Here’s a small selection of the horror and genre news that caught our eye during the last week …
Where We Live, a collection of twelve loosely connected short stories by Tim Cooke, out now from Demain Publishing
‘Where We Live’ is a collection of loosely connected short stories that track the same central character’s experience of some of the landscapes surrounding his family home. These landscapes contribute directly or metaphorically to the protagonist’s understanding of his place in the world. Tim Cooke is interested in what drives us to seek out these outshift and edgeland environments and how such landscapes can act upon us. He considers his work to fall into the emerging category of ‘landscape punk’, while some stories directly address themes consistent with works of ecogothic. The collection isn’t outright horror, he is subtle, atmospheric and at times, purposefully ambiguous and as such creates something quite unique… Released 4 September, you can pick up your copy right now, here.
Trickster’s Treats #4 – Coming, Buried or Not!, coming 26 September from Things in the Well
With all proceeds going to The Indigenous Literary Foundation, Trickster’s Treats #4 is the latest in the series of charitable anthologies, released by Steve Dillon’s Things in the Well, around halloween. Taking on the theme, ‘Coming, Buried or Not’ this time around, editors Louise Zedda-Sampson and Geneve Flynn present thirty-two collected poems and short stories to scare the wits out of you while also giving money to a great cause. Available for pre-order now, you can grab your copy right here.
Out now from Demain Publishing, The Fallen, by writer Anthony Watson
At its heart, The Fallen is a ‘creature feature’, where man is pitted against monster. It’s a homage to the films and books that have made an impression on author Anthony Watson and influenced his writing, and it wears those influences – in particular The Thing and Alien – proudly on its sleeve. As Anthony said: “On a deeper level I guess The Fallen is about the persistence of evil – the story itself spans centuries and presents the same supernatural foe in three different time periods. The Fallen describes the varying approaches mankind has taken to combat that evil: religion, military force and science and the varying success of those approaches. It’s about fate and friendship and what happens when the supernatural impinges on the real world at different stages of human history.” What Anthony is striving for is an epic adventure story; a narrative that will keep the reader entertained, creating thrilling set-pieces but populating them with real characters you care for…and boy, has he succeeded. Released 4 September, you can pick up your copy right now, here.
The Library of America presents The Shirley Jackson Collection
There’s no denying the vast influence of Shirley Jackson’s fiction on the world of horror and strange fiction. Over the years, The Library of America has collection Jackson’s novels and stories, and now they’re set to release what they’ve curated in one comprehensive box set. Collecting The Lottery; or, The Adventures of James Harris, The Haunting of Hill House, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and 11 uncollected/unpublished stories, as well as the novels from the 1940’s and 1950’s, The Road Through the Wall, Hangsaman, The Bird’s Nest, and The Sundial, these volumes mark the very best of Jackson’s fiction. A must have for even the casual collector, The Shirley Jackson Collection releases 20 October 2020 and can be pre-ordered here.
Meerkat Press set to release new paperback of Kathe Koja’s The Cipher
The novel that launched the career of Kathe Koja and introduced the world to cutting-edge horror, The Cipher, returns in a new paperback edition. Winner of the Bram Stoker and Locus Awards, finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award, the original Dell Abyss paperback has been long out of print, with copies fetching high prices from collectors. Meerkat Press aims to change that status with a new trade paperback, featuring a new afterword by Maryse Meijer (author of Heartbreaker and Rag). When they discover a strange hole in the floor of a storage room, Nicolas and his lover Nakota plunge the depths of curiosity, obsession, violence, and transformation as they experiment with “The Funhole”, as they come to call it. io9.com called The Cipher one of the “Top 10 Debut Science Fiction Novels That Took the World By Storm.” Releasing 15 September 2020, The Cipher by Kathe Koja is ready once again to usher in a new group of readers to the Funhole.
KEV HARRISON and BOB PASTORELLA
