chaosium, generously let me use the story in my Aftermath of an Industrial Accident collection in 2020. There’s a character in “Sun Saw,” John Hairston, who has seen a lot of action in other stories since I first thought him up.

Regarding reworking, any story can benefit from further tweaking. In the run-up the publication of Unseaming, Thomas Ligotti himself advised me to use the republication of stories in a collection as an opportunity to further refine them. All of them.

If there’s project I’d love to have another go at, its my debut novel, The Black Fire Concerto, which came out in 2013. Not because I would want to make major changes to it — some more polish would not hurt, but my heroines, my villains and villainesses, my ravening ghouls, my surreal settings, my gory set pieces, my loopy over-the-top magic feats, all embody what I was aiming for, a kind of madcap zombie-fic tribute to the likes of Michael Moorcock and Roger Zelazny.

But I had plans for the book to be the start of a four-book series. (In fact, the second book, The Ghoulmaker’s Aria, exists as a complete first draft, and I know the titles of books three and four.) However, the publishing imprint that brought out Black Fire Concerto folded almost as soon as it opened and my novel shot so deep under the radar sales-wise that I concluded that I could not justify the time investment it would have taken to complete the series. What’s heartbreaking is that Black Fire does have a few fans who still ask me from time to time about the next installment. I dream of someday having a window of free time to complete the series and mount a proper large-scale re-launch.

Speaking of reworking, does your process differ from the start of a project versus how you edit completed drafts?

In my experience every piece demands a different process; there is no One Right Way. Given that, I’m going to answer this question more generally.

The single most important step in writing any work of fiction — though it applies to all types of writing, but I feel its especially important to stress this with novels and stories: finish the first draft. Get to the end. Do whatever you have to do to make that happen. You will never see your work in print if you never finish it.

A technique that I co-opted and swear by is the “three-sentence rule,” because “a thousand words a day” is out of reach for many of us who write as a side hustle. The “three-sentence rule” is simple: no matter how tired or busy you are, you can always add three sentences to a work in progress. Some days that is all you will manage. Some days you’ll catch fire and write a lot more.

Once you have that complete draft, that is your clay. You can take however long you want to shape it however you like. Feedback from a few trusted beta readers who you can handle criticism from can be a huge help. Once again, you have to walk that balance beam, staying true to your vision while recognizing that the jewel in your head might on the page still be a lumpy rock.

Since I’ve gone into armchair vizier mode here, I want to add, for whomever might see this; if you decide to write a novel, you would benefit from doing research into how the various processes for seeing a novel through into print work in current times — before you start, even. There’s nothing like spending two years on a project and then learning that all your assumptions about how the business works — assumptions that you based major creative choices on — are wrong.

If you had to pick a central theme or style throughout your work, what might that be?

I’m most comfortable not sticking to a single style. “The Button Bin” drew some gripes because I wrote it in second-person present tense, which for some readers is apparently equivalent to having a suit put on inside out and backwards. “Let There Be Darkness” (collected in Unseaming) is written in future tense. “The Cruelest Team Will Win” (collected in Aftermath) gets told in straightforward first person colloquial voice. I have high fantasy stories, science fiction stories, gritty noir stories, subtle stories, extreme stories. Whatever the performance requires.

I’m definitely drawn to the dark and disturbing, though, whatever style I happen to be working in. I suppose that was true with my poetry as well, though it emerged in smaller doses. I mean, I didn’t think of my poetry entirely in those terms, as I definitely produced verse I thought were light, but look at how Amal El-Mohtar chose to describe my poetry in her introduction to Hungry Constellations:

“Let me tell you about Mike Allen’s poetry. This is a man who delights in breaking bodies: butchering, splitting, flaying, dismembering, then seeding landscapes with viscera until they too become bodies—bodies invaded, bodies stuffed, bodies contaminated. This is a man who carves words into and out of bodies, be they skin or sapphire, corpses or constellations. But somehow Allen skirts gore and clinical detachment both: there is a precision and an economy to his horror that’s reminiscent of clockwork, architecture, astronomy. Imagine a clock with bone-gears, a skin-tree growing liver-fruit, a ship knifing a face into the moon, and you’ll have something of a sense of what lies before you.”

Back in 2007, as part of a promotion for Weird Tales during the years when Ann VanderMeer was editor, I wrote an essay trying to explain “the Fascination of the Abomination,” which I am hardly the only author to exhibit:

“It’s almost as if the author is acting on a spiritual dare: take the worst truth you can imagine, and I will show you that things can be far worse, that the core of your being is not equipped, can never be equipped to cope with the worst that’s out there, even the worst that’s inside you. And I will dare to entertain you, not so much by what I tell you, but how I tell it. (And this is how, perhaps, those of us who have the Fascination transmute it into something we can manage? I can’t really claim to know the answer.)”

I believe that’s the game I am still playing.

How did starting Mythic Delirium impact your personal writing career?

My unexpected career as an editor and publisher helped me in the networking department, I suppose you could say, in that it had the unexpected side benefit of giving me reason to meet people I otherwise might not have.

I guess as one example: when Mythic Delirium became part of the DNA Publications stable, that first issue under new management included a poem by Ian Watson, a prolific sf novelist from across the pond who was in a phase of his writing life where he was producing a lot of poems. My debut poetry chapbook, Defacing the Moon, also came out under the DNA banner about the same time, and Ian, on reading and liking it, pitched one of his own, which I ended up editing, The Lexicographer’s Love Song, and that led to us collaborating as writers on things like the kooky novelette “Dee-Dee and the Dumpy Dancers” that appeared in Interzone (collected in Ian’s Saving for a Sunny Day) and the poem “TimeFlood” that Gardner Dozois published in Asimov’s Science Fiction (collected in Hungry Constellations) and which I still think is one of the best and wildest pieces of writing with my name attached to it, period. Another example of collaborative work I’m super-proud of would be “The King of Cats, the Queen of Wolves” written with my friends Sonya Taaffe and Nicole Kornher-Stace, originally published by Apex Magazine when Catherynne M. Valente was editor, and also collected in Hungry Constellations.

Many of the creative partnerships in my life began with Mythic Delirium or projects that started under or ended up under the Mythic Delirium Books umbrella. I told the story of Mythic Delirium in some detail in the editorial that introduced the final digital issue of the zine, and as Mythic Delirium as a venture turns 25 next year, I expect to share even more as I, while wearing my publisher hat, line a bunch of new book releases and projects up to celebrate that silver anniversary.

What is your most recent publication? What are you currently working on?

Not counting the latest piece written for my day job at the Roanoke Times (which as of this writing happens to be an editorial about the idiotic “Little Mermaid” movie controversy), my most recent publication would be my sci-fi horror story “Matres Lachrymarum” in the April issue of Cosmic Horror Monthly. I have to say, the folks behind this magazine are doing something right, because I got a pretty big positive public response from that story, or at least what counts as one on the scale I work in.

“Matres” is a sort of sequel to “Drift from the Windrows,” a story I wrote for Broken Eye Books’ Tomorrow’s Cthulhu anthology that has since been included in my Aftermath collection. Invites to play in H.P. Lovecraft’s universe are fun; I prefer not to name-drop all his made up monsters and gods and instead let the reader infer what beings might be manifesting from the things my characters see and experience.

I have drafted a couple of new stories that, once they see print, will add a couple more polygons to the story map. One is a Hierophant story, one is a Hairston tale.

What I’m most excited about though is the release of my next novel, Trail of Shadows. I’m incredibly grateful to Broken Eye Books publisher Scott Gable for granting a home to this wayward monster of a book, which has been with me, evolving in fits and starts, for many years.

Trail of Shadows grew from my short story “The Hiker’s Tale” (included in Unseaming) and its novelette sequel “Follow the Wounded One” (included in Aftermath of an Industrial Accident). To share a little secret, “The Cruelest Team Will Win” (also included in Aftermath) is actually a sequel to Trail of Shadows. “The Feather Stitch,” published last year in Lackington’s, connects the Trail of Shadows universe to my “Button Bin” stories, sewing it all together into one big scary “Allenverse,” so to speak. (You can see, on the map I made, how the strands connect.)

The few and the proud who have followed my tales in all their scattershot appearances might not have been aware of it, but the narrative of Trail of Shadows has been an unseen source of gravity, in the manner that anomalies in a planet’s orbit ultimately reveal that there’s another unseen planet exerting force from further out in the void. I’m psyched beyond words that at last I’ll get to call this dark world into the light.

Assuming I live long enough to add three more decades to my writing career, Trail of Shadows will be a great way to kick them off.

Finis

Again, I want to thank Sydney Macias for the interview questions, and C. S. E. Cooney, Carlos Hernandez and Cassandra Khaw for these wonderful AI-generated imaginings of my worlds and monsters!

 

Posted in 30th anniversary interview, Editing, Interviews, Mythic Delirium, Novels, Poetry, Short stories, The Black Fire Concerto, Trail of Shadows, Writing

Six dark fantasy and horror titles
discounted to 99¢
for an early Halloween start

See a map of how my stories and upcoming novel connect

Read the beginning of my 30th anniversary interview

Read the second part of the interview

How did you rise to become the president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association? What was that experience like?

I want to phrase this in a way that’s respectful of those who are no longer with us.

I only became aware of the Science Fiction Poetry Association in 1998, the first time one of my poems was nominated for a Rhysling Award. The organization, though, had been around since 1978!

In 2002, Anita and I and a whole contingent of people involved with DNA Publications traveled to Arisia in Boston. At that convention there was a meeting conducted for SFPA members. I had joined and was curious, but I found the meeting disappointing. I left with what I will call, tongue-in-cheek, a dangerous thought: “I could do this better myself.”

To drill down a little into why I felt that way, what I had hoped for was to find an organization that advocated with vigor for this art form I had come to embrace, and that served as a center of gravity for an enthusiastic community. At that time, SFPA fulfilled neither function. (Others may disagree, but that was my takeaway.) At best, it managed the bare minimum needed to keep from dissolving, and once volunteering took me behind the scenes, I realized the organization hung on by threads.

My bid for president resulted in the first contested election in the SFPA’s history. The group is approaching its 45th anniversary, so I guess you could say my time at the helm, only two years, was a short interval within SFPA’s lifespan. But it was intense. There are things that now I might wish I had done better, or differently, but perhaps most important in the first place, things got done.

Some of the things I tried, like establishing a regular SFPA presence at Readercon in Boston, including an official Rhysling Award ceremony, ultimately fell by the wayside — but those ceremonies were glorious while they lasted. Some things that I tried and failed to do, like changing the organization’s name to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association, eventually happened without my involvement. Some things, I shouldn’t have been so pigheaded about, like the founding of the Dwarf Stars Award, a proposal I initially fought against, believing that adding award categories would detract from promoting what we already had. Some of the things I helped establish have evolved to a point where they present new problems: the annual Rhysling Anthologies, which collect all nominees for members to read before voting on the winners, went from DIY stapled-together zines to pretty print-on-demand paperbacks sold through online bookstores under my watch, but now the award gets so many nominees that SFPA is having to figure out how to prune back what goes in those books, because they’ve become impractical to print.

Above all else, I wanted to project an image of an organization that was active, that was engaged, that was making things happen. I wanted potential newcomers (and disgruntled expats) to see what we were up to and want to be part of it.

I worked with poet and editor Roger Dutcher to complete The Alchemy of Stars, an anthology collecting the first twenty-five-plus years of Rhysling Award winners — the book had been stuck in limbo. I worked with SFPA Founder Suzette Haden Elgin, a wonderful person who I still miss, to publish the Science Fiction Poetry Handbook, a treatise of sorts on how sf poetry can be written that she was offering as a fundraising tool to the association she started. I reached out to members who had dropped out and asked them to come back and I hard-sold the organization to prospective new members wherever I could within the resources I had at the time.

In the end, though, backing away was the right thing to do. I made myself accept that I had made my investments and what happened next was up to others. From what I gather, in the years since, even during rough patches, SFPA has never come close to backsliding to the state it was in when that “dangerous notion” took hold of me.

Perhaps one amusing measure of my success could be the awkwardness those efforts sometimes cause me to this day, now that I’m no longer writing much poetry or sticking my nose into Poetryland affairs, because people who encountered that man on a mission remember him vividly and presume he and I are still the same person. At one time I really was at the center of that intriguing world, where the audience might be small but the artists are often up to really interesting, even mind-stretching things; but now people come to me for advice on, for example, a press to pitch a poetry collection to, and I can only shrug: I have no idea!

One thing I hope more speculative poets will take to heart is that publicly complaining about a lack of respect will never draw that respect. Instead, make the case for why speculative poetry deserves interest, even admiration. Share a poem you wrote, or one you like that someone else wrote, and let listeners hear why those words challenge and delight. That tactic always worked for me.

What genres/forms do you find yourself most comfortable in now?

I’m not comfortable sticking to any one genre, really, though most everything I write ends up having some sort of dark element or twist.

When he wrote the introduction to Aftermath of an Industrial Accident, the amazing Punktown author Jeffrey Thomas perceptively nailed my joy and my curse: “Many writers endeavor to establish a certain style or voice or tone, to clear a small but distinct plot of ground they can build within, so as to create a kind of brand that inspires recognition in a reader … But those writers who do as Mike does have a special place in my heart. And what Mike does, as I say, is just about everything. In these pages you will encounter straight up horror. Experimental horror. High fantasy. Science fiction. Poetry. The consistency, here, is simply excellence.”

Maybe I would be better off if I stayed in one lane and reworked similar themes and techniques over and over, but it’s just not how I roll. Obviously, I take a lot of pride in my work, but I’ve little interest in limiting myself to producing cookie cutter-styled stories for the sake of “brand-building.” (That’s not to say it’s innately a bad thing — if the muse entices you to build a brand, more power to you!)

In terms of forms, I am absolutely much more focused on fiction these days, to the degree that I can set aside any time to focus on creative writing.

As a poet I wrote a number of series: there was the “Disturbing Muses” series of ekphrastic poems based on the lives and works of 20th century artists, there were series that riffed on my “Petting the Time Shark” and “Defacing the Moon” poems from early on in my poetry-writing career, a trilogy of “Midnight Rendezvous” poems, a lot of concrete poems that, really, were inspired by the Alfred Bester-esque way Harlan Ellison played with text on the page in some of his stories. My poem “Phase Shift,” which is half upside down, is a direct reaction to “Theory of Tension” from Mind Fields, Ellison’s collaboration with artist Jacek Yerka.

My friend and colleague Nicole Kornher-Stace once challenged me to write stories the way I wrote poetry, and the result was “Twa Sisters” (collected in The Spider Tapestries) an ekphrastic short story full of concrete poetry tricks like two or three vertical columns on a page indicating simultaneous actions from multiple points of view. I’m really proud of that story — Nicole’s point generally though was that I was demonstrating a fluidity with poetry that wasn’t always evident in my prose. Now it’s skewed the other way.

And I’m creating several series of short stories — I don’t always plan installments in advance, but more and more of my tales are connecting as I spy opportunities to tie together unexpected threads. There’s a map I made that shows how all the published pieces (or in the case of my novel Trail of Shadows, soon-to-be-published pieces) connect.

I don’t think at the moment I have the discipline (or the spare time!) to generate the tons and tons of background notes involved in world building, but a sort of world building is happening nonetheless, the way globs of quicksilver randomly clump together to form an advanced model of Terminator.

How does your work as an editor differ from what you like to write? Do you think there are reasons for those differences?

It amazes me still: My tastes when selecting poetry and fiction to include in projects like Clockwork Phoenix and Mythic Delirium run in distinctly different directions from the subject matter I choose to tackle as a writer.

This might seem a little dotty, but I genuinely believe that the name I picked for the publishing portion of my side hustle, Mythic Delirium, had some effect on how my preferences as an editor grew. I brainstormed the name while I was still a student at Virginia Tech, and at that age I thought of it as both a term that suggested a wide tent under which all sorts of surprising genre combinations might reside, and as an excuse to create a cool logo to adorn a magazine cover. (Prime example, the logo that artist Tim Mullins came up with in 2000 and refined in 2009, and that we still use, even though the zine closed in 2018.) Shepherding a publication with the word “mythic” in the title steered us in a direction of mythic content, I am sure of it.

I didn’t daydream of editing as a youth and the notion that this was something I had a talent for never occurred to me until I tried it and didn’t fall flat on my face. (The story behind that first anthology I put out in 1995, New Dominions: Fantasy Stories by Virginia Writers, is a wild one, and too complicated to go into for this occasion. I did talk about it in the interview I gave Locus in 2017, if you’re super-curious.) As a result, I think it’s fair to claim that my skills and interests as an editor evolved as their own separate thing, independent of my interests as a writer, which are more closely related to my formative interests as a casual reader.

The way I read as an editor is rather unlike how I read for fun. (Of course, what I find fun isn’t particularly typical, either.) I want as an editor to be genuinely surprised, to finish a piece feeling that I have never ever read anything quite like that before. The title I came up with for the anthology series I’m most associated with, Clockwork Phoenix, is meant to evoke unclassifiability and even impossibility, a creature of a nature so contradictory it cannot exist, yet somehow on the page it does.

Thus, as a writer, I gravitate toward generating my own personal versions/visions of The Books of Blood, Angry Candy or Grimscribe: His Lives and Works — but as an editor, an occupation that sprouts from a different era of my creative life, I want the poetic, the mind-bending, the beautiful, the genre-blending, and though I won’t shy away from darkness I also snatch up helpings of the joyful and the just plain (or very not plain) strange, because I want to shape a well-balanced experience, thought-provoking, exuberant.

As a writer, I want to tip readers into the abyss. At least most of the time.

On to the end of the interview

 

Posted in 30th anniversary interview, Clockwork Phoenix, Editing, Fiction, Interviews, Mythic Delirium, Novels, Poetry, Short stories, Writing

Six dark fantasy and horror titles
discounted to 99¢
for an early Halloween start

See a map of how my stories and upcoming novel connect

Read the beginning of my 30th anniversary interview

How do you feel about the way your poetry was distributed versus your prose?

Humans plan, gods chuckle. In this particular channel, the way this principle applied had to do with how I imagined my career would go vs. how it really went down. I had an early burst of short story sales, but my writing skills didn’t yet match my ambition, and further sales of stories came few and far between.

However, the poems I was writing at the same time started to find homes with greater and greater frequency, and that encouraged me to crank out even more poems. Ten years on, only a handful of my stories had seen print, but I’d had dozens of poems published, including years of repeated contributions to the respected small press journal Tales of the Unanticipated. Quite a few of those TOTU pieces were intensely experimental. I loved the freedom poetry gave me in that regard.

2002 saw my earliest appearances in Strange Horizons. That’s also the year a quirky online outlet called EOTU Ezine published “Epochs in Exile: A Fantasy Trilogy,” a genre-blurring piece about aliens and dragons that I co-wrote with fellow Roanoke author Charles M. Saplak. The next year “Epochs” ended up winning my first Rhysling Award — tied for first place in the Science Fiction Poetry Association voting, in fact, with “Matlacihuatl’s Gift” by my longtime friend and colleague Sonya Taaffe.

Not to mention, my poetry-only DIY zine Mythic Delirium had after a mere two issues been added to the DNA Publications stable of magazines, which meant it was suddenly a sister publication to the likes of Aboriginal SF, Absolute Magnitude and Weird Tales. Mythic Delirium did not get national newsstand distribution — boy, would that have been impractical — but large ads for it appeared in magazines that did!

I noticed people in the speculative fiction field referring to me as a poet, and even discussing my work on occasion. It was never my intention to only be a poet, but I think it was only natural that I leaned into what was working.

Growing up in Appalachia, making those solo reading explorations absent any interaction with sf fandom, I got the impression that poetry and fiction walked hand in hand in the speculative field. Reading essays about J.R.R. Tolkien led me to T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” — not to mention, Tolkien himself published a poetry collection. Poetry appeared (and still appears!) regularly in Asimov’s Science Fiction, to which I subscribed as a teen.

It wasn’t until I started interacting with a much broader swath of the genre community that I met fans, authors and even editors who reacted to discussions of “science fiction poetry” the way those comically wrong characters in the Reese’s Cup commercials exclaim in horror at the thought of blending peanut butter and chocolate. Really, it was one rude awakening among many — the belief I had that people who enjoyed such inspirational, aspirational literature would embody those qualities themselves, that bubble got popped over and over again; I mean, many definitely do, but hardly all. More specifically, much closer to the heart and art, I often found myself having to defend my choice to write the kind of poetry I did after years of just presuming most all genre authors wrote the stuff. This played a large hand in my volunteer work for the Science Fiction Poetry Association; there’s an upcoming question about that, so I’ll save further elaboration for then.

Let me skip ahead and say that I think nowadays the field is even more filled with writers who tackle novel series and 14-line poems with the same enthusiasm and editors who appreciate writing as a creative expression that takes many equally valid forms.

I never stopped trying my hand at fiction, and I think one of the interesting ironies involved in accomplishing something with poetry that approximated “success” is that I had to accept I was pouring my best creative energy into a show that would always have a small audience. I didn’t stop writing, editing and publishing poetry, but I pushed harder at fiction editing and fiction writing.

Nothing came easily. I wouldn’t say anything happened along the lines of a breakthrough — but more of my stories found homes, and one of them, my 2007 horror tale “The Button Bin,” made the Nebula Award shortlist. Honestly, being a Nebula finalist didn’t throw any doors wide open for me, but I got first hand experience at playing to a much larger audience, and that at least encouraged me to keep going.

By 2012 a number of events professional and personal had conspired to dull my interest in both the genre poetry scene and the writing of poetry. I wrote a poem called “Hungry Constellations” that I intended essentially as my swan song to that phase of my writing life; it was kind of every theme I had ever tackled, wrapped up into one. That became the title poem of my final large-scale poetry collection, so far the only one that you can buy in an e-edition (and part of the 30th Anniversary Sale!). Dominik Parisien edited Hungry Constellations and did a great job assembling an overview of the wild stuff I got up to as a poet.

A couple years after that, the relative obscurity of my short fiction paid off on a scale I never would or could have believed, as a new slew of readers “discovered” me even though I’d been around for nearly a quarter century.

Right book, right cover, right endorsements, right timing: my debut horror collection Unseaming (which kicks off with “The Button Bin”) sold thousands of copies, landed on the Shirley Jackson Award shortlist and strongly hinted to me what the way forward should be.

(I suppose it’s worth noting here that since 1998 I’ve been employed as a newspaper journalist. I keep high walls of church and state separation between my side hustles and my day job. Because of that, folks who hear me talk about my years writing poetry and fiction wouldn’t necessarily know that my career as a journalist has all along been happening simultaneously; I’ve written thousands of news stories, feature stories, columns and editorials. Every once in a while the streams cross, but for the most part I make sure the twain don’t meet.)

Nowadays, thirty years on, the poles have reversed. Most of my creative work that makes it into print is short fiction, with poems few and rare.

Yet poetry hasn’t left the building. My most recent collection, Aftermath of an Industrial Accident (which I think of as the follow-up to Unseaming) mixed a few poems in with the stories. Aftermath kind of got obscured by the COVID-19 pandemic, so I feel like a lot of people aren’t aware of its existence — but it also landed on the 2020 Shirley Jackson Award shortlist, which completely bowled me over. It also made the Locus Magazine Recommended Reading List, a first for me as a writer after all this time.

While Sonya Taaffe was poetry editor at The Deadlands, she reached out to me to see if I could come up with something, and for a brief time I found that headspace that I was working in back in the mid-to-late ’00s, when I wrote poems like “Picasso’s Rapture,” “The Strip Search,” “The Journey to Kailash” and “Machine Guns Loaded with Pomegranate Seeds.” The result was “Astynome, After.” So my poetry bug, though mostly dormant, still lives.

At Readercon about four years ago, multiple Hugo nominee Yoon Ha Lee caught me in the hall and told me that my Weird sci-fi poem “Metarebellion” from back in 2002 had a huge impact on him when he read it. Needless to say, that disclosure meant quite a lot to me!

On to Part Three

 

Posted in 30th anniversary interview, Fiction, Interviews, Novels, Poetry, Short stories, Writing

1992 was the year I graduated from Virginia Tech, and also the year Anita and I got married. We celebrated that anniversary with a two-part adventure; the first part took us on an artists’ retreat by beautiful Burke’s Garden in Tazewell County, Virginia; the second part saw us in Pennsylvania, visiting the Mutter Museum, witnessing the Philadelphia performance of Rammstein’s Stadium Tour, and making music of sorts at Ringing Rocks Park.

That anniversary, however, is not the one I’m celebrating here on my long-time, often-neglected homepage. That same summer of ’92, my first published short story appeared in a small press magazine — and from there began a long and strange career.

I wanted to celebrate 30 years of this life in some way; at first I contemplated a reading but the logistics were daunting and any announcement seemed like it would be easy to miss in the continuing climate of alarming news and social media chaos. I settled on something more permanent and in a way more casual — but even this I could not have pulled off without considerable help. My thanks to Sydney Macias, Assistant Editor for Mythic Delirium Books, who came up with questions that could guide my ramblings as I went on a lengthy, multipart look back. My thanks too for the especially fun contributions from Cassandra Khaw, Carlos Hernandez and C. S. E. Cooney, who fed words and characters of mine from more than twenty years worth of short stories into Midjourney and provided me with inspiring results that could serve as illustrations for my odyssey.

It made sense to me as well to make the fruit of this thirty-year labor available cheap with an early Halloween discount:

Dark Fantasy and Horror E-books: 99¢ Discount Sale!

 

Amazon Amazon AU Amazon CA Amazon DE Amazon FR Amazon UK Nook iBooks Kobo Google Play	Amazon Amazon AU Amazon CA Amazon DE Amazon FR Amazon UK Nook iBooks Kobo Google Play	Amazon Amazon AU Amazon CA Amazon DE Amazon FR Amazon UK Nook iBooks Kobo Google Play
Amazon Amazon AU Amazon CA Amazon DE Amazon FR Amazon UK Nook iBooks Kobo Google Play	Amazon Amazon AU Amazon CA Amazon DE Amazon FR Amazon UK Nook iBooks Kobo Google Play	Amazon Amazon AU Amazon CA Amazon DE Amazon FR Amazon UK Nook iBooks Kobo Google Play

A Map of How My Stories Connect

 

… and what books they appear in.
Added note: “The Comforter” appears in the anthology A Sinister Quartet

The 30th Anniversary Interview: Part One

How has your writing changed between the start of your career and now?

I think back on the version of me that existed in 1990, 91, 92, meandering toward the end of my days as an undergraduate, starting to get somewhat serious about submitting stories and poems to magazines, and the preconceptions I had then about how writing worked, how publishing worked, how readers chose what they want to read, and I can’t help but think that every single one of those preconceptions has proven wrong in some way.

That’s not so surprising. In those pre-household internet, pre-social media days, growing up in Appalachia, I didn’t meet anyone who shared my particular set of interests in significant numbers until late high school and college, and even then my specific set of eccentricities made me the square peg — though I note with tongue-in-cheek that I was more like a multi-pointed star of some sort, really, when it came to fitting in. Certainly I had no one to compare notes to when it came to getting published.

I did receive some vital encouragement from my creative writing professors at Virginia Tech, Ed Falco and Lucinda Roy — especially Falco. Though I was just one of many hundreds of their students over the years, those interactions meant a lot when it came to focusing my resolve, as I didn’t start college thinking of writing as a lifestyle choice.

I also honed storytelling skills running a four-year long Dungeons and Dragons campaign, that served as the locus of my social life, and ended on the final day of my senior year. One of the consequences of my increasing need to devote spare time to straight up writing is that gaming fell by the wayside. Back then, who would have thought?

From one angle, it was a small miracle that I made that first short story sale right as I graduated. (Hokie Class of ’92!) And yet, if I’m being honest, I think that, viewed from an angle of quality, those very first small press, pay-in-copy short story sales that I pulled off thirty years ago happened before they should have. (My first monetary payment happened two years later: $10 for a two-line poem, ha ha!) I sold those stories during the desktop publishing revolution that enabled a proliferation of zines of all kinds, creating a proving ground for aspiring writers — since essentially anyone with access to the right software and a sturdy laser printer could become an editor and publisher. I mean no disparagement by that; after all, that’s how my own path to being and editor and publisher eventually materialized.

But, were I to receive any of those stories in my inbox today as a submission to an anthology, I’d reject them without thinking too hard about it. They have imaginative moments but they’re pretty disheveled in the prose and plot departments.

What those early successes did do was encourage me to keep trying in the face of many subsequent rejections, and gradually, with practice, get better. I sometimes fret as to whether writers getting started in the 2020s have any equivalent environment for joining the game at the entry level, at least when it comes to over-the-transom encouragement to refine one’s craft. I’m aware that there are all sorts of information and support networks available for writers that weren’t so easy to find thirty years ago, but networking doesn’t help everyone equally.

Those early successes also set me up for a bit of a humbling once I enrolled in the M.A. in Creative Writing program at Hollins College (soon to become Hollins University). Here’s a thing you should never do: submit your already-published work to your critique group, thinking this will result in a round of admiring comments. Nope! I got to hear all about the story’s flaws. That brief embarrassment turned into a vital lesson that I had more work to do.

At the very end of my year at Hollins, I wrote the beginning of a novelette that would prove — five years later! — to be my first professional fiction sale (at least as some define professional). For the record, it was “Stolen Souls,” which you can read nowadays as its own e-book or as part of The Spider Tapestries.

I learned that above all else, the key to pursuing writing as any sort of career or side hustle has to be perseverance. Don’t bank all your hopes on any one piece. Keep trying. Seek out feedback, and use what feels right for what your creation needs. Accept that every draft has room for improvement, and learn how to make those improvements. Being a writer requires holding two thoughts in one’s head essentially simultaneously, that the things you create are amazing and deserve to be showcased, and that the things you create are raw clay that require extensive refinement.

I suppose the main difference between my writing then and now comes with all the accumulated lessons in between. The inspirations still spark from more or less the same places: hallucinatory art, heavy metal music, dreams, disturbing life experiences.

Continued in Part Two

 

Posted in 30th anniversary interview, Fiction, Interviews, Novels, Poetry, Signal boosts, Writing

We live in an era of time distortion.

Mostly it’s a bloody distressing state, but occasionally there’s a boon — such as this wonderful and unexpected opportunity to congratulate A Sinister Quartet contributor Jessica P. Wick, whose debut novella “An Unkindness” has been selected for inclusion in the latest volume of editor Rich Horton’s Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy series, slated for publication later this year.

How is that a time distortion? Well, not that anyone can keep track of when things happened in our endless Groundhog Day reliving of 2020, but A Sinister Quartet actually was published in 2020 (in fact the second anniversary of the book’s release just slipped by) and the latest edition of Horton’s “Best of” series is in fact the 2021 Edition, delayed by pandemic and economic shenanigans.

All the same, we’re delighted for Jess, and thrilled that this honor befalls our strange and beautiful anthology. A Sinister Quartet is a curious hybrid even by our standards, half fantasy with degrees of dark shading, half horror with a fairy tale tint. “An Unkindness” explicitly ventures in to the realm of princesses and fae queens, but contains scenes as twisted and intense as any horror tale worth its salt.

Just as arresting as the marvels and terrors of the fairy realms as Jess imagines it is the droll voice of our haunted narrator, Princess Ravenna:

The only person who has never pointed out how ridiculous my dread of ravens—and by that reckoning, how ha ha amusing—is my older brother, Aliver. Even friends are ghoulishly eager to explain that not only is it impossible for a ‘mere bird’ to do me injury, but that one lives in my name. This is the last thing I wish to be told, excepting perhaps ‘here is a raven to keep as a pet, look he likes you.’ The words ‘mere bird’ are spoken by those who have never gone hawking or seen crows mob a larger predator or spent any time observing nature at all, and I have received far more raven-themed gifts than anyone, whether their name is Ravenna or not, should be forced to put up with.

If pushed to give a cause for my fear beyond ‘ravens are scary,’ I might mention a terrifying unkindness—was ever a collective noun so apt?—of raven puppets I was given when I was still a child. Each raven was meant to represent a different kind of person I might become in the future, outfitted according to their prophetic narrative. Those puppets lurked in a dark clot above my wardrobe until the nightmares grew so sharp my nurse removed them.

We’re proud to see “An Unkindness” join the ranks of the many stories and poems we’ve published over the years that have become award finalists or winners and selected for Year’s Best showcases — that even though Mythic Delirium is teeny tiny, we remain mighty.

Fortuitously, if you haven’t read “An Unkindness” yet, the e-book edition of A Sinister Quartet happens to be on sale for 99 cents as a part of our promotion of C. S. E. Cooney’s new short fiction collection Dark Breakers. That promotion will last at least through the end of this week, so don’t let it pass you by.

See the deal on A Sinister Quartet e-books

Ebook: Amazon | Amazon UK | Amazon CA | Amazon FR | Amazon DE | Amazon AU | Kobo | iBooks | Nook | Google Play
 

Paperback: Amazon | Amazon UK | Amazon CA | Amazon DE | Amazon FR | Barnes & Noble | Indiebound | Bookshop

Cross-posted from Mythic Delirium Books

Posted in Awards, Editing, Fiction, Mythic Delirium, Short stories, Stage

Day job demands have slowed us down here at Mythic Delirium Books — more specifically, they’ve slowed me down — but that doesn’t mean the machinery is idling.

Here’s a bit of proof: we’re delight to announce the acquisition of The Collected Enchantments, a major new tome from Theodora Goss that features selections from her previous collections (In the Forest of Forgetting, Songs for Ophelia, Snow White Learns Witchcraft, all available from Mythic Delirium) as well as previously uncollected works and original stories and poems. It’s about 170,000 words of wonder from the author of The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter!

Check out the stunning cover art from Catrin Welz-Stein:

Here’s a few more details about what The Collected Enchantments holds within its pages:

A wicked stepsister frets over all the ways in which she failed to receive her mother’s love. A lost woman travels through an enchanted forest looking for someone who can remind her of her name. A girl must wear down seven pairs of shoes to gain help from a witch. A fox makes a life with a human, but neither can deny their true natures. A young woman returns to her childhood home and the fantastic stories she left there. A man lets himself be taken prisoner by the Snow Queen to prove that the woman who loves him would walk barefoot through the ice to save him. Medusa cuts her hair for love.

The Collected Enchantments gathers retellings of folk and fairy tales in prose and verse from World Fantasy and Locus award-winning author Theodora Goss, creator of The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club series. Drawing from her Mythopoeic Award-nominated collections In the Forest of Forgetting and Songs for Ophelia and her Mythopoeic Award-winning tome Snow White Learns Witchcraft, and adding new and uncollected stories and poems, The Collected Enchantments provides a resounding demonstration of how, as Jo Walton writes, Goss provides “a vivid, authentic and important voice” that, in the words of Jane Yolen, “transposes, transforms, and transcends times, eras, and old tales with ease.”

We began the year with a notion to publish this volume in June, but those ambitions have proven over-ambitious, alas. This book is definitely coming! But too much is not yet ready. Once all the ingredients are assembled, we’ll announce the new schedule.

We are, however, accepting pre-orders for the e-book editions here on the site; that much as least we are ready to do. Stay tuned for more news about this exciting project.
 

Click here to pre-order the e-book.

 

Cross-posted from Mythic Delirium Books

Posted in Editing, Mythic Delirium, Signal boosts

In 2021, with the exception of a handful of poems (and more on that below) I was pretty dormant as a writer of published fiction (all the action was on the journalism side of my life, subject matter that I don’t discuss here — that’s a whole separate, compartmentalized thing, like church and state, or Matt Murdoch and Daredevil, or Hannibal Lecter pre-Silence of the Lambs.)

So it’s pretty wild to arrive in 2022 and have four new short stories published within three months.

Three of them I’ve made previous mention of. The very first week of January brought the publication of “Falling Is What It Loves” in issue #69 of Not One of Us. I wrote about that in more detail in this post. It’s a story that’s more personal to me than they normally are, but also features an alien that juggles its own multi-dimensional eyeballs.

Next up came the Plutonian Press anthology Pluto in Furs 2, which contains two new stories from me, “Abhors” and “This Rider of Fugitive Dawns.” (And also a story from my mentee Hysop Mulero, “This Is You On Lust.”) I’ve written about these tales before, too, but I did not yet have the book in hand. Now I do, and it is quite the beauty — you should get one, too! [Photos by Anita Allen]

And now, something completely new. I’m thrilled to share that Cosmic Horror Monthly is about to bring out another fresh-from-the-oven story from me, “Matres Lachrymarum.” I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity to work with zinemasters Charles Tyra and Carson Winter to aim this Lovecraftian nightmare your way. Thanks, too, to beta readers C.S.E. Cooney, Carlos Hernandez, Amanda McGee and Cathy Reniere, to Sonya Taaffe who helped me with the title, and to the members of the Virtual Gumbo Cafe who kept me company as I worked on the first draft.

“Matres Lachrymarum” is set in the same grim future as my story “Drift from the Windrows” that appeared in Tommorrow’s Cthulhu, Tales to Terrify and Aftermath of an Industrial Accident — circumstances have just, um, advanced a bit further down the road to hell, heh, heh. To anyone who might wonder whether the title is a Dario Argento reference, the answer is — kind of?

The April issue of Cosmic Horror Monthly is on its way to mailboxes right now. Look how beautiful! Here’s how you get one. [Images courtesy Cosmic Horror Monthly]

My creative output last year, at least the published creative output, amounted to three poems — and now two of them are nominated for the Rhysling Award! My thanks to the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association who found my poems “Astynome, After” and “Dispelling the Arcana” worthy of nomination, and my gratitude to editors Sonya Taaffe of The Deadlands and Henri Gendreau of The Roanoke Rambler for giving this works their original homes.

Their second home is pretty spiffy too. Take a look!

It occurred to me to investigate whether I now have enough uncollected stories to assemble a fourth collection and shockingly, the answer is, yes, barely. But I have no such plans just yet. Let’s see what the rest of 2022 brings.

Posted in Aftermath of an Industrial Accident, Awards, Poetry, Short stories, Writing

Dark Breakers by C. S. E. Cooney has been racking up rave reviews faster than we can keep track of them. (Admittedly, a new-ish day job has distracted me!) Here is a belated attempt to play catch up.

It’s been nice to see Mythic Delirium’s dark horse entry in the “hopepunk” genre catch on so beautifully. The responses have been not just laudatory, but stunningly eloquent.

By the way, in the interval, Cooney’s first major international publisher-released novel, Saint Death’s Daughter, appeared in bookstores physical and virtual. You need to check Dark Breakers out for sure, but you ought to check this other book too, really you should.

Now then, to the reviews!

☆ ★ ☾ ☼ ☽ ★ ☆

In Locus

There have now been two reviews in Locus Magazine, the industry journal for speculative fiction.

• In his last review as a short fiction columnist for Locus, published in February, Rich Horton gave Dark Breakers a look, and focused especially on the original novella “Salissay’s Laundries,” which he dubbed “lovely, extravagant, colorful, passionate – like all of Cooney’s work.” He also included “Salissay’s Laundries” on his monthly Recommended Reading list.

You can read that review here.

☆ ★ ☾ ☼ ☽ ★ ☆

• And then in the March issue, columnist Ian Mond reviewed Dark Breakers in its entirety, and in the course of a review full of superlatives also tossed in some retroactive additional love for “The Twice-Drowned Saint,” Cooney’s short novel included in our anthology A Sinister Quartet.

As I found with ‘‘The Twice Drowned Saint’’, it didn’t take long for me to be hooked by Cooney’s world-building: her Gilded Age secondary world and the mythology of three nested realities – human, fairy and goblin – cleaved apart by a centuries-old war … there’s Cooney’s magical ability at imbuing her worlds and characters with a life that goes beyond the page – a reminder that fiction is also a potent drug to us mortals.

Buy the whole issue to read the review — it doesn’t cost that much, there’s plenty more great stuff inside and Locus is absolutely worth supporting.

☆ ★ ☾ ☼ ☽ ★ ☆

Among the Book Bloggers

• Out in book blogger land, this amazing review: Siavahda of Every Book a Doorway felt the need to invent words to explain how much she loved Dark Breakers, because ordinary language just didn’t cut it.

This book is jewel-tones and gilt and bells of bone. This book is secrets and yearning, terror and triumph, wonder and wildness. This book is a whisper and a song and a howl. … Dark Breakers is beautiful beyond the power of words to describe, but even more incredible is what it does to you. Lighting you up inside, snatching your breath away, holding you hypnotised because it’s a reminder, a promise, a proof you can hold in your hands that the world is so, so far from grey. That it’s worth getting up in the mornings, darlings; it’s worth it to keep carrying on, because we have art and magic and wonder and books like this!

Read the full review here.

☆ ★ ☾ ☼ ☽ ★ ☆

• At Ancillary Review of Books, Jeremy Brett aka “SFF Librarian” shared a lovely review of his own that suggested a potential political appointment for the author:

There are few authors that merrily dance so close to the borders of Fairyland as C.S.E. Cooney. Should the mortal world ever establish diplomatic relations with the fae, Cooney, whose warm writing beautifully merges the otherworldliness and sheer strangeness of fairykind with the rich and familiar emotions of humanity, would make an excellent ambassador… for either side of the line.

Read the whole review here.

☆ ★ ☾ ☼ ☽ ★ ☆

• Reviewer Anthony Cardno gave Dark Breakers a 5 out of 5 rating in his own review that examines the books characters and craft:

These stories beautifully illustrate the overlapping layers of creativity, love, ambition, and self-identity that propel us as individuals and thus as a society. … You do not have to have read Cooney’s novella Desdemona and the Deep to enjoy these stories, but if you have (or when you do), you’ll pick out the connections easily enough. They all stand alone very well, and all feature Cooney’s trademark love of language. If you’re like me, you’ll be so invested in the stories that you won’t notice the amazing craftwork, but it will hit you afterward how amazing is Cooney’s knack for the right descriptive word in each moment.

Read the rest of his review here.

☆ ★ ☾ ☼ ☽ ★ ☆

• And neither last nor least, but the one we’ll happen to conclude with, from Kathryn Adams at Pixellated Geek:

Tasty as ice cream and as dizzying as an entire bottle of wine. … Cooney absolutely revels in her descriptions of a roomful of dancers in full costume, of gentry life, of high society, of the darkness in the cellar of a workhouse, of a quiet forest glade beside a cabin in the mountains. The gentry become drunk on human writing, human art, human mortality. Humans are dragged into the complicated politics of the gentry where rivals fight for the throne using sculptures and captive poets and venom. Cooney describes the paintings and mythology of this world in a way that you can almost touch and smell as well as see.

Read the full review here.

☆ ★ ☾ ☼ ☽ ★ ☆

If you want to touch and see a signed copy of Dark Breakers, well, there’s a deal for that….
 

Cross-posted from Mythic Delirium Books

Posted in Editing, Reviews, Signal boosts