We are delighted to announce details for the launch of Chalk by Pat Cadigan. Taking place on Saturday 16 November from 6-8pm at The Big Green Bookshop, London, Pat will be joined by Robert Shearman, Barbie Wilde and everyone’s favourite horror host Jasper ‘Uncle Jasp’ Bark. This is a free event but it would be helpful if you could email Michael@ThisIsHorror.co.uk to book a place so we can confirm numbers and arrange seating accordingly.
As coincidence would have it the last time Pat Cadigan appeared at a This Is Horror event was exactly one year before this year’s event. On that occasion she was joined by Joseph D’Lacey, Jonathan Green and once again Jasper Bark.
Pat Cadigan, who recently won a Hugo Award for ‘The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi’, taken from Solaris’ Edge of Infinity anthology, explains the origins of Chalk:
This is one of my ‘autobiographical’ stories – not strictly autobiography in terms of story but it makes use of the neighbourhood where I grew up. I had to take liberties with the geography to make things come out right. But there’s also another element I made use of from my childhood – the fact that kids live secret lives that the adults
around them never suspect.Many people have heard the interview I did on NPR some years back about how my best friend Rosemarie and I had a whole fantasy universe laid out in which we were from Venus, were friendly with the Beatles and so forth. That really only scratched the surface. Rose and I frequently turned our neighbourhood into Somewhere Else, drawing on the road and sidewalks with chalk or, if we didn’t have any, the sharp edge of a stone. Sometimes covered a third of a block with detailed layouts of palaces, jungles, cities, alien lands. (Funny how little
kids never get back-ache bending over so much.)But this is a horror story. It goes wrong. And once that happens, it’s impossible to put it right again. There’s no way to reconcile the world we all live in with any other. One of them has to go.
Pat Cadigan won the Arthur C. Clarke Award twice for her novels Synners and Fools. She also won a Hugo for her story ‘The Girl-Thing Who Went Out For Sushi’, which appeared in Edge of Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Most often identified as one of the original cyberpunk writers – the Guardian called her The Queen of Cyberpunk – she has actually written fantasy, horror, young adult, and non-fiction. Born in New York, she grew up in Massachusetts but spent most of her adult life in the Kansas City area, where she worked for ten years at Hallmark Cards, Inc., writing greeting cards, often in perfect iambic pentameter. She now lives in gritty, urban north London with her husband, the Original Chris Fowler.
Robert Shearman is a British author and screenwriter. He is synonymous with the Doctor Who series. His other books include Tiny Deaths, Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical, Everyone’s Just So So Special and Remember Why You Fear Me. Some of his theatrical works include Dented Crowns, Couplings, Easy Laughter, Breaking Bread Together, White Lies, Fool to Yourself, Binary Dreamers, Mercy Killings, About Colin, Knights in Plastic Armour, Inappropriate Behaviour, and Shaw Cornered among many others. Robert Shearman attended Reigate Grammar School and the University of Exeter. His first collection of short stories titled Tiny Deaths was acknowledged as Best Collection at the annual World Fantasy Awards. His collection Remember Why You Fear Me was voted runner-up for Best Short Story Collection in the This Is Horror Awards 2012.
Barbie Wilde is best known as the Female Cenobite in Clive Barker’s classic cult horror movie Hellbound: Hellraiser II. She has performed in cabaret in Bangkok, Thailand, robotically danced in the Bollywood blockbuster, Janbazz, played a vicious mugger in the vigilante thriller Death Wish III, and appeared as a drummer for an electronica band in Grizzly II: The Predator.. Barbie was also a founding member of the mime/dance/music group, SHOCK in the 1980s. Barbie has had numerous short stories published and her debut dark crime novel, The Venus Complex, is out now and published by Comet Press.
MICHAEL WILSON
