Look Out For… Do You Like To Look At Monsters? by Scott Nicolay
“Nicolay’s stories build an atmosphere both of menace and ambiguity.”
The World Fantasy Award-nominated story by Scott Nicolay, previously only available as a limited-edition chapbook, Do You Like to Look at Monsters? showcases one of the most exciting and unusual new voices in horror fiction, Scott Nicolay. Also here is Scott’s manifesto, ‘Dogme 2011 for Weird Fiction’.
Why We’re Excited About This Book:
Those lucky souls who bought the super limited edition of Scott Nicolay’s debut collection Ana Kai Tangata will have already had the chance to read Do You Like to Look at Monsters? but the rest of us could only envy them… until now.
As anyone who has read Ana Kai Tangata will know, Nicolay is an exceptionally gifted writer of the weird whose stories build an atmosphere both of menace and ambiguity. (You can read This Is Horror’s review of Ana Kai Tangata here.) Do You Like to Look at Monsters? is told from the point of view of a child obsessed with his Viewmaster toy and what he sees in it… Seemingly evoking King’s The Sun Dog, this one promises to be another must read from Nicolay.
Also included is Nicolay’s manifesto for horror fiction, which is sure to provoke lively discussions if nothing else.
Do You Like to Look at Monsters? is out now from Word Hoard
Look Out For … Let Me Tell You by Shirley Jackson
“She wrote about the absurdities and pettiness of human behaviour, and understood such scenes could be funny or chilling.”
From the peerless author of ‘The Lottery’ and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, this is a spectacular new volume of unpublished and uncollected stories, essays, lectures, letters and drawings.
Let Me Tell You brings together the deliciously eerie short stories Jackson is best known for with frank and inspiring lectures on writing; comic essays she wrote about her large, rowdy family; and revelatory personal letters and drawings. Jackson’s landscape here is most frequently domestic – dinner parties, children’s games and neighbourly gossip–but one that is continually threatened and subverted in her unsettling, inimitable prose. This collection is the first opportunity to see Shirley Jackson’s radically different modes of writing side by side, revealing her to be a magnificent storyteller, a sharp, sly humourist and a powerful feminist.
Why We’re Excited About This Book:
Let Me Tell You aims to showcase the different sides of Shirley Jackson–undoubtedly one of the greatest horror writers of the Twentieth Century, but she also an astute humourist and recorder of domestic life. Yet even her scenes of children playing, middle-class dinner parties and lowly office work have something strange about them. She wasn’t a writer who needed the supernatural or the violent to write stories that seemed slightly skewed. She wrote about the absurdities and pettiness of human behaviour, and understood such scenes could be funny or chilling, or sometimes both at the same time.
Let Me Tell You is a new posthumous book of Jackson’s uncollected stories and essays, following on from similar posthumous collections Come Along With Me and Just An Ordinary Day. There’s always the risk that such a book as this will be a barrel scraping exercise in money making for the pubplisher, but early reviews have been good and suggest there are a number of new classics within its pages.
For devotees of Jackson, this will likely be the most exciting book of the year.
Let Me Tell You is released on 30th July 2015 from Penguin Classics.
JAMES EVERINGTON
