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Category: stories (Page 9 of 11)

Cave & Julia

April 4, 2013 /

Readers of this blog might remember my recent mention of a story by M. John Harrison called ‘In Autotelia’, an exquisite piece of writing that hasn’t garnered nearly as much attention as it deserves. I’m hoping that ‘Cave & Julia’, a brand new story by Harrison set in the same semi-mythical universe, will be more forward in coming forward. It’s a wonderful piece, allusive and resonant and beautiful. It is also a deeply moving story of love and yearning, the anguish and obsession that surrounds the pursuit of a goal that is by its nature unattainable.

If anything, I enjoyed this story even more than I enjoyed ‘In Autotelia’. At only 99p on Kindle it’s a ridiculous bargain, and one I recommend absolutely.

MJH invites comments on ‘Cave & Julia’ here.

BSFA Short Fiction shortlist

March 27, 2013 /

It being the very eve of Eastercon, I’d been thinking about writing a blog post on the six stories that are up for this year’s BSFA Award, because awards shortlists are always interesting (if not always for the right reasons) but then I thought again. As it happens I’ve either met, corresponded with or been published alongside pretty much everyone on that list, and so for me to undertake any kind of detailed public analysis of their work would make me deeply uncomfortable and anything approaching an objective judgement would most likely prove impossible in any case. Luckily for us all, both Niall Alexander and Martin Lewis have blogged the shortlist with their usual high level of informed insight, and I commend their postings with enthusiasm. But travelling up to town yesterday, I found myself reading some stories that for me threw all the problems we inevitably find with such shortlists into stark relief, and so I thought I might say something more general about short fiction awards instead.

The stories I was reading were by Scott Bradfield, from his 1988 short fiction collection The Secret Life of Houses. I’d heard of Bradfield – who was published alongside Philip K. Dick and J. G. Ballard in early issues of Interzone – but not yet read him, and so this was my first encounter with his fiction. I very quickly found him to be one of those very special writers whose first effect is to make you question pretty much every word you’ve written until now. Reading his ‘The Flash! Kid’ made me laugh out loud with satisfaction at having stumbled across such a wonderfully original and raucously alive SF story (because yes, this is science fiction – one of the five BSFA Award nominees for 1984, no less) and reading ‘The Dream of the Wolf’ made me want to rip up everything I’ve written to date and do better from tomorrow.

Canis lupus youngi, canis lupus crassodon, canis niger rufus, Larry thought, and boarded the RTD at Beverly and Fairfax. The wolf, he thought. The wolf of the dream, the wolf of the world. He showed the driver his pass. Wolves in Utah, Northern Mexico, Baffin Island, even Hollywood. Wolves secretly everywhere, Larry thought, and moved down the crowded aisle. Elderly women jostled fitfully in their seats like birds on a wire. (TSLOH p3)

Every page of Bradfield’s prose turns up wonderful stuff like this – a constant awareness of the beauty of words, an intellect that clearly delights in juxtaposing the mundane with the fantastic, the recognisable with the totally out there. When you discover a writer who is so clearly his own person, who doesn’t give a toss about what others in his ‘peer group’ might be writing or what he ‘should’ be writing about, I feel like stopping whatever less important thing I happen to be doing and just celebrating to myself, and then later on, perhaps, celebrating here.

Because my God aren’t these the kind of stories we want to see more of?

The way Bradfield constructs his stories is deliriously idiosyncratic, and again one senses that he doesn’t have much time for the kind of rules that say a short story should have a clearly defined message or theme, that it should consist of an easily identifiable beginning and middle and end, that it should ideally be 3-6,000 words long. Rather, his stories enact themselves upon you, and they go on as long as Bradfield feels they should, opening new internal mini-chapters on fresh incident just when you think another, less brave writer might have wrapped things up. Of course in reality these stories are as artfully constructed as any tale by Chekhov – the reappearance of the instigatory termites in the final paragraph of ‘The Flash! Kid’, for example, is a sweetly ironical proof of that – but the hugely overriding impression on reading Bradfield is of freedom, of space, and of waywardness.

Of course, one of the big problems with choosing which works to nominate for short fiction awards is the vast quantity of eligible material to be considered. No reader, writer or fan can subscribe to every magazine, or even hope to read more than a select proportion of the often very fine material that is increasingly available online. The other problem – and it’s a more subtle one – is that all too often and all too early a consensus begins to emerge for which stories are ‘the’ stories in any given year. The ‘Year’s Bests’ come out, the readers’ polls are drawn up, and from the moment those lists are published there’s a subtle kind of background pressure not to bother looking beyond these, because all the necessary reading and considering has already been done for us by others. I’ve felt such a pressure myself – and of course as a writer I may even have benefited from it. I’m not saying that Year’s Bests are a bad thing – I enjoy them very much, find them useful as a reader and have felt extremely honoured to be selected for them as a writer – just that we shouldn’t forget to look and think beyond them and argue the cause of overlooked material where we feel that’s necessary.

How, for example, can all the major ‘Best of 2012’ anthologies have overlooked M. John Harrison’s ‘In Autotelia’? And if I don’t see some of Helen Marshall’s stories turning up on the F/H shortlists I will count it as a serious oversight.

I applaud Abigail Nussbaum’s ‘Short Fiction Snapshot’ initiative at Strange Horizons, which should at the very least do something to help develop the critical apparatus around short fiction, to bring more stories into the spotlight and – equally importantly – make us as readers and reviewers sample a wider variety of short fiction and think about it at a deeper level.

And when the time comes to start thinking about next year’s awards (which I for one am looking forward to particularly as I’ll have Hugo voting rights for the first time) perhaps it would be a good idea for all of us to take up the cause of some of our own particular favourites in the field of short fiction, to write about them at our blogs and in the zines, to spread the word, to look beyond the usual publications, to encourage and celebrate not just the familiar but the radical and the excellent and the truly noteworthy, the stories that make you angry with yourself for not yet writing as well as you think you one day might.

Three bits of book news

March 11, 2013 /

A few things just in. Firstly, my collection from NewCon Press, Microcosmos, is now available for pre-order.

This book, with beautiful cover art (as always) from Ben Baldwin, collects together seven stories written since the publication of my first collection A Thread of Truth in 2007. When Ian Whates of NewCon first approached me about putting this volume together I saw it as a wonderful oppotunity to present an updated snapshot of my short fiction writing. Especially exciting to me is the fact that Microcosmos contains two brand new stories – ‘A.H.’ and ‘Higher Up’, both of which were written within the last twelve months. The volume also contains ‘Chaconne’, a story I wrote for Ex Occidente Press’s Bulgakov-themed anthology The Master in Cafe Morphine. Master was a very limited issue and sold out more or less straight away, so I’m very happy to see ‘Chaconne’ – a story I’m rather fond of about Russia, music and cats – being made available to a wider audience.  You can order Microcosmos online here. I’m also looking forward to signing copies at Eastercon, where the book will be officially launched later on this month.

Another piece of exciting news is that my novella Spin, a reimagining of the Arachne myth and the second in TTA Press’s standalone novella series, has gone to press and is now also available for pre-order.

This little book is very close to my heart and I’m really rather excited about it coming out. You can read more about Spin here – there’s been some very generous advance press – and also place your order.

And finally, Eibonvale Press have just announced the table of contents for their forthcoming railway-themed anthology Rustblind and Silverbright, to include my brand new novella ‘Vivian Guppy and the Brighton Belle’. I won’t say this story wrote itself (if anyone knows the secret to that technique, do let me in on it… ) but it was one of those rare stories that did seem confident of itself from the first, and gave me genuine and daily pleasure throughout the writing process. Most stories I write take a considerable amount of time to find their form – it’s not unusual for me to rewrite the beginning of a story three or four times before I’m happy with the way it’s going. But I loved the voice of Marian, this story’s narrator, from the off, and I was happy to let her take charge!

I can’t wait to see what David Rix at Eibonvale comes up with for the cover design of this anthology – given his passion for trains, it promises to be a beauty.

Thought for the day

February 18, 2013 /

I didn’t read anything that I would have considered to be horror until I started working for ChiZine Publications because I’m very susceptible to it. I will spend nights up, awake and terrified. At the same time, because of that genuinely visceral response I find myself more and more interested in what horror is and how it works because it’s so affective. And that’s what art should be, isn’t it? Art should move us. Art should scare us. Art should go too far. And so in some ways I like that horror really can be a sort of avant garde art form even though it’s seldom recognized as such.

(Helen Marshall, from her recent interview at Weird Fiction Review here.)

I really love what Helen says here about horror being a kind of avant garde, because it shows an understanding of the genre – of what the genre should be and what it can do – that passes way beyond many people’s conception of it.

I was blown away by Marshall’s collection Hair Side, Flesh Side, a book that combines fantastically original ideas with writing so assured and so strikingly lovely that – as with Sam Thompson’s Communion Town last year – it’s actually quite scary to think that this is a fiction debut. I’ve already nominated HSFS for Best Collection in the British Fantasy Awards, and will be doing the same for the World Fantasy Awards when I send in my ballot.

You can read Helen’s story ‘The Mouth, Open’ here. It’s my favourite story in the collection – one of them, anyway – and I do wholeheartedly recommend it. I’m delighted to learn – from the aforementioned interview – that Helen is currently working on a novel. I honestly can’t wait to read it.

We’ve just returned from a weekend in the New Forest, where we attended the wedding of a good friend of ours (film director Gerald McMorrow, who’s been scripting The Glamour – more on this soon, watch this space) and then spent a morning wandering around Milford-on-Sea, the little town Chris got to know very well during the 1970s when it played host to the annual Milford SF Writers’ Workshop. It’s not the first time we’ve called in there, mainly because I love hearing Chris’s stories about the place. A lot of writers passed through Milford – Richard Cowper, John Brunner, Chip Delany, Lisa Tuttle, Neil Gaiman, Nicola Griffith, Rob Holdstock, Alastair Reynolds and Brian Aldiss to name but a few – and the workshop is undoubtedly a unique little slice of UK SF history.

We walked out along Hurst Spit towards the castle (where Charles 1 was imprisoned immediately prior to his execution – there’s something I never knew before now). The sunshine was so bright it turned the water to metal. Difficult to believe it was February.

Now back to working on the story I began writing last week – this is another of my SE12 stories, closely related to both ‘Wilkolak’ and ‘The Tiger’ and which I am hoping to submit to Tartarus Press for their Strange Tales 1v anthology. It’s good to be writing.

Watching: Benh Zeitlin’s remarkable film Beasts of the Southern Wild.

Reading: Gordon Burn’s Happy Like Murderers. This man can write. Truly. It’s a privilege to read him.

Hurst Castle - photo by Ian Stannard

Milford mudflats from Hurst Spit - photo by Chris Priest

Bellony at Lightspeed

February 10, 2013 /

I’m thrilled to announce that my novella Bellony, which originally appeared in the Eibonvale Press anthology Blind Swimmer, will be reprinted in the April issue of the very wonderful Lightspeed magazine. Lightspeed publishes some of the best shortform fantasy and SF around – the current issue features stories by Genevieve Valentine, John Crowley and Robert Reed – and I’m delighted that Bellony will be finding its way out to a whole new audience. The issue will also feature a mini-interview with me – I’m working on that right now. The questions they’ve come up with are fascinating.

Another very pleasing piece of news is that my novella Spin should be going to press in the near future. Having now handled and read the first in the TTA Novellas series, Mike O’Driscoll’s excellent Eyepennies, this is something I’m even more excited about than I was before. These little books are truly wonderful – beautifully designed and produced, lovely to hold and with an elegant and clear layout that’s a pleasure to read. At £25 for the complete set of 5, the TTA Novellas subscription offer really is superb value for money and I’m very much looking forward to reading the other titles in the series as they appear.

Aside from nipping up and down to London a couple of times on various errands, I’ve spent most of the past week at my keyboard, working on the third draft of What Happened to Maree. The book is now almost 20,000 words lighter – a lot of the joy in redrafting lies in cutting words! – and the whole thing feels smoother and cleaner and more free-flowing as a result. There’s been a pretty radical restructuring, too. Anyone who was at my BSFA gig back in October might be interested to know that the section I read out no longer exists…

Reading: Helen Marshall’s extraordinary debut collection Hair Side, Flesh Side. Wonderfully original, lyrical, and delightfully dark. Kind of like Borges mixed with (Clive) Barker and a generous pinch of HPL thrown in for good measure. I am loving it.

Watching (for the fourth time): Michael Mann’s Thief. Awesome. That opening sequence – second to none.

Thinking about (very cautiously): new work.

The Silver Wind crosses the Channel

January 8, 2013 /

Some exciting news this week – The Silver Wind is going to be published in France! I’ve just received the contract from Editions Tristram – just take a look at their incredible back catalogue and you’ll begin to understand how delighted and honoured I feel to be on their books – and all being well the French edition will be out in August.

As well as Sylvie Martigny and Jean-Hubert Gailliot at Editions Tristram, the person I have to thank for this is the translator Bernard Sigaud. Absolutely no stranger to British SF, Bernard has translated works by J. G. Ballard, Iain Banks, Paul McAuley and M. John Harrison among others, and first came into contact with my work when he translated my story ‘Microcosmos’ for the French SF magazine Lunatique. He subsequently made an enquiry about translating The Silver Wind, approaching the publisher personally and finally bringing the project to fruition in the latter stages of last year. I cannot thank Bernard enough for his commitment and enthusiasm – this literally would not have happened without him.

In addition to the five stories that make up the English edition, the French edition of The Silver Wind will also feature the story ‘Darkroom’, first published in Elastic Press’s Subtle Edens anthology in 2009. ‘Darkroom’ saw the first ever appearance of Martin Newland, the central character in the Silver Wind stories, and once again it was Bernard Sigaud who spotted the connection, and asked that this additional ‘Martin’ story be included. I was only too happy to agree!

While I’m here, just a quick note to add that you can now read an online extract from my story ‘Seeing Nancy’, which features in the Guest Writer spot over at Paul Kane’s website Shadow Writer. If you like what you see, you can find the rest of it in The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women, edited by Marie O’Regan and featuring stories by Alison Littlewood, Sarah Pinborough. Kim Lakin Smith, Caitlin R. Kiernan and Lisa Tuttle among many others.

Working on: a third draft of something… (Going well, though, so it’s a happy third draft.)

Listening to: By the Blue, by Rosie Brown.

Just about to start reading: The Drowning Girl, by Caitlin R. Kiernan.

Walking in: West Norwood Cemetery – just two of the ‘Magnificent Seven’ left to go now, Nunhead and Tower Hamlets.

Terror Tales of London

January 3, 2013 /

In October last year I was completely absorbed in working on a new story for a forthcoming anthology – for details of that one, watch this space – when I received an email from Paul Finch, asking if I’d like to write something for his new anthology, Terror Tales of London.

The piece I was already working on was turning out to be about twice as long as I’d originally envisaged, and the thought of another impending deadline made me panic a bit. But Terror Tales of London?? – how could I refuse? I would have felt like I was letting the old place down.

I’m happy to say that I accepted the challenge and wrote the story. It’s called ‘The Tiger’, and I would count it as one of the scariest pieces I’ve written to date (must have been the thought of that deadline). It’s also turned out to be one of my favourites – it’s set in SE12, after all. The anthology will be published by Gray Friar Press around Easter time. Paul has just released the full list of contributors, which you can find here. This is an impressive line-up, and I’m thrilled to be included in it.

The thing that makes Gray Friar’s Terror Tales series especially fascinating and original is that they come with ‘true’ stories of ghosts, hauntings and other dark happenings interspersed with the fiction, something which I think gives added depth and lustre to the sense of place that is these anthologies’ defining characteristic.

To get a taste of what I’m talking about, you can find details of previous releases in the series here, here, and here.

Fantastic covers, too – I can’t wait to see what the artwork for Terror Tales of London is going to look like!

Christmas comes early

December 19, 2012 /

Really very happy indeed to announce that my story ‘Sunshine’, originally published in Black Static #29, has been selected by Rich Horton for his Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2013 Edition. The full ToC can be viewed here – with stories by Ursula Le Guin, Kelly Link, Elizabeth Bear and Genevieve Valentine, among many other wonderful writers, it truly is an honour to be included.

And a piece of news like this does go some of the way towards dulling the pains of First Draft Hell. The thing I’m working on now is difficult. At this early stage, progress is slow as I’m still very much feeling my way into the story, discarding stuff almost before I write it. But it’s exciting! I don’t think I’ve ever felt so excited about a project in my life.

I may take a break for Doctor Who and mince pies, but that’s about it…

The Muse at Tales to Terrify

November 23, 2012 /

I’m delighted to announce that my story ‘The Muse of Copenhagen’ is currently being featured as this week’s fiction at Tales to Terrify. You can listen to the podcast right here.

The nicest thing about this for me is that it offers the chance for me to experience one of my stories from the outside, as it were, to get a proper sense of how it might come across to readers. In the normal course of events, achieving this level of objectivity is next to impossible. Reading a piece of work aloud myself does help, but it’s not the same thing. I have to say I’ve loved hearing ‘Muse’. Dan Rabarts‘s reading is just perfect – he inhabits the various characters completely, and the whole thing (I am proud to say) does seem to have the feel of a classic ghost story.

I remember ‘The Muse of Copenhagen’ being an absolute beast to write. When Jonathan Oliver first asked me to contribute something to his House of Fear anthology for Solaris, I was well up for it – I love haunted house stories, and felt immediately excited by the idea of writing one. The inspiration for ‘Muse’  came from a trip Chris and I made to Maldon and the Blackwater Estuary. It’s a special place – you might almost say it’s hidden from view – and its understated landscape of brackish marshland and narrow inlets attracted me immediately as a setting for a ghost story.  The character of Johnny was there in my head from the first – for me, a story almost always begins with a single character – so that was the easy part. After that though nothing about this story wanted to be simple. I lose count of the number of false starts I made – I think it was four? – but I do know I almost gave up on it completely at one point.

I don’t know why it was so difficult. I know I wanted to write a ‘classic’ kind of haunted house story, my own personal take on the sort of thing that made me fall in love with weird fiction in the first place, and perhaps it was those cherished early memories of stories by Machen and Blackwood and Aickman (oh, especially Aickman) that gave me stage fright. Either way, hearing Dan’s wonderful reading this evening has made all the struggles I experienced getting the thing down on paper seem worthwhile. Thanks so much for that, Dan, and huge thanks also to Tony Smith of StarShipSofa and Larry Santoro of Tales to Terrify for inviting Johnny and Denny on to the show…

The Next Big Thing

November 21, 2012 /

I was tagged to take part in this writers’ blog relay race by Carole Johnstone. Carole’s stories appear regularly in the BFS Award-winning dark fantasy magazine Black Static, she’s featured in many anthologies including Best Horror of the Year #2, and you can read all about her upcoming novella Cold Turkey here. Cold Turkey will be published by TTA Press in 2013 as part of their of their new series of novellas, which also includes my own story inspired by the Arachne myth, Spin.

But first, those ten leading questions:

1) What is the title of your next book?

Stardust: The Ruby Castle Stories

2) Where did the idea come from for the book?

That’s always a difficult one to answer, at least for me. The chapter that gave the book its title was actually written about six months before I started working on the rest of it. I wasn’t sure what it would be, just that certain characters and their stories compelled me. It was only bit by bit that the connections between these characters emerged, and the book began to settle into the form it now takes.

3) What genre does your book fall under?

Again, that’s a tricky one. The book falls into six chapters – three that are longer short stories and three that are novellas. The title chapter, which is one of the novellas, is SF. Several of the other chapters lean more in the direction of horror, or dark fantasy. And then there’s another time-slip, SFnal chapter in the middle of all that. I suppose it’s best simply to say that it’s speculative fiction.

4) What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

This book has a diverse cast of characters, but the central figure, the character that unites all the others, is Ruby Castle herself. As the story advances, you’ll get to see an episode from her childhood in a travelling circus, and then later scenes from her life as an actress, first on the London stage and then in film. The actor I’d choose to play her – no question – would be Rebecca Hall.

5) What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Be careful what you wish for.

6) When will the book be published?

Stardust will be published by PS Publishing in the New Year. I’ve just recently seen the cover art, by Ben Baldwin, which is truly fantastic and, as with all the illustrations Ben has created for my work, shows a tremendous insight and sympathy with the book itself. I hope to be able to announce the publication date for Stardust soon, so watch this space for updates.

7) How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

What with all the buggering about that always seems to accompany the start of a new project, I’d say probably about nine months all told.

8) What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I’ve been thinking about this for ages and I honestly can’t say. I think it’s for the reader, rather than the writer, to make these kind of comparisons. I think that the best way of describing these stories is to say they start off normal and end up getting strange. If you like books that skew the world a little, that reveal the secrets inside outwardly ordinary lives, then I think you’ll like Stardust.

9) Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Initially, the idea of a teenage girl in an alternate Russia, watching a rocket launch on TV with her brother. These were characters who just would not go away and who might one day return.

10) What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?

I think those people who know my work are getting used to (and hopefully to like) the way I enjoy playing with form, the way I like to approach a story from different angles, then discover through the process of writing where all the various threads join up. I don’t think of Stardust as a story collection, so much as a fractured novel, and I think that anyone who reads the book will understand why. The individual chapters can be enjoyed as standalone stories – but I think they gain considerably by being read in context.

On the simple level of story, this book is full of interesting people, and I’m fond of all of them. There’s a chess prodigy, a knife thrower, an antiquarian bookseller who gets into trouble in Nazi Germany, an art dealer who tells a lie about his wife and ends up halfway up a mountain pursued by monsters. There is poetry and there is romance. There is a giant worm and there are horror movies. Oh, and it has an introduction by Robert Shearman.

What’s not to like?

Taking the baton from me next week will be the very excellent David Rix, horror writer, illustrator and head honcho of Eibonvale Press. and the wonderful Aliette de Bodard, SFF writer and winner of the BSFA Award in 2011 for her story The Shipmaker.

People I tried to ask, but who had to say no because they’d already been tagged (bastards) include Cate Gardner, Kirsty Logan, Ray Cluley, Marie O’Regan, James Cooper and EJ Swift. People who said they couldn’t take part because they were just too chicken shall remain nameless…

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