New Books for 2019 and Other News

I have a lot planned for this coming year – 2019 is poised to be as busy as 2018 was.

First up – new books I’m working on.

I’m currently writing a Wraeththu novel called ‘Breathe, my Shadow’, which is based on ‘The Emptiness Next Door’ a short story I wrote for the ‘Paraspectral’ anthology last year. As can happen with a short, this piece wanted desperately to be longer. I had hoped to finish it in time for Yule 2018, but because I was so busy with other projects, I wasn’t able to meet that deadline. I’m not going to specify exactly when this year I hope to publish ‘Breathe’ but will get to work on it in earnest once I have a few important short stories out of the way. I’ve been researching a lot for this novel, some of which explores the lore of bees, honey and bee-keeping. This isn’t the main focus of the story but is still important as it’s an interest of one of the characters that has bearing on the plot.

Two of the stories I’m working on are for the next ‘Para’ anthology, which is ‘Para Mort’, a study of love and death in the world of Wraeththu. The idea for this theme grew from suggestions given to me by Mythos writers Martina Bellovičová and Maria Leel. I want to go for an outright Gothic feel for this one – doomed love, tragic desire and so on. I did specify in the brief I sent to the Mythos writers that the stories don’t have to be total downers – they can have upbeat endings. I’ve just finished the first draft of a tale called ‘The Shade of Q’orlenn’ but need to go back through it, adding in scene details and fleshing out some of the interactions between the characters. But that one’s almost there. I’ve a choice of two others to write for my second story for the anthology and haven’t yet made a decision about which to go with. The third piece I need to work on before turning to longer projects is my story for ‘Shadows on the Hillside’, the weird fiction anthology I’m editing for NewCon Press. I’ve an idea for that and have written a few pages. Research for this involves studying old maps and a particular kind of folklore, which I won’t reveal, as it would be a terrible spoiler for the story. I’ve also been looking into Middle English and the ancient meanings of some modern words.

One of the most interesting things I discovered yesterday is that English in the Middle Ages had a gender-neutral pronoun ‘hit’, but also that ‘he’ could be used instead. So I wasn’t so wrong about using ‘he’ for Wraeththu as some might claim! I’m not interested in the fuss around the politics of gender and pronouns, and in fact am uncomfortable with the way extremes of certain politics are infesting – and at worst stifling – creative media nowadays, but I am interested in presenting my androgynous characters as they are – beings who are both male and female, greater than the sum of their parts and endowed with faculties and abilities beyond human experience. I was writing about hara when I was a teenager, (and had met them in my imagination years prior to that), long before modern ideas about identity politics arose. I wrote from the heart, not trying to invest my fantasy world with any one agenda. Wraeththu are what they are – in the way they evolved in my imagination very early in my life. They owe more to mythology and folklore than anything else. And that’s the nearest I’ll get to talking about my personal opinions in a public place!

Anyway, back to book news after that little diversion. I aim to get ‘Para Mort’ out this year, probably with a Yule release and accompanying launch party, which is becoming traditional now. It’s down to whether the writers can get their work to me in time. I’ve already had one in from E. S. Wynn so maybe that will spur the others into action! ‘Shadows on the Hillside’ should also be released this year. I’m still waiting on a few stories to come in for that one.

I’ll also be working on a new non-fiction book this year. Around 15 years ago, I wrote a correspondence course on Egyptian Magic, back when people were more inclined to get involved in correspondence courses. Once this trend tailed off in favour of other forms of learning, the course gathered dust in isolated chambers on my computer. It was only when someone mailed me a couple of years ago to enquire whether that course was still available that it was brought once more to my attention. I didn’t feel I wanted to run the course again, as it requires quite a lot of input from me, discussing the work with students, and reading and responding in depth to their coursework, for which I no longer have time. I offered to let the person have the course as one PDF at a very cut price, for them to work through how they wanted, but I couldn’t act as mentor for it anymore. The person concerned was happy with this, so I transformed all the separate modules into one document to send to them. As I was doing this, I realised the modules could actually be a book. A lot of the material would have to go, because it wouldn’t be suitable for a non-interactive project, but I could add new chapters to replace what I’d take out.

I’m writing this book under the very unimaginative ‘Egyptian Magic’ working title, but intend to come up with something more colourful for the finished work. It won’t be a quick project by any means, as I’m having to change the entire structure and come up with a lot of new pathworkings for it. A proportion of what was in the correspondence course was based on material in ‘Bast and Sekhmet: Eyes of Ra’ which I co-wrote with Louise Coquio in the late 90s. I don’t want to rehash that, or just focus upon feline deities, so there’s a lot to be written for it. At the moment, I’m looking into the creation myths of Ancient Egypt, and creating workings based upon them. That will be the starting point of the work, after an introductory section discussing the beliefs and practices of the Egyptians and how we can reinterpret them for a modern practice of magic. Again, I intend to get the book out this year, but as with the novel it depends on how much time I get to finish it.

Moving on from my own work, there are plans for several books by other writers. Since Taylor Ellwood parted company with the Megalithica Books imprint, releases have inevitably slowed down somewhat for this list. Even last year, when Taylor was still with us, Megalithica Books published only three titles that weren’t co-written by me. I do have books in the pipeline for the list, but in three cases am waiting for news from the respective writers with whom I’ve been talking over the past couple of months. I can say for definite that we’ll have a new book from Cornelia Benavidez, expanding her work on the legacy of Victor H Anderson, and there’s an exciting re-issue of a legendary work that’s currently in production. Only the fact that a contract with an individual connected with the original work has to be sorted out prevents me from talking more about this book. Sometimes, after a lengthy period of time, it’s difficult for people to get back in touch with those they might have worked with in the past. This is in the case in this situation but as soon as it’s OK to talk about this project the author and I will do so wholeheartedly!

On the fiction side, I’ll be publishing a book I’m delighted to have edited. This is ‘Lord of the Looking Glass’, the short stories of Fiona McGavin. Louise Coquio and I met Fiona way back when we were producing the magazine Visionary Tongue. Fiona provided two stories for us and another one for Jamie Spracklen when he took over custodianship of the magazine. Lou and I both loved Fiona’s stories – they were among the best we received. Later, once I started Immanion Press, I brought out the trilogy ‘A Dream and a Lie’ by Fiona, her first full-length works. In hindsight, I wish I’d published this book some years later, after I’d gained more experience as an editor and publisher. Fiona’s were among the first novels Immanion Press published. I’d do things a bit differently now, as I know more about what I’m doing!  It was only when I had to contact Fiona again concerning two of her stories, which I wanted to reprint in the Visionary Tongue anthology I edited for NewCon Press, that I asked whether she had enough stories for a book of her own. She did, and ‘Lord of the Looking Glass’ is the result. These are astounding stories. Fiona, like Tanith Lee, has the gift for taking genre tropes and turning them on their heads. She has a wonderful imagination. I never thought a zombie story could bring tears to my eyes – but ‘The Contraption’ did. Fiona tackles vampires, fairy abduction, ghosts, fairy tales, alternate realities, science fiction and post-apocalyptic worlds, but all in a way you won’t have read before and in a fluid, lyrical style.  I’m happy to report that her story ‘A Tale from the End of the World’ is included in an updated form, (it was always my favourite) as well as a sequel to it, ‘He May Grow Roots’. Fiona has intimated she might write a full-length novel set in the world of these two stories, which I really hope she does. I can’t wait to release ‘Lord of the Looking Glass’ – which should be in late spring – and ask any of you with genre blogs or review sites to help me get Fiona’s work out there. She is a marvellous writer and her work should be better known.  I hope to plan a kind of blog tour for her and am happy to send advance copies of the book’s PDF for review. Please mail me at editorial(at)Immanion-press(dot)com if you’re interested.

Other new fiction publications for 2019 include three more anthologies of Tanith Lee’s stories, which focus upon her uncollected works – stories that appeared briefly in magazines or on web sites and have not yet been included in a printed book. The first of these, ‘Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata and Other Tales’, is scheduled to appear in April, so that Tanith’s husband John Kaiine can promote it at this year’s Eastercon. John will also be creating the cover art for the book. For the majority of readers, most of these stories might as well be newly-written as they won’t have been seen before. Much thanks must go, as has become usual for Tanith collections, to Allison Rich, Tanith’s bibliographer, and also to Jeremy Brett and his staff at the Cushing Library and Archives in Texas, who will provide scans of these often difficult to source stories.

That’s about it for news now. The DVD of the film of one my favourite novels, The Little Stranger, is due to arrive today and tonight I intend to watch it with Lou and our respective males. I saw this at the cinema initially and was impressed with what the director did with it. It’s not very often adaptations are so satisfying!

 

 

 

The Weird Draws Near

Summer is virtually here already, but at least most of my plans this year have worked out. A couple of projects have slid into the cupboard under the stairs, but at least one of those is due to be hoiked out and dusted down very shortly.

I’m putting the finishing touches to the ‘Dark in the Day’ weird fiction anthology, which I’m co-editing with Paul Houghton, the Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Staffs University. The book will include the work of several students at the university – both past and present – as well as stories by established writers, and maybe (still not quite decided on this), one or two authors from the early 20^th century, whose work is now public domain. The main problem with the latter idea is that the work of dead writers Paul and I would most like to include – Robert Aickman, Oliver Onions and Algernon Blackwood among them – is still very much tied up in copyright, mostly with agents and estates (rather than actual relatives), who demand high sums for reprinting. This is beyond our means. There is other writers’ work available to us, but these wouldn’t be our first choices. But anyway, we do have some great stories from current writers, a few of whom have donated previously unpublished works. I’m also really pleased that John Kaiine, Tanith Lee’s husband, has allowed me to print one of her stories in the collection – as far we know, this has not been published before. Other new stories are from Rosie Garland, Elizabeth Counihan and – me.

I didn’t intend to write something new for this book as I’m so busy, and thought my piece ‘At the Sign of the Leering Angel’ would be a fair example of a weird tale to include in the anthology – it has previously only been published in ‘Dark Discoveries’, a magazine in the States. However, one night in bed last week, while I was reading the ghost (and weird) stories of Edith Wharton before going to sleep, one line from ‘The Looking Glass’ stuck in my mind. From that, a whole story grew. I wrote it in two sessions a couple of days later. The line was ‘…like a guide leading a stranger through the gallery of a palace in the twilight, and now and then lifting a lamp to a shimmering Rembrandt or a jewelled Rubens…’ An image came to me entire of a secret gallery of unsettling works… the story grew swiftly from there.

At the time, I was – and still am – working on a science fiction story for an anthology to which I’ve been asked to contribute. I was keen to get this piece finished last week, as I want to return to ‘Blood, The Phoenix and a Rose’ (my next full length work). But because ‘The Secret Gallery’ made its presence felt so strongly, I had to write it without delay. As a tribute to Ms Wharton, one of the paintings in the gallery is named ‘The Looking Glass.’

This story was also influenced from another direction, or rather the influence insisted to be included whether I wanted it or not. A few weeks ago, I saw the film XXY on DVD, a story about an intersex teenager growing up in an isolated community in Uruguay. The film had a beguiling, fairy-tale ambience, (not least that the family name is Kraken, a mythical sea-monster), and I loved the main character, played by a young female actress, who captured perfectly a shifting ambience of gender. I felt that this character, who might or might not have sharply-honed senses, if not a degree of psychism, would surely go on to have a life of strange and wondrous adventures. She is named – appropriately androgynously – Alex, and my character in ‘The Secret Gallery’ also has this name. The Alex of the film haunted this story. When I’d finished writing and was re-reading the piece, I thought ‘it’s clear now my character is that Alex, who she grew up to be.’ The gallery itself, unintentionally on my part, seems to mirror the protagonist’s life. But then, I suspect, that gallery mirrors the life of any who find their way to its hidden gate.

The weird anthology’s cover will feature a photograph by author Michael Marshall Smith. I always enjoy seeing the strange and haunting photos he posts on Facebook, so asked him if he’d mind if I used one as cover art for this book. Happily, he said yes. The book should be out in the early autumn.

Taylor Ellwood and I have finished writing ‘Grimoire Dehara: Ulani’ and are now only waiting for the final few pictures from Ruby to go in the book. I envisage this title will be out in July at the latest. We’ll then start work on the final book in the series, ‘Grimoire Dehara: Nahir Nuri’, rather than wait another ten years to do the next one – as happened with the first book! ‘Grimoire Dehara: Ulani’ will be published through Megalithica Books, as part of our non-fiction list, as it’s a pop culture magical system based on the magic in the Wraeththu books.

‘Blood, the Phoenix and a Rose’, my three linked Wraeththu novellas have been left alone for a few weeks while I completed the grimoire and worked on short stories, and the editing for ‘Dark in the Day’. However, if all goes well, and I get my science fiction piece finished before Tuesday, (writer meeting that night, so I want to take it with me), I’ll get back to the novellas later in the week. Two of them are written, although need a little work, and I have the idea worked out for the third. I hope to get this book out later in the year, if I don’t get too distracted by other tasks.

I noticed in the ‘Blog Post’ folder, when I was creating a Word document for this post, that my post from June 2015 was about ‘The Shadowbirds’, a novel that was a follow-up to ‘The Moonshawl’. I can’t believe a year has passed since I first thought about that book. I’d begun writing it, too, but then ideas for the current project elbowed it out of the way, and I had to run with that as it was demanding to be written! However, I do still intend to return to ‘The Shadowbirds’ at some point.

Early in my career, I managed to write one novel a year – and this was when I had a day job too – but as time passed, and work for Immanion Press increased, it’s been difficult for me to produce novels so regularly. I’ve also upped my output for short stories, as this is a good way to get your work better known out there in the world. Plus, I enjoy writing them.

My ‘Through the Night Gardens’ project has been put on hold too, and part of the reason for that is I’m not as happy as I used to be in the game Rift, in which I’m creating landscapes to go with the story. The world of Rift is still enchanting to me, but I’m not enchanted by the way the developers now treat their customers and seek to milk relentlessly people who enjoy creating dimensions (the landscapes) in that game. I forgave a lot, but when it got to the point where new art assets were concealed within ‘gambling bags’ you had to buy with real money – and then not be guaranteed contents you’d want or could use – my dissatisfaction spilled over into actual resentment. I understand parting with cash is part of the deal. Rift is free to play, (although I do have a patron subscription to help support it), and needs income to survive. I shelled out quite a lot at the start of my project to fund it, but I prefer to spend my money on what I want and need, not be cheated by randomness, the dreaded RNG of all MMOs. I don’t think that belongs in an activity like dimension-building. I hate leaving projects half finished, especially as I’ve created a special blog for ‘Night Gardens’ and made a fanfare about this transmedia endeavour, so I expect I will return to it at some point, but I can’t escape the fact the experience has been soured for me. This, coupled with all the other work I’m doing, means ‘Night Gardens’ got pushed further back in the queue.

That’s it for current work news – more when I know it. I do want to put down my thoughts about the Warcraft movie, but will save this for a WoW blog post (The Necklace of Evil Faces) – I’ve neglected that blog for a while.

February News

I’ve been extremely busy since the New Year, working on several projects at once, so here’s a run down of what’s in the pipeline

‘Splinters of Truth’, my new short story collection being published by NewCon Press, will be released at Easter, with an official launch at Mancunicon, this year’s Eastercon. I’ve been working on final bits and pieces for the collection, but now all tweaks have been made and it’s done.  Here’s a preview of the fabulous cover art by Danielle Lainton. There are three ghosts hidden in the picture – two of them on the back, so not visible in this preview. (One might only become apparent from reading one of the stories.)

I’ve also been working on stories for my forthcoming Wraeththu collection ‘Blood, the Phoenix and a Rose’, which will have cover art by Ruby. I wanted to collect all my published Wraeththu stories together in one collection, and the book will also include some completely new tales, as well as illustrations. I finished working on the story ‘Song of the Cannibals’ during January, which turned out to be quite long at 40 or so A4 pages. This piece involves new characters not seen before, but is set in the familiar territory of Ferelithia. I have some half-finished stories on my computer, some dating back to when I was writing the first Wraeththu trilogy. I intend to use a couple of these for the new book too – rewriting the starts and finishing them.  In addition, I’m mulling over what pieces of my Wraeththu juvenilia to include. I want to show how the stories began when I was in my teens, but the pieces are long, and somewhat rambling, as well as being the product of a fledgling writer. Perhaps some excerpts can be included.

‘Para Animalia’, the new Wraeththu Mythos shared world anthology is now almost ready for publication and will be released in March, with a cover by Ruby. I’m creating some illustrations for the book, which will take a week or so more to complete. The lineup is:

Beneath My Skin a Vein of You – Storm Constantine

The Bird Har – Wendy Darling

Running Under a Cold Moon – Nerine Dorman

Heart Howl – E. S. Wynn

Liminality – Amanda Kears

Eight Legs – Daniela Ritter

Dream Dragon – Maria J. Leel

Medium Brown Dog – Fiona Lane

Wolf in Wolf’s Clothing – Wendy Darling

Harbinger – Nerine Dorman

Clouds Like Hair – Storm Constantine

Plus a story due in this week from Martina Bellovičová (don’t have the title yet)

I’m continuing to work on my transmedia projects ‘Through the Night Gardens’, and chapter 2 ‘Deepmoss Pile’ is now available to read for free at https://throughthenightgardens.wordpress.com/

I intend to publish the first six chapters or so of this story online, complete with accompanying landscapes that I created in the video game Rift, using their ‘dimension building’ feature. Eventually, I’ll add other subplots to the story and turn it into a full length novel.

I’m still aiming to post a new chapter every month, but as January was so hideously busy and I didn’t get time to finish Chapter Two until this week, I’m being more cautious about it now. It might be over a month sometimes, depending on what other work I have on.

I’m also working on ‘Grimoire Dehara: Ulani’ with Taylor Ellwood, as it’s been over a decade since the first volume ‘Grimoire Dehara: Kaimana’ appeared. This is a pop culture system of magic, based on the Wraeththu books. I can’t believe so much time has passed since the first volume, when I fully intended to get do the whole system in about five years at most. Still, Taylor and I are now committed to getting both Ulani and Nahir Nuri out over the next year or so. I envisage Ulani will be ready by the end of the summer/autumn time.

 

 

 

Talking Weird

My love of supernatural stories inevitably led to me discover the side-genre of what is now known as weird fiction. My very first encounter was with Robert Aickman’s ‘The Swords’, as in my teens I collected all the Pan Books of Horror Stories and the Fontana Books of Ghost Stories, and Aickman edited the first eight volumes of the latter. Each of the Fontana collections included a story by him – editor’s privilege!

Regarded as somewhat more respectable than simple horror, examples of weird fiction can be found in the work of Truman Capote (Miriam) and Flannery O’Connor (Good Country People), as well as many other ostensibly mainstream, literary writers. Shirley Jackson, Oliver Onions – and more recently Lisa Tuttle – have also written many superbly peculiar stories. But Aickman has come to be seen as the king of the genre – a well-deserved accolade. You can now find collections dedicated solely to weird fiction – not just the odd (usually very odd) story cropping up in horror anthologies.

Such an example is ‘Aickman’s Heirs’, edited by Simon Strantzas, a beautifully produced book from Undertow Publications. I was drawn to it because I’m such an Aickman fan, and am repelled by the majority of modern horror, which often relies too much on blood and guts and being as disgusting as possible. Weird fiction is quirky, thought-provoking, disorientating, but rarely visceral. Guts are too crude a prop for this genre.

Aickman’s Heirs is an excellent book – I enjoyed reading it immensely. I only have a couple of slight criticisms, which I’ll get out of the way first. One of the most unsettling aspects of Aickman’s fiction is that it – on the whole – features very ordinary people, in ordinary lives, who suddenly collide with the weird. Their familiar world is thrown off-kilter, reality skews like a tilted, broken mirror. In ‘Aickman’s Heirs’, a few of the story protagonists are detached from reality from the start – teetering on madness – so to my mind this isn’t exactly ‘weird’ as Aickman wrote it. Perhaps inspired by him – after all, the editor stresses in his introduction that Aickman is a one-off, never to be emulated – but borderline insane characters make it easier to write ‘weird’, and to me it’s a kind of cheating. Someone going out of their mind is not weird – simply mad. Their world might get very odd indeed, but it’s a world of their own making. In a truly weird story, the protagonists are hapless victims, who find themselves in a reality that’s fallen out of balance. The world looks the same, but it’s not. They are seeing beneath the skin of the world, or seeing through it. There might be hints that what they experience is entirely subjective, but is it? That’s the magic of the weird.

I also found some degree of self-consciousness in a couple of the tales, as if the writers were striving a tad too hard to be clever and impenetrable. Aickman’s stories always appeared effortless and the author was invisible within them. That said, all the tales here are well written, and there are some absolute gems among them. Which is far more than can be said for most horror collections that are published.

As with all the best of weird fiction, these stories reward you if you read them more than once. The first time through you might think ‘what??’, but the story has got under your skin. You want to understand it, so read it again, perhaps this time intuiting more of what might be going on.  The author doesn’t tell you. It’s almost as if they flirt with you, beguiling your senses, laughing off-stage as you attempt to penetrate the mystery. You think about the story afterwards. You discuss it with friends. ‘What do you think?’ you might ask. I love that aspect of the weird. After reading Capote’s ‘Miriam’, I was desperate to talk about it with others who’d read it. The tale was almost maddening, yet utterly bewitching. I had to talk about it. To pull this off, a writer has to know their craft intimately. They must be adept with language and nuance. It’s a difficult genre to master, because in clumsy hands, stories in this vein merely become irritating rather than remaining intriguing mysteries. One of the problems of weird fiction is that there are examples within it of writers trying to be literary and obscure, but coming off as simply pretentious. Aickman was always convincing, even at his most peculiar.

Now to what I liked in ‘Aickman’s Heirs’. I particularly enjoyed ‘Camp’, by David Nickle, a tale of a recently-married gay couple on their honeymoon. Meeting a friendly elderly couple, who invite the pair to stay at their camping site, they eventually end up canoeing off into the wilds to reach this destination. And this is where their extremely comfortable, ordinary lives crash into strangeness. Reminiscent of Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Willows’, the landscape here feels almost sentient and far from benevolent. Understated. Beautifully composed. The mundane is shattered irretrievably.

I also enjoyed ‘Seaside Town’ by Brian Evenson, the story of a rather anti-social man who is left stranded in a foreign holiday village by his more gregarious girlfriend. His discomfort in a strange land is compounded by the fact that the reality around him is far from certain. His inability to speak the local language only worsens his situation. In a Hitchcockian manner, he observes from his window rather than participates in events, but when he is drawn outside… The writer deftly creates a mystery that is far from solved, but I didn’t come away from it feeling short-changed or the victim of deliberate literary obtuseness – which undeniably can be a failing of the genre.

Reading ‘The Dying Season’ by Lynda E Rucker, I felt the author must have visited a holiday village as described in the story. There’s an authenticity to the detail. I could imagine the writer, perhaps as a child, finding in this very mundane setting of identical cabins a kind of terror – the uniformity becomes sinister, disorientating. The uniform shacks are like traps to snare the unwary. And what exactly did happen in the cabin next door? It’s apparently abandoned, hasn’t been lived in for years, yet the protagonist, on her arrival at the place, hears the voice of child within. We also find some ‘living odd’ in a couple of the characters – something Aickman often included in his tales. The protagonist might be Mr or Ms Ordinary, but then they meet someone who is patently ‘other’, and cannot walk away from this meeting unchanged. In ‘The Dying Season’, we’re not sure whether the only other apparent inhabitants of the holiday village are just mannered Goth types, striving to be wacky and unconventional, or something distinctly more unsettling – creatures with masks. They are liars with ulterior motives, certainly, but… This story has no end. It stops, but is far from finished. And the fact you don’t discover what happens next is more terrifying than actually being shown. Deft, assured.  A fine example of the genre.

It’s interesting that the three examples above all involve protagonists being on holiday, drawn away from their day to day lives. Holidays are supposed to be relaxing and enjoyable, yet in all these cases the opposite proves true. Holidays, you might end up thinking, are treacherous. Anything can happen when you step outside your ordinary existence of job, home and familiar territory. You liberate yourself in a way that perhaps also makes you vulnerable. You are unhitched from the mundane, floating free. But into what?

As for my favourites, there are three. I’ll mention first ‘Two Brothers’ by Malcolm Devlin (but I like all three stories equally). On the one hand it concerns a boy whose (slightly) older brother has been sent away to school. The brother who returns for the holidays seems strangely and unsettlingly different. And what the protagonist William stumbles across in the woods during his brother’s visit implies the change is sinister, perhaps unspeakable. On the other hand, the story spoke to me of a child losing a friend, or in this case a brother, to looming adulthood. (I wrote of this myself recently in a story called ‘The Violet House or Songs the Martyrs Sang’, which is to be published in a collection called ‘Splinters of Truth’ by Newcon Press next year). While reading ‘Two Brothers’, you feel that sense of loss and bewilderment. Is it simply that or…? That is the playful nature of a story of the weird.

My next favourite is ‘A Change of Scene’ by Nina Allen. Again, featuring two women on holiday from their normal lives, but in this case following bereavements. Both are widows, and the meeker and more malleable Iris is taken by the still glamorous and vibrant Phrynne to a Norfolk town where Phrynne spent her honeymoon. Iris soon notices inconsistencies with Phrynne’s recollections of the past – deliberate lies or simply because of a faulty memory? These women have a history, and Phrynne holds a hurtful secret, which when it comes out and despite Iris’ best efforts to be ‘nice’ can’t help but anger her. The atmosphere is both dreamy and fizzing – if such traits can exist alongside each other. The weird creeps in with beautiful subtlety, like mist off the sea.  Something once happened in this place.

I’ve always loved Lisa Tuttle’s work, and her story here ‘The Book That Finds You’ is another fine example of her deft hand. It concerns a young writer and enthusiast of weird stories, who comes across an author no one appears to have heard of – J W Archibald. She finds a battered old paperback in a second hand store and is entranced by the contents. Archibald’s work is described as being much like Aickman’s. Eventually, the protagonist finds what she believes to be a soulmate, a fellow enthusiast, who not only knows of the collection she found but owns more work by Archibald. It’s difficult to say more of this story in a review because the weirdness doesn’t really start to creep in until after certain things happen that would certainly be plot spoilers. Suffice to say our heroine collides with the strange on a visit to Archibald’s home country. Fiction bleeds into reality, but not in a way you’d expect.

As well as the favourite stories I’ve mentioned above, all the pieces are good reads, even what I considered to be the weakest of them – and after all, that is down to taste and preference. Other readers might prefer the more hallucinatory stories.

I’m at present compiling an anthology of weird fiction with Paul Houghton, who’s a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Creative Technologies at Staffs University. We’re both huge fans of the genre. But the majority of submissions we’ve had in are simply horror stories. Despite our – we thought – carefully worded brief for contributions, some authors don’t quite seem to ‘get’ what weird fiction is. A vampire is not weird. A serial killer is not weird. Supernatural, yes, horrible, yes, but not weird. These tropes are simply too familiar. A writer of the weird looks for the unfamiliar in everyday situations and people.

Any writer who wishes to dip their toes into weird fiction should read ‘Aickman’s Heirs’ to see how it’s done well. I’m delighted that discovering this volume has led me to writers I’ve not read before, which means there will be more books for me to discover and devour. To assist in this aim, Undertow Publications have other fascinating titles I’m keen to read, among them ‘The Year’s Best Weird Fiction’ (one volume 2014 available, with 2015 to come), and also ‘Shadows and Tall Trees’ which was and is an annual anthology. Sadly, not many of them remain in print. I noticed from the Undertow web site that a few of their list are available as eBooks. I really hope the earlier volumes of ‘Shadows and Tall Trees’ are eventually released in this format too. As a publisher myself, I hate to see books go out of print completely, especially when I have a hankering to read them!

Here’s a link to the site: http://www.undertowbooks.com/